For three years I’ve been talking about this eclipse. August 21st, 2017 is a date that feels etched into my skull. With solar eclipses being few and far between, and usually occuring far from my home in Canada, I’m excited that the great american eclipse of 2017 will be within my budget for travel. Though like many people, I’m ready to pay a bit extra to get to the right spot. The eclipse is expected to draw over 100 million people to the many towns and cities along the path of totality. Though most of the population of North America...
If you haven’t already heard, Mercury is going to transit the Sun this coming Monday! It’s like a solar eclipse, except Mercury is covering the Sun instead of the Moon. And since Mercury is tiny and far away, it’s not so much ‘covering’ the Sun as it is passing across the face of the Sun in a barely perceptible way. The transit takes approximately 7 hours start to finish, and will occur on Monday, May 9th, 2016 from 7:12am to 2:42 pm EDT. If you miss this one, you can catch the next one in 2019. They happen a dozen times a...
One of the most fascinating things happens whenever I show someone the planet Mercury in the sky. Their first reaction is to be surprised at how bright it is. Most people think of Mercury as a faraway planet, too close to the Sun to see at all. But in reality, Mercury is close to Earth, and when the angles are just right, it’s not hard to find. Mercury is 57 million kilometers from the Sun, more than a third of the way to Earth. We are also much closer to Mercury than we are to Jupiter and Saturn. When we see the...
Since diving into astrophotography last year, I’ve discovered that I love the concept of time-lapse, and not just with respect to astronomy. It’s amazing to see the changes that can occur over long periods of time, and time-lapse photography is a way to record the changes and see how they unfold. In astronomy the best time-lapses give you a sense of the Earth’s motion through space, show satellites zipping overhead, and show aurora dance along with weather patterns. Large amounts of time with slow incremental changes produce incredible results when it comes to time lapses. Science communication is about how to...
Titan is the most interesting body in the solar system from a weather standpoint. It has a thick and robust atmosphere, a liquid cycle of methane and other hydrocarbons, and it has seasonal variations in these patterns. It’s essentially a cold and oxygen-deficient version of Earth. Because the seasons on Titan take 7.5 years to pass, we have few opportunities to study them up close with the Cassini spacecraft. So as long as Cassini is operating, we are using our time wisely to see how Titan is changing. The first major change is a giant ice cloud that has formed...
Our species is just now reaching the technology necessary to detect features of exoplanets, and not just the exoplanets themselves. We have seen atmospheres, aurorae, and magnetism on distant worlds, and now we can add incredibly fast winds to that list. A team of astronomers have discovered an exoplanet, classified as HD 189733b, that has wind speeds exceeding 8,500 km / h, or about 2 Km / s. Lead researcher Tom Louden, of the University of Warwick’s Astrophysics group, said: “This is the first ever weather map from outside of our solar system. Whilst we have previously known of Wind on...
If you wanted to look at weather and climate patterns on the Earth, you would put a satellite in orbit and watch the planet for a long time, looking for changes in the cloud layers and measuring wind speeds, etc. It isn’t a stretch to think that we could do the same for another planet, especially since most of the planets in the solar system have atmospheres. Jupiter, being the largest and heaviest planet, also has immense wind speeds and beautiful vortex features, some of which are larger than the Earth. But in order to understand these features, we have...
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...
As warm as the temperatures have been recently, it may shock you to learn that today marks the Earth’s Aphelion, or its greatest distance from the Sun in its orbit. This may confuse those that think the Earth has seasons due to its proximity to the Sun. The seasons of Earth are actually due to the tilt of the Earth’s axis, and is a result of how much direct sunlight we receive at any given time of year. It’s one of my favourite trivia questions to ask kids in my planetarium shows, and have them guess when the Earth is...
I presume that you know what a leap year is. A year is the amount of time the Earth takes to orbit the Sun, and is measured as 365 days, or 365 rotations of Earth. It is, in reality, a little bit longer. Each orbit of the Sun takes 365.25 days, or 365 days and six hours. So what do we do with that six hours? We ignore it for 3 years. On the fourth year we add up those extra hours and we get 24 hours, an extra day! So we add in February 29th every four years. This...
