Friday’s science update from the New Horizons team shed some more light on the seemingly endless jaw-dropping discoveries from the Pluto system. We have found a surprising atmosphere and very cold ice flows, contributing to a surprisingly active geology for an object that receives so little sunlight. Seven hours after the craft made its closest approach of Pluto, it turned around and took a backlit shot, revealing two distinct layers of hazy atmosphere at 80 Km and 50 Km above the surface respectively. It looks more like an eclipse photograph from much closer to home, but it shows a hauntingly...
It’s been a good couple of years for lunar eclipses, we are in the midst of what we call a tetrad, which is a series of four lunar eclipses spread out evenly over a period of time, usually 2 years, in this case April and October. For observers watching the April 4th morning eclipse, in my boat here in Toronto, you won’t be able to see it because the Moon will set and the Sun will rise just as it gets good. Plus you would have to wake up at 5:30am to go look at it. Pretty much everyone East...
Move over Saturn, J1407b has rings that are far more spectacular than anyone would have imagined. This distant ‘planet’ (It may not actually be a planet) orbits an orange star 117 light-years away in the constellation Centaurus, and has a ring system consisting of 30 separate rings, each of which could be tens of Millions of Kilometres wide. In Spring of 2007, while monitoring the light from the star, astronomers noticed that the star was being eclipsed multiple times to varying degrees. This led the team, consisting of astronomers from Leiden Observatory and the University of Rochester, to conclude that...
Yesterday’s post had me discuss the partial Solar Eclipse that occurred around sunset for most of North America. The one thing I neglected to mention was regarding safe viewing of it. In reality if you saw the sun with your bare eyes during a partial eclipse, it looks like the sun any other time of day – its bright. Don’t damage your eyes. I found a bit of time in the afternoon to build a pinhole camera, which basically consists of a tube or box with a pinhole in one end and a film or ‘viewing area’ at the other...
Tonight, right around sunset, there will be a partial eclipse of the sun, visible from most of North America. As the sun sets, skywatchers will get to see the moon gradually cover about half of the sun, before it disappears below the horizon. A map of the viewing area shows that the best spot to see it will be all the way up in the Canadian arctic. If you don’t live in the Arctic circle, you can certainly see the eclipse in the South-West near the horizon as it sets. The moon will start to cover the sun around 5:45 EDT,...
