Category archives for Breaking Orbit
Night Sky News: Chance to Spot a Green Giant
Posted by Andrew Fazekas on February 8, 2012 
Thanks to a close encounter with Venus , skywatchers the next few nights get a chance to easily glimpse the 7th planet from the Sun – the green giant Uranus. While the pair of planets will be visible together within the field of view of any standard 7×50 binocular until Feb.15th, Venus and Uranus will…
Read the whole post »Help Put Pluto On Postage!
Posted by Jason Major on February 4, 2012 
As New Horizons speeds toward its date with Pluto the mission team petitions to celebrate the spacecraft with a USPS Forever Stamp… and YOU can help!
Read the whole post »Night Sky News: Monster Star Factory on Showcase
Posted by Andrew Fazekas on February 3, 2012 
You may not consider winter prime stargazing season, but in fact some of the brightest stars are found shining in Northern Hemisphere skies this time of the year. Probably the most recognizable pattern of stars in all the heavens, after the Big Dipper, is the constellation Orion, the Hunter. Because of its placement in the…
Read the whole post »Missing Martian Atmosphere: Clues In Earth’s Cold Plasma?
Posted by Dave Mosher on January 26, 2012 
“Invisible” veils of cold plasma discovered around Earth might tell us something about how Mars lost its atmosphere, experts say.
Read the whole post »Pluto: a Dwarf Planet With Rings?
Posted by Jason Major on January 26, 2012 
NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft is currently speeding through the outer solar system toward its July 2015 date with Pluto, when it will take a good close look at the dwarf planet’s mysterious surface, atmosphere, moons, and… rings? Less than three-quarters the size of our moon, Pluto nevertheless has no shortage of fascinating features. It…
Read the whole post »Solar Storm Hits Earth
Posted by Andrew Fazekas on January 23, 2012 
After a weekend filled with great auroral activity in Northern Canada and Scandinavia (Norway video) thanks to a strong gust of solar wind coming off the Sun Jan.19th, the Earth is about to get hit again -by the biggest blast of solar radiation in 7 years. Talk about a one-two punch on the cosmic scale!…
Read the whole post »My God, It’s Full of Stars…
Posted by Jason Major on January 20, 2012 Here’s a wonderful time-lapse video made of photos taken from orbit as the International Space Station passed over Switzerland, western Europe and eventually Saudi Arabia on the night of December 22, 2011. A portion of the Station can be seen along the right side, reflecting the lights of the major cities passing 240 miles below.…
Read the whole post »GLOBE at Night – Helping to Save the Night Sky
Posted by Andrew Fazekas on January 20, 2012 
A dark sky filled with stars is becoming an ever rarer sight. Since most of the human population lives in or around big cities we have become detached from our night sky heritage as artificial lights filter out natural star light. Ask a young person about the Milky Way and you’re more often than not…
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Posted by New NASA footage shows a long-lasting flare followed by an eruption of charged particles from the sun’s atmosphere aimed right at Earth.
Read the whole post »Martian “Bomb Sag” a Clue to Wetter Times
Posted by Jason Major on January 13, 2012 
Spirit may be settled in for its eternal sleep, but the data it’s returned is still helping researchers piece together clues to Mars’ watery past! The image above, a false-color view from the “Home Plate” region where Spirit now sits, points to a feature geologists call a “bomb sag”. Bombs are a term for rocks ejected…
Read the whole post »Night Sky News: Watch Venus and Neptune Close Encounter
Posted by Andrew Fazekas on January 13, 2012 
Next few evenings backyard astronomers get a chance to see two worlds in the extreme – Venus and Neptune – in the same part of the sky. The brightest and faintest planets visible to skywatchers will be huddling together in a close conjunction in the south-western sky after sunset. While Venus is super easy to…
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Seen from the outside, our home galaxy is “the color of fine-grain, new spring snow in the early morning or late evening,” astronomers say.
Read the whole post »Hubble Survey Finds Galaxies Far, Far Away
Posted by Jason Major on January 10, 2012 
The image above, a composite of visible and infrared light images captured by the Hubble Space Telescope, shows the newfound locations of five small and incredibly ancient galaxies which are in the process of merging into a galactic cluster. Located a staggering 13.1 billion light-years away, these galaxies were in existence a mere 600…
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A popular explanation for the Star of Bethlehem is that it was actually a conjunction of Jupiter and Venus that presumably occurred on June 17, 2BC (see bethlehemstar.net). In other words, in the evening hours of that day, Jupiter and Venus appeared so close together in the sky to observers in the middle east that…
Read the whole post »Night Sky News: Planets Dazzle Holiday Skies
Posted by Andrew Fazekas on December 24, 2011 
This holiday season skywatchers get to witness five planets hanging like ornaments in the skies above. All throughout the end of the month you can catch the five classical naked-eye planets – Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn – all of which were first seen by astronomers in ancient Greek and Roman times. First up…
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While we wait for official word on the nature of the Namibian “space ball,” NASA’s Cassini orbiter is highlighting some spacey spheres of its own: Saturn and its colorful moons.
Read the whole post »A Commanding View of a Comet
Posted by Jason Major on December 22, 2011 A time-lapse movie taken from the International Space Station shows a brightening view of Earth’s horizon at dawn on December 21. It features an orbital view of lightning storms, stars, airglow… and the dramatic appearance of “sungrazer” Comet Lovejoy as it rises above the atmosphere! Incredible!
Read the whole post »Space Shuttle Discovery Powers Down
Posted by Susan Poulton on December 16, 2011 
Friday morning marked a sad and permanent milestone in the ongoing decommissioning of the space shuttles at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center with the closing of the payload bay doors and the final power-down of Discovery.
Read the whole post »Comet Stays Alive After Buzzing Sun
Posted by Andrew Fazekas on December 16, 2011 
The sun-diving comet known as Lovejoy amazed astronomers by surviving its close solar encounter—although it did emerge missing its tail.
Read the whole post »Death-Diving Comet May Be Visible to Naked Eye
Posted by Andrew Fazekas on December 15, 2011 
A comet dubbed Lovejoy is plunging toward the sun—and there’s a slim chance it’ll get bright enough to be seen with the naked eye Thursday.
Read the whole post »A New Milestone for New Horizons
Posted by Jason Major on December 9, 2011 
Artist’s rendering of New Horizons. Southwest Research Institute (Dan Durda)/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (Ken Moscati) Last Friday, December 2, 2011, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft became the closest spacecraft ever to Pluto, a record previously held by Voyager 1 which came within 983 million miles of Pluto on January 29, 1986. This…
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Either a comet crash or a stellar merger could have caused an unusual gamma-ray burst spied last year on December 25, two new studies argue.
Read the whole post »Night Sky News: Moon points to Mars and Saturn
Posted by Andrew Fazekas on November 18, 2011 
With less than a week to go until NASA’s new Mars mega-rover Curiosity launches its a great time to go outside and see the Red Planet yourself. And while you’re at it why not look for the true lord of the rings and a couple of constellations too. That’s what’s in store for skywatchers over…
Read the whole post »Night Sky News: Primetime for Mercury, Venus Duo and Asteroid Close Call
Posted by Andrew Fazekas on November 7, 2011 
The moon is the natural starting point when learning to navigate the night sky but once you become familiar with its craters and mountain ranges it’s time to go beyond lunar orbit. Mercury and Venus the two innermost planets in the solar system are hundreds of times farther but offer up fairly easy naked eye…
Read the whole post »Watch the sun send a massive cloud of charged particles hurtling toward Earth in newly released NASA footage.
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