One Night with Mars, One with Venus – The Moving Moon

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...

Gravitational Lensing and a Supernova Give Insights into Dark Matter

Even I was blown away when I saw this image a friend sent me.  Gravitational lensing is a rare occurrence, and a supernova is a rare occurrence, so to see a supernova in a gravitationally lensed galaxy deep within the universe is exceptional.  So exceptional that it was spotted for the first time ever in a Hubble image of the distant universe. That dot in the image is a single supernova in a very distant galaxy, split into four images by the gravitational lensing of the galaxy cluster in front of it.  But there is also a secondary lensing effect from...