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 have their closest encounter for 2012 on the 10th at 2:oo UT (9 pm EST) making it well positioned for North American observers in the evening of Feb.9th.  The two worlds will only be separated by 0.3 degrees -  less than the width of the moon’s disk in the sky.

Shining at magnitude 5.9, Uranus is technically visible to the naked eye as a superfaint bluish star, but  that’s really only possible from  very dark skies far from city lights.  So what this means for most of us is that we need at least binoculars to catch sight of it.  Through a small telescope under medium to high magnification it really looks distinctively like a bonafide planet with its tiny blue-green disk.  By the way, it’s the  absorption of red light by methane in its atmosphere that gives Uranus it’s cool cyan coloring.

Start your hunt by facing the west-southwest horizon at local dusk and zero-in on beacon like Venus – the brightest starlike object in the evening sky. Then with your binoculars or a small telescope look for a tiny, faint blue-green dot to the left of Venus.

And remember if you do get clouded for the main show on the 9th then you can still catch the pair for a few days after as Venus quickly leaves behind the green planet , rising higher in the western sky.

First spotted in 1781, Uranus was the first new planet discovered since ancient times however it wasn’t until NASA’s Voyager 2 flew by in 1986 that we got an up close view at the third largest planet in the solar system –  4 times  the width of Earth.

It’s so far away from the Sun that if you were a Uranian – you would be lucky to celebrate your first birthday. A single year on this planet, the time it takes to make one orbit around the Sun, lasts just about a human lifespan – 84 years.

Sitting at a whopping  3.1 billion km from Earth, Uranus’ great distance means that it takes the sun light reflecting off its upper cloud deck 2 hours and 52 minutes to reach your eye. Just a little something to think about when gazing at that tiny green dot in the sky!

Skywatching Extra: After about 9 pm local time on Feb.9th face the eastern horizon and watch the waning gibbous moon hang lower right of orange colored Mars. The cosmic duo will be 10 degrees apart -  equal to the width of your fist held at arm’s length.

Andrew Fazekas, aka The Night Sky Guy, is a science writer, broadcaster, and lecturer who loves to share his passion for the wonders of the universe through all media. He is a regular contributor to National Geographic News and is the national cosmic correspondent for Canada’s Weather Network TV channel, space columnist for CBC Radio network, and a consultant for the Canadian Space Agency. As a member of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada, Andrew has been observing the heavens from Montreal for over a quarter century and has never met a clear night sky he didn’t like.

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!

The New Horizons spacecraft is soaring through the outer solar system, currently in blissful hibernation but nonetheless excellent condition for its upcoming date with Pluto. It is now the closest any manmade spacecraft has come to the distant world, and in July of 2015 it will send back the first views ever of Pluto, its moon Charon, and whatever surprises the far-flung family of frozen worlds may hold in store.

So why shouldn’t we honor this intrepid robot explorer with a stamp?

That’s exactly what the New Horizons team is trying to make happen though an online petition to the U.S. Postal Service. The stamp above, a concept illustration by space scientist and artist Dan Durda of the Southwest Research Institute, is what’s envisioned as a successor to a 1990 stamp portraying Pluto as a “Not Yet Explored” featureless orb.

(Personally, I like Dan’s version much better.)

Previous US stamp featuring Pluto. (NASA)

Admittedly, what was known about Pluto in 1990 (back when it was still an honest-to-goodness “planet”) was mostly speculative. There was no New Horizons, no Hubble images of its curiously-mottled surface, no knowledge of its smaller moons Nix, Hydra or the yet-to-be-named P4. Even the presence of an tenuous atmosphere had only been discovered two years prior. Pluto, for the most part, was very much an enigma.

The gold-foiled New Horizons will, in a little over 41 months from now, help solve the puzzle of Pluto (and in the process undoubtedly reveal many more new mysteries!)

A stamp, in my opinion, is the least we can do to pay homage to the historic and groundbreaking New Horizons mission. Alan Stern, principal investigator for New Horizons, has similar sentiments.

“You can help make this happen,” Stern said. “We’re asking people to sign the petition, because the post office considers not just the merits of a new stamp proposal, but also whether it is supported by a significant number of people. This is a chance for us all to celebrate what American space exploration can achieve though hard work, technical excellence, the spirit of scientific inquiry, and the uniquely human drive to explore.”

It can take at least three years for a stamp concept to be created and released by the USPS, so by petitioning now we can help make sure it’s ready in time for the spacecraft’s flyby.

So sign the petition on Change.org here. Pass it on. Tell your friends and family to do the same. Share it on Facebook, Twitter, email, whatever your social media platform of choice may be. With enough support we can make this a reality and give New Horizons — and Pluto — our “stamp” of approval!

Read the New Horizons message here.

Forever Stamps were created by the United States Postal Service in 2007. They are non-denominational First Class postage, which means that they can be used to mail First Class letters no matter what the postal rate. Learn more about Forever Stamps here.

Part of what makes Orion so popular with beginner sky-watchers is that it vividly resembles its mythological character: a mighty hunter armed with a club and shield. With its distinctive row of three equally brilliant stars representing Orion’s belt and four surrounding stars marking the shoulders and knees of the giant, this constellation is easily found about due south around mid-evenings.

Marking Orion’s right shoulder is the striking orange colored Betelgeuse—one of the largest stars known, sitting about 500 light-years away.  Even brighter Rigel, marking Orion’s left knee, lies over 700 light-years away and makes for a spectacular contrast with its sparkling blue-white color.

Orion's sword features a giant star nursery. Credit: Starry Night Software

The real cosmic treasure however is within Orion’s Sword—three more stars hanging under the three-star belt of the mythical hunter. Even with the naked eye, you can tell that the middle star in the sword is different from the others, because it looks like a faint hazy patch of light instead of a pinpoint in the night sky.

This special “gleam” in the sword is not a star at all but one of the true marvels of the universe—a colossal star factory over 1,200 light-years away from Earth called the Great Orion Nebula.

Nebula is Latin for “cloud,” and that ghostly greenish glow in the warrior’s sword is indeed a cloud in deep space. Even binoculars or a small telescope will reveal the nebula as a beautiful luminescent cloud in the shape of a blooming flower. Unlike our Earthly clouds made of water vapor, a nebula is made of gas—mostly hydrogen—and dust.

The Great Orion Nebula. Credit: NOAO

Orion’s great mass (20 light-years wide) of swirling chaotic gas is the birthplace of scores of stars. Thanks to the eagle eyes of the Hubble Space Telescope, we now know that the nebula also holds the promise of forming countless of future planetary systems like our own!

Like a great big celestial neon sign, the Orion Nebula is glowing from the light of embedded hot newborn stars. Looking at this hauntingly beautiful stellar nursery, we are probably witnessing what our own sun’s birthplace looked like over five billion years ago!

Without question it is the most spectacular nebula visible to novice stargazers—clearly evident to the naked eye in dark country sites and easily seen with binoculars from the city.

Andrew Fazekas, aka The Night Sky Guy, is a science writer, broadcaster, and lecturer who loves to share his passion for the wonders of the universe through all media. He is a regular contributor to National Geographic News and is the national cosmic correspondent for Canada’s Weather Network TV channel, space columnist for CBC Radio network, and a consultant for the Canadian Space Agency. As a member of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada, Andrew has been observing the heavens from Montreal for over a quarter century and has never met a clear night sky he didn’t like.

It’s been an incredible week for space weather, thanks to a nasty sunspot that hurled a cloud of superheated gas and charged particles toward the Earth.

But some cooler space weather news has snuck into the mix: “Invisible” veils of cold plasma were discovered around Earth, and they might tell us something about Mars’s missing atmosphere.

First, a little bit more on the discovery.

Two space scientists poring over data from the European Space Agency’s Cluster II satellites—four spacecraft which zip around Earth in an elliptical orbit—found evidence of positively charged, slow-moving (hence “cold”) plasma particles as far as 60,000 miles (100,000 kilometers) above Earth’s surface.

That’s about a quarter of the way to the moon, and a region where few researchers suspected any cold plasma lurked. But nobody needs to be hard on themselves, said space scientist Mats André of the Swedish Institute of Space Physics (and leader of the new study about the plasma in Geophysical Research Letters). That’s because cold plasma is really, really tough to detect.

The invisibility of cold matter has a lot to do with like charges repelling like charges. Sunlight in space strips away electrons from atoms, ionizing any “naked” matter out there to have a positive charge. That includes spacecraft (like Cluster II satellites) and atmospheric gas at the edge of Earth’s atmosphere (which creates cold plasma).

Like a magnet’s north pole near another magnet’s north pole, the spacecraft and cold plasma repel and never meet. “Hot” plasma, on the other hand, is moving fast enough to ignore any magnetic repulsion with a spacecraft, so it’s detectable.

Without some clever analysis, cold plasma just doesn’t seem to be out there.

But André knew two things. First, that a spacecraft zooming through cold plasma—if it existed—would create a shockwave (i.e. cold plasma piling in front and zipping around to the back). Second, moving charged particles emit electric fields.

André and his colleague paired these facts up to “see” the subtle shockwaves in Cluster II’s data. The results imply cold matter constitutes between 50 and 70 percent of all charged particles in Earth’s magnetic field! That’s quite a jump from zero percent.

The sudden abundance of cold plasma means a few things. Space weather forecasts stand to improve, as cold plasma particles probably interact with incoming hot matter from solar storms—and that dynamic is missing from computer models. Another effect is that the Earth is bleeding off roughly 2.2 pounds (1 kilogram) of atmospheric gas every second.

When you look at planets with thin atmospheres like Mars (which has just 1 percent the atmospheric pressure of Earth), scientists like André begin to wonder what role the “blood loss” of cold plasma plays in killing atmospheres.

Illustration couretsy NASA/JPL-Caltech

Despite having half the solar intensity, the rate of loss may be about the same as it is at Earth (about one Chihuahua’s weight every second).

“There are all kinds of ways to get rid of a planet’s atmosphere—big asteroid impacts, loss of a dynamo, and so on,” André said. “Well, this is certainly one of them when you apply it over billions of years of time. I don’t know how important it is, but this is on my short list.”

While no one knows for certain how Mars lost its atmosphere, we now have a chilly new suspect.

Dave Mosher is a freelance journalist obsessed with space, physics, biology, technology and more. He lives in New York City and you can stalk him on Twitter as @davemosher.

Hubble image of Pluto and its four known moons. NASA, ESA, and M. Showalter (SETI Institute)

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 has a curiously mottled coloration that seems to change with its seasons, an atmosphere that expands and falls back onto its surface, a system of four moons in orbit around it — the most recent of which, currently called “P4″, was announced just last summer — and, according to Planetary Science Institute senior scientist Henry Throop, possibly even a system of rings.

Astronomers have suggested before that Pluto could have rings… probably not an elaborate system like Saturn’s, of course, but rather a thin ring made up of small bits of rock, dust, gas and ice. These could be the remains of a small moon or even ejected material from one of the existing ones.

In fact, concerns over the existence of such rings have recently arisen, as running into unseen debris at 14 kilometers a second — the velocity at which New Horizons will pass by Pluto — would pose a serious risk to the spacecraft and its sensitive suite of instruments.

Artist's concept of the New Horizons spacecraft during its planned encounter with Pluto. (JHUAPL/SwRI)

“Even particles less than a milligram can penetrate our micrometeoroid blankets and do a lot of damage to electronics, fuel lines and sensors,” said New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern.

While it’s not known if Pluto has such rings, or perhaps even more moons in tow, Throop’s team is using occultation data gathered with the four-meter Anglo-Australian Telescope in Australia to search for any hints of hidden ring structures.

“As Pluto passes in front of a star, the star’s light blinks out, like a moth blocking out the beam from a flashlight,” Throop said at the Division for Planetary Sciences meeting in Nantes, France. “We searched through the observations to try to find any hint that the star light was being blocked by rings of Pluto.”

Although no conclusive evidence for rings has yet been found, Throop’s research is still valuable to the New Horizons mission. After all, knowing where rings aren’t is just as important as knowing where they are when planning a safe path for the spacecraft.

Read more about this research on PhysOrg.com.

Late last night (Jan.22) at around 11 pm ET a giant, long lasting, solar flare erupted off the face of the Sun, sending a giant Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) – cloud of plasma and charged particles – squarely towards the Earth.  Detected by NASA’s sun-monitoring satellites SOHO and STEREO, the solar blast was determined to be an M9 on the Richter scale of solar flares – just shy of an X- class flare which is ranked as the most powerful. Space weather forecasters at NOAA – who keep watch for any hazardous, incoming solar storms – are expecting the brunt of the CME to slam into Earth’s magnetic field Jan.24 around 9 am EST ( 2 pm UT)   +/- 7 hours.

And Earth is not the only planet in its cross-hairs. Mars will get walloped too when the CME arrives there on Jan.25th.

Already the front of the storm is now being felt as space radiation (energized protons) speeds by Earth, states the Spaceweather.com website. The high influx of charged particles hitting the magnetic field poses a hazard to everything from GPS signals, polar radio communications, power grids  and circuit boards on orbiting satellites.

What does this mean for chances of seeing Northern Lights? If the geomagnetic storm becomes moderate to strong then auroras may creep down to southern latitudes like Texas and Georgia -but that’s pretty rare. Exactly how intense and widespread the sky show will be depends on how our planet’s magnetic field is oriented at the time when the storm arrives.

Best time to go outside will be between local midnight and pre-dawn hours. Face the northern sky and look for green or red glows to start near the horizon. Catching auroras with your camera is not hard. All you need to have is a tripod mounted DSLR camera with a wide angle lens, capable of taking exposures of up to 20 seconds with a timer.

As usual there are still too many unknowns to forecast reliably who, where, and when exactly will get a sky show when it comes to aurora, but one thing is for sure – you have to go outside and look up to even have a chance.

Andrew Fazekas, aka The Night Sky Guy, is a science writer, broadcaster, and lecturer who loves to share his passion for the wonders of the universe through all media. He is a regular contributor to National Geographic News and is the national cosmic correspondent for Canada’s Weather Network TV channel, space columnist for CBC Radio network, and a consultant for the Canadian Space Agency. As a member of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada, Andrew has been observing the heavens from Montreal for over a quarter century and has never met a clear night sky he didn’t like.

Flashes of lightning briefly illuminate scattered storm clouds, and the thin shell of our atmosphere is capped by airglow — a greenish light cast by ions charged by UV radiation.

(See the video in HD here.)

This photos were taken by Expedition 30 astronauts, compiled at Johnson Space Center and uploaded to The Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth.

Especially impressive are the stars visible in the background… this should answer any questions as to whether or not astronauts can see stars from space!

(The visibility of stars in photos from space is entirely dependent on the ambient sunlight and how the camera is set to expose the scene. In these instances, passing above the night side of the planet and shielded from the Sun, cameras are set for maximum sensitivity and so stars can register on the sensor. In daylight the camera is set differently, so as not to overexpose a brightly-lit Earth. This makes capturing much dimmer background stars impossible.)

The video was rotated (by me) 90º clockwise to give, one: a larger view on screen, and two: an entirely different sense of passing “around” the planet. North is up, and so it portrays more of a globe feeling, in my opinion. But, however you look at it, the view is simply incredible!

Light pollution,  the bane of all astronomers both professional and amateurs alike, is basically light produced by street lamps, sports fields, skyscrapers, shopping malls, and even porch lights – any kind of light that floods the night sky and washes out the stars. But it not only robs us of our window to the cosmos but also wastes energy and can affect wildlife too.  You want to see how bad light pollution is? Then check out this sobering NASA map of the Earth as it appears at night from space.

Now GlOBE at Night an international campaign to battle light pollution,  is turning to the web in hopes to get citizen scientists to help out.

It originally got its start with NASA and was just in the United States but now the GLOBE at Night program had gone international, a citizen-science effort to raise public awareness of the impact of light pollution.

The general public is asked to measure their night sky brightness and submit their observations to a website from a computer or digital device.

For the last six years the GLOBE at Night campaign runs for two weeks every winter and spring, with this one running until Monday, Jan.23rd

People of all ages and walks of life from  115 countries have contributed nearly 70,000 measurements, making GLOBE at Night one of the most successful light pollution awareness campaigns.

And participating couldn’t be any easier – no telescope or even binoculars required.  All you need to do is load their web app onto your computer, tablet or smartphone and go outside in the early evening when it’s clear and look for one of the easiest star patterns to find in the night sky – Orion constellation.  Even if you don’t stargaze, you have probably seen it looking up during the winter nights. Orion’s most recognizable feature is it’s row of three star that represent the mythical hunter’s belt.

What you do is count the bright visible stars in the area surrounding Orion and then match that number to one a of a few star charts of the constellation’s star pattern as it would appear under various amounts of light pollution. This will help quantify the magnitude of the faintest stars that are visible in your geographical location and give astronomers a clear idea of the quality of your night sky and if it’s getting worse or better over time.

The organizers hope that by  raising awareness to the growing problem of light pollution,  people will not only want to work towards protecting this natural heritage but also get a better appreciation of the true beauty the night sky has to offer .

So if you haven’t counted those stars around Orion yet, don’t wait ’cause you only have until Jan.23rd, Monday night, to do your part to help save the night sky!

Andrew Fazekas, aka The Night Sky Guy, is a science writer, broadcaster, and lecturer who loves to share his passion for the wonders of the universe through all media. He is a regular contributor to National Geographic News and is the national cosmic correspondent for Canada’s Weather Network TV channel, space columnist for CBC Radio network, and a consultant for the Canadian Space Agency. As a member of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada, Andrew has been observing the heavens from Montreal for over a quarter century and has never met a clear night sky he didn’t like.

The eruption shot out of active region 1401, a large sunspot that’s been spitting flares about once a day since satellites saw it advancing onto the sun’s Earth-facing disk.

As seen in the new video, the latest flare was followed by a coronal mass ejection, or CME, that was aimed right at Earth.

Scientists predict this cloud of solar particles could reach our planet on Saturday, giving weekend sky-watchers a better than average chance of witnessing some glorious auroras.

(See photos: “Multicolored Auroras Sparked by Double Sun Blast.”)

Meanwhile, the video itself shows the sun in a bevy of brilliant hues because SDO is able to capture pictures in ten wavelengths every ten seconds.

In this composite footage, each color represents a different temperature region of the sun, which corresponds to one of our star’s layers.

For instance, in the picture here, data from SDO is used to “paint” several layers onto the sun.

Picture courtesy NASA/SDO

The “flat” yellow at the far left is the sun’s surface, or photosphere, which is a mere 10,800 degrees F (6,000 degrees C). Pictures of the relatively cool photosphere allow us to see the even colder, darker blobs called sunspots that signal magnetic activity on the sun’s surface.

The turbulent gold region is the layer between the chromosphere (lower atmosphere) and the corona (upper atmosphere). This mid-temperature zone is around 1.8 million degrees F (a million degrees C).

Next, swirling blues and greens represent three different wavelengths from the corona, where temperatures can soar up to 3.6 million degrees F (two million degrees C).

Finally, the far right panel includes an illustration of the sun’s magnetic field lines, which spring from and connect the active regions on the photosphere.

Scientists can use SDO’s penetrating gaze to try and solve a number of solar mysteries, such as why the star’s upper atmosphere is so much hotter than its surface—the reverse of the situation on Earth.

(Related: “Comet Seen Vaporizing in Sun’s Atmosphere—A First.”)

In addition, solar experts can use SDO to examine the link between activity on the sun’s surface and the often abrupt discharges of material from the corona. When aimed at Earth, CMEs can not only trigger auroras but, if they’re intense enough, they can also damage satellites and the power grid.

A volcanic rock sits in a 1" deep crater near Home Plate

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 from volcanic eruptions, and a sag is the crater that’s formed when said rocks impact the ground. A team of researchers led by Michael Manga from the University of California, Berkeley, used this photographic evidence to recreate what the conditions of Mars’ air and soil may have been like during the time of the bomb sag’s formation.

What they found, after running several physical experiments using materials of different composition, was that the sag seen here was likely formed during a time when the atmosphere was thicker – and the soil wetter.

“The downward deflection of beds seen on Mars is consistent with water-saturated sediment in the laboratory experiments,” states the team’s paper, published Jan. 5 in Geophysical Research Letters. In addition, Manga et al. concluded the atmosphere in the region must have been (based on the rock’s mass and velocity before impact) at least 20 times thicker than it is today.

Since the Home Plate region is believed to have once been a hydrothermal vent, these findings are in line with what the area must have been like at one point in the planet’s distant past. Still, the team stresses that these results are based on one finding in one area and are not necessarily conclusive.

Read more about this on ASU’s Red Planet Report.

(Also, check out an excellent program by National Geographic in honor of Spirit, the Mars Exploration Rover that really defied all odds right up until the end.)

Research credit: Manga, M., A. Patel, J. Dufek, and E. S. Kite (2012). Image NASA/JPL-Caltech.