... With brilliant Venus above the western horizon at sunset and Jupiter and Saturn high in the east by early evening, November's night sky is filled with bright planets. October's sky featured bright planets as well and, triggered by the active Sun, some lovely auroral displays. ... If sometimes it appears that the entire Milky Way Galaxy is raining down on your head, do not despair. ... Jupiter Swallows Comet Shoemaker Levy 9 . ... Double Asteroid 90 Antiope . ... The Perseus Cluster s X Ray Skull . ...

... The remote planet Pluto and its moon Charon orbit the Sun at a mean distance of almost 6,000 million kilometres, or nearly fourty times farther out than the Earth. During a recent investigation by an international group of astronomers [1], the best picture ever of Pluto and Charon [2] was secured with the European Space Agency's Faint Object Camera at the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). ... The new HST image was taken when Charon was near its maximum elongation from Pluto (0.9 arcseconds). ...

... STScI-PRC99-27 A CLOSER ENCOUNTER WITH MARS Taking advantage of Mars's closest approach to Earth in eight years, astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have taken the space-based observatory's sharpest views yet of the Red Planet. ... In these views the north polar cap is tilted toward the Earth and is visible prominently at the top of each picture. ... Dark sand dunes that surround the polar cap merge into a large, dark region called Acidalia. ...

... 2016 February 25 . Highest, Tallest, and Closest to the Stars . ... Explanation: Fans of planet Earth probably recognize its highest mountain, the Himalayan Mount Everest , on the left in this 3-panel skyscape of The World at Night. Shrouded in cloud Everest's peak is at 8,848 meters (29,029 feet) elevation above sea level. ... The highest equatorial mountain, the Chimborazo volcano's peak elevation is 6,268 meters above sea level. ... About APOD | ...

... Bad Astronomy . ... Bitesize Astronomy . ... Keep Bad Astronomy close to your heart, and help make me filthy rich. ... It's semi-common knowledge that stars twinkle and planets don't. By semi-common, I mean that a lot of folks know that, but I also mean it isn't strictly true. Stars twinkle because we see them from the bottom of a sea of air. ... These small bundles of air act like little lenses, bending light as it passes through them. ... What we see is the light from the star flickering. ...

... 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. ...

... Planets . ... Earth Satellites . ... Looking in the direction of the constellation Cygnus the Swan and launched by NASA in 2009 is the Kepler Space Observatory.Many previous missions searching for exoplanets mainly detected large giant planets, like large hot Jupiters (it is easier to detect larger planets).However KeplerтАЩs main objective is to search for much smaller planets located in a habitable zone which is not too close nor too far from their star; planets which may be just like our Earth. ...

... We have been using it to analyze PC images of known gravitational lenses and QSOs which are candidates for lensing (Falco 1993). ... Fig. 1 plots the higher contours of the PC image of 0142 in the upper left, and its power spectrum in the upper right. ... If we fit the envelope of the power spectrum with a binary model, we find that best fit gives a separation of the two components of 1.3 PC pixels or about 58 mas. ... The lower two curves are cuts through the 0142 power spectrum. ...

... Tonight's Sky . ... The Magazine . ... Observing . ... The double star 54 Leonis, spiral galaxy NGC 3198, and emission nebula NGC 3199 . ... Astronomy for Kids . ... Observing springtime deep-sky objects with a large telescope . ... Bright planets meet at dusk . ... Astronomy magazine subscribers can read the full article for free. ... Get instant access to subscriber content on Astronomy.com! ... Receive news, sky-event information, observing tips, and more from Astronomy's weekly email newsletter....

... Venus, the brightest planet, and Jupiter the second brightest (apart from Mars on very rare occasions) will appear very close together in the Eastern morning sky! ... Venus will be magniute -4.0, and Jupiter mag. ... Callisto, Jupiter's outermost Galilean moon, will then be 7' to the West of Jupiter, so Venus will be just about 4.5 times further away. ... The Last Quarter Moon will be 55 degrees away to the upper right of Venus, with Saturn (mag 0.1) another 16 degrees beyond the Moon. ...

The Bringer of Peace V enus is the second planet from the Sun and the sixth largest. ... S ince Venus is an inferior planet, it shows phases when viewed with a telescope from the perspective of Earth. ... T he pressure of Venus' atmosphere at the surface is 90 atmospheres (about the same as the pressure at a depth of 1 km in Earth's oceans). ... Craters on Venus seem to come in bunches indicating that large meteoriods that do reach the surface usually break up in the atmosphere. ... Earth .. ...

home publications > mercury . SEARCH ASP SITE: Match ALL words Match ANY word . ... Editorial: Climbing a Little Closer . ... In the late 1950s, my uncle Morgan and his best friend, Gerald, were using my uncle's small telescope to look at the night sky. ... Sputnik spurred them like so many others to build ships to climb into the sky, to join that chilly, violent Universe that embraces our little warm droplet of life. ... Yet they climbed higher each successful shot. ... Trying to climb higher. ...

... We also take care to characterise the flat fields, especially their colour dependence, to very high precision which enables high precision photometry even without autoguiding. ... The Blue Diamond Effect The blue diamond effect is caused by surface imperfections on the silicon chip introduced during manufacture, resulting in a repeated large scale pattern in the flat field at blue wavelengths. ... We can remove the blue diamond by using a colour appropriate flat field produced in the lab. ...

This service is intended as an aid to visually observing close-approaching asteroids. ... By clicking on the column headers for "Object Name", "Maximum Brightness", and "Maximum Angular Speed", you can sort the list by those fields. ... When This is the predicted time when the asteroid will be closest to the Earth. ... This field shows red if an asteroid comes as close as the moon. ... PHA (Potentially Hazardous Asteroid) This does NOT mean that this is going to hit the Earth. ...

... Aurora from Space . ... Magnetic Storms . ... The "ring of fire" seen by satellite cameras around the polar caps (picture below) is probably created by electrons leaking from the tail's plasma sheet, whose magnetic field lines form a somewhat imperfect trap. ... One possible explanation involves the close association between auroral arcs and electric currents which flow along field lines between the ionosphere and distant space ( Birkeland currents ). ... Why no aurora at the magnetic poles? ...

... Telescopes ћ Binoculars ћ Microscopes . Meade Ultra-High Transmission coatings (UHTC ) Group . ... Meade Standard Coatings: The optical surfaces of all Meade telescopes include high-grade optical coatings fully consistent in quality with the precision of the optical surfaces themselves. ... These specialized, and extremely advantageous, coatings are offered here as the Meade Ultra-High Transmission Coatings (UHTC) group, a coatings group available optionally on many Meade telescope models. ...

... A rough estimation is that in the United States there is one planetarium per 100,000 population, ranging in size from the Hayden Planetarium's 20-meter dome seating 430 people, to three-meter inflatable portable domes where children sit on the floor. ... Together dblo associates make a huge impact in the architecture, interior design and development arena in London. ... With the holidays around the corner what better way to spoil your family than with your very own private home cinema. ...