Yesterday I posted some of my own photos of the Moon and Mars in conjunction from the night before. Last night I went out again knowing that there was another planetary conjunction in the works. The Moon was now with Venus. People on the internet and in person were asking me “Mars? I thought the Moon was near Venus,” and “Venus? I thought the Moon was near Mars.” It really speaks to the fact that most people don’t realize how quickly the sky changes from the point of view of an Earthbound observer. So what happened between the Mars-Moon and...
Every 29.5 days we see a new Moon, or rather we don’t see it, since it’s lost in the glare of the Sun. But a few days after the new moon, we can see it slowly move away from the Sun and become visible after sunset, with the thinnest crescent growing a bit larger each night. You may have heard that Mars and Venus also live in the Western sky after sunset, with Venus moving higher and Mars appearing to double back toward the Sun, soon to be lost in the glare of our home star. Last night I was...
After reaching a deeper understanding of the subsurface ocean of Enceladus just yesterday, a stunning discovery has just been made about the largest Moon in the solar system. The largest moon of Jupiter, Ganymede, contains a subsurface ocean of it’s own. The discovery was made with the Hubble space telescope and a careful study of aurora on the giant moon. That’s right Ganymede has auroral activity. This is because it is the only moon in the solar system with a magnetic field. The magnetic field funnels radiation from the Sun toward the north and south poles, where it ionizes molecules...
Some of the moons of gas giant planets have a unique property: They are worlds that have a source of heat other than the Sun. The huge tidal forces imparted by their host planet and fellow moons cause their crust to grow and shrink, creating huge friction and heating the rock. It means that even if these moons are far from the warmth of the Sun, they can still host liquid water. There are two moons in our own solar system that are especially enticing: Jupiter’s second moon Europa, and the icy moon of Saturn known as Enceladus. Each host...
Astronomy is a science that is always associated with the sky, and rightly so. But since the beginning of modern science there have been discoveries made on Earth that teach us about the formation and evolution of the Universe. As telescopes become more powerful and allow us to look deeper into space, the technology to simulate outer-space conditions here on Earth has grown significantly. In Albuquerque, New Mexico, a powerful tool called the Z machine generates quick high-energy pulses of electricity, which can be used to generate X-rays and Gamma rays to be used in experiments. Outside of astronomy, the...
As the Dawn Spacecraft readies for orbit insertion only a week from now, the images coming in are getting sharper and sharper. Once the craft is fully in orbit its first task will be to map the surface of the planet in high definition. Even on the last few weeks of the journey to Ceres, we have seen increasingly clear images, and have already started asking ‘What the heck is that?’ This week’s ‘what the heck are we looking at?’ involves this apparent double bright spot on Ceres, imaged on February 19th from a distance of 46,000 Km, about an...
Even though the weather has been insanely cold in Canada the past few weeks, there is an upside for astronomers. Call me a perpetual optimist, but when it’s colder in Canada than it is on Mars, you have to find some kind of silver lining. The upside is that colder weather and clear skies are sometimes synonymous. I’m not a meteorologist so I don’t have any reason to go into detail as to why, but we have had a lot of cold, clear evenings. I’ve had a chance to go outside and test my new DSLR camera, at least for a...
It’s coming up fast. The March 6th orbital injection of the Dawn spacecraft about the dwarf planet Ceres is set to be an incredible event. The latest photos show a much more detailed Ceres that we have seen previously. The newest images reveal that Ceres is a rocky, cratered world, not unlike the Moon or Mercury. Still, we have yet to determine the origins of the bright spots on the surface. Just over two weeks from now the world will see an unmasked Ceres.
Everything in the universe that has mass, has gravity. It’s easy to understand that the Earth, large as it is, has gravity, which pulls on us constantly, keeping us on terra firma. It’s just as easy to understand that other large objects have gravity, like the Moon, planets, and the Sun. However, it’s much harder to understand that every person on Earth has gravity. Strangely, you exert a force on the Earth, and on every other human. You also exert a force on every rock, tree, and creature that roams the Earth, and they all exert a force on you....
If I told you that humanity was going to mine the Moon for rare elements and water ice, you might think it was the plot of a science fiction book I was writing. However, with the recent strides made by unmanned space missions, coupled with a discovery of water and rare elements near the lunar surface, that story could become fact sooner than you’d think. It’s been 40 years since the Apollo landings on the Moon, and for a long time we naively thought we had discovered everything there was to discover about the Moon. We assumed it was a big...
