... Why visit Venus first? ... The graceful spiral structure seen in this computer visualization does not portray winding spiral arms in a distant galaxy of stars. ... Watching from a hillside near Austin, Texas, planet Earth, astrophotographer Russell Croman recorded this view of their passing as clouds gracefully dimmed the brilliant moonlight. To Fly Free in Space . ... Have you ever seen the band of our Milky Way Galaxy? ... This band is the disk of our spiral galaxy. ... Moonset, Planet Earth . ...

... Armagh Observatory, College Hill, Armagh BT61 9DG, +44 (0)28 3752 2928 . Armagh Observatory, 11 June 2015: Armagh Observatory reports that the next two weeks will provide an interesting opportunity to observe the brightest planet, Venus, and the largest planet, Jupiter, as they move towards one another in the evening twilight. ... The image shows the sky view towards the West at around 11pm on 20 June 2015. ... Professor Mark E. Bailey, Armagh Observatory, College Hill, Armagh BT61 9DG. ...

... 2015 July 1 . Venus, Jupiter, and Noctilucent Clouds . ... Explanation: Have you seen the passing planets yet? Today the planets Jupiter and Venus pass within half a degree of each other as seen from Earth . ... Featured above , the closing planets were captured two nights ago in a sunset sky graced also by high-level noctilucent clouds . ... She reported this as the first time she has seen noctilucent clouds . ... About APOD | ... NASA Official: Phillip Newman Specific rights apply . ...

Astronotes Armagh Planetarium's Stellar Blog! ... Moon . Planets . ... Monthly Sky Notes . ... February . ... The ringed planet will be quite bright, but unlike Jupiter it will not be the brightest point of light in the sky, this accolade will return to Sirius which is the brightest star in our night sky in the constellation of Canis Major. ... Seven days later on February 18, the Moon will be in its full Moon phase. ... Tweets that mention Wonders of the February Night Sky | ... Astronotes . ...

I was wondering what conditions should be met to have the "darkest" sky .. ... Upon the above publication of the Southern Galactic hemisphere, TunГ Tezel started seeking opportunities to create the Northern counterpart image. ... So, the initial quest of having the darkest possible sky have delivered us these two all-sky images of the two galactic hemispheres as seen from Planet Earth. Zoomable and 'full-screenable' fisheye view of the "darkest sky" Southern Galactic Hemisphere image. ...

... An artificial comet holds secrets to Earths life . ... Astronomers recently discovered that Scholz's star passed close to the Sun 70,000 years ago. Wouldn't its gravity have sent Oort Cloud comets raining into the inner planets? ... COMETS | OORT CLOUD . Based on the number of long-period comets that enter the inner solar system, astronomers estimate there are probably trillions of them in the Oort Cloud. Get instant access to subscriber content on Astronomy.com! ... Discover | ...

This is a new popup window - close it when you are done . Submitted by Robert Halstead on 06/30/2015 23:19:35 . Planets Passing in the Night, June 30, 2015 . ... Captured using my Canon 6D at the prime focus of my 8-inch f/10 Celestron Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope. ISO 1600, 0.6 seconds for the image at the left; and ISO 400, 1/50 second for the image at the right. Images captured between 8:57 and 9:02 pm EDT on June 30, 2015. ... Copyright (c) Amateur Telescope Makers of Boston, Inc. ...

Jupiter is the largest of the nine planets, more than 10 times the diameter of Earth and more than 300 times its mass. ... The mean density of Earth is 5.245 times that of water. The pull of gravity on Jupiter at the top of the clouds at the equator is 2.4 times as great as gravity's pull at the surface of Earth at the equator. ... It is tipped about 11њ to Jupiter's axis of rotation, similar to Earth's, but it is also offset from the center of Jupiter by about 10,000 kilometers (6,200 miles). ...

NASA's Galileo spacecraft radioed confirmation late this week that it has entered Jupiter's environment, crossing over the boundary from interplanetary space into the giant magnetic cocoon around Jupiter called the magnetosphere. ... On Thursday, December 7, Galileo's previously deployed atmospheric probe will plunge into Jupiter's cloud tops at 5:56 p.m. EST and descend into the giant planet on a parachute. ... Jupiter's magnetosphere is like a giant bubble around the planet. ...

... What's New? Bad Astronomy . ... News . ... Bad Astro Store . ... The Nine Planets . ... Keep Bad Astronomy close to your heart, and help make me filthy rich. ... When two objects in the sky are as close as they can get, we say they have reached appulse . ... Venus and Jupiter are the third and fourth brightest objects in the sky, and this was a particularly close appulse; they got within a quarter of a degree of each other. ... 2008 Phil Plait. ... THE BIRDCAGE: ARCHIVE OF OTHER BAD NEWS ITEMS . ...

3) Planets and Brown Dwarfs . ... By its nature, this method is most sensitive to massive planets orbiting close to their stars. ... That means that some of the more massive extrasolar planets could actually be brown dwarfs (although the statistics of the finds suggest that most of them are not). ... Another possible difference between brown dwarfs and massive planets is how they are born. ... They would base the fundamental definition on the mode of formation: a planet is built from planetesimals. ...

... Astronomy Pictures . ... Jupiter . Jupiter from ANU's 24-inch telescope . ... Title: Jupiter from ANU's 24-inch telescope . Description: Several images of Jupiter from ANU's 24-inch telescope, Siding Spring Observatory. Lower half of picture: Close-up of Jupiter and the moon Ganymede, just before Ganymede "transits" (passes across) the face of Jupiter Upper half of picture: The image in the middle of the bottom row shows the shadow of Ganymede on the face of Jupiter about 30 minutes later. ...

... A dynamo is created in a magnetic field by an electric circuit, part of which is moving relative to the rest (additional conditions must also be met). ... Furthermore, the plasma between them conducts electricity very well along its magnetic field lines, which act as if they were wires connecting Io and the planet (drawing). ... The drawing is not to scale. ... The Hubble Space Telescope , using its Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2, has been photographing auroras of the planet Jupiter. ...

... George Benedict, University of Texas at Austin . ... Abstract . ... Quasars at Redshift z=6 and Early Star Formation History . ... The cosmic distance scale and dark energy are two key issues in modern astrophysics, and HST has played a vital role in probing both. On the one hand, HST has been involved in cosmic distance measurements since its inception, largely through the H 0 Key Project, which used WFPC2 to identify and photometer Cepheids in 31 spiral galaxies at distances from 60 to 400 Mpc. ...

Moon, Planets And Aurora, Oh My! Articles | ... Moon | ... How often do we see several planets and the Moon together? ... Then I look northeast and see more red through all the light pollution of Washington, D.C. I snapped this 15 second photo. ... What started out as a father son photographic safari for rare planet conjunctions turned into a spectacular night of memories. ... Aha, I see some red light near Orion. ... A Very Rare Red Aurora in Northern Virginia, . ... www.astronomy.net . ...

... 11 Yellow-Green (78% transmission): Contrasts well with the red and blue characteristics of surface features on Jupiter and Saturn. ... 82A Light Blue (73% transmission): Useful on the Moon, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, this subtle pale blue filter enhances areas of low contrast while avoiding significant reduction of overall image brightness. ... Meade Series 4000 Photo-Visual Color Filters may be ordered individually or in the following sets: . ... Meade Series 4000 Broadband Nebular Filters . ...

... Search . ... Astrophysics Group . Research . ... Research and Instrumentation . ... While this seems an extraordinary endeavour, in light of what we have learnt about Solar System planets, only a handful of key ingredients are required to start characterising an exoplanet. ... The NGTS project is a partnership between the University of Cambridge, Queen?s University Belfast, University of Warwick, University of Leicester, Observatoire de Geneve, DLR (Berlin) and Universidad Catolica de Chile. ...

Asteroid 2055 YU55 passes close by Earth; how close did it get? ... As Elizabeth Flock reported: An asteroid the size of an aircraft carrier missed Earth by only 200,000 miles as it flew by Tuesday night the closest an asteroid has been to Earth in 200 years Asteroid 2005 YU55, as it has been dubbed, streaked by at about 30,000 mph, but some scientists and lucky amateur astronomers caught a glimpse in their telescopes, where they saw strange structures on the asteroid\u2019s dark-colored surface. ...

... More on 51 Peg: . The discovery of a Jupiter--mass planet in orbit around the solar--type star 51Peg has been reported by Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz (Geneva Observatory) on October 6th at the 9th Cambridge workshop on "cool stars, stellar systems, and the sun" held at Florence (Italy). ... Recall that the measurements of radial velocity only yield v sin i which in turn gives us M sin i. For most values of i, sin i will be greater than 0.5 and this gives a mass estimate of 0.5 Jupiter masses. ...

... As then we removed from the Earth, we dived into a sky deeper and deeper. ... We saw immense red-hot spheres, liked suns, in illuminator of our spaceship. ... We saw our Earth, Mars, Mercury, and planets-giants, such as Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and other. ... Also we saw a comet. ... The planet Upsilon was on our way. ... If we could speak the language of these two peoples, we could explain them what the war did on our home planet "the Earth", how many people were killed because of war conflicts. ...