The Night Sky

[dsedy]

Last nights moon plus Jupiter (I think)

 

[cany]

 

[JackPrintMD]

Saw that_awesome.

 

[Roccus7]

Slammed into that asteroid nicely!!

View attachment 54288

A SMASHING SUCCESS!!!

Smashing success: NASA’s asteroid strike results in a big nudge​

pressherald.com/2022/10/11/smashing-success-nasas-asteroid-strike-results-in-a-big-nudge/

By MARCIA DUNN October 11, 2022

A plume of dust and debris is blasted from the surface of the asteroid Dimorphos by NASA’s DART spacecraft after it impacted on Sept. 26, 2022, captured by the U.S. National Science Foundation’s NOIRLab’s SOAR telescope in Chile. The expanding, comet-like tail is more than 6,000 miles long. Teddy Kareta, Matthew Knight/NOIRLab via Associated Press

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — A spacecraft that plowed into a small, harmless asteroid millions of miles away succeeded in shifting its orbit, NASA said Tuesday in announcing the results of its save-the-world test.
The space agency attempted the first test of its kind two weeks ago to see if in the future a killer rock could be nudged out of Earth’s way.

The Dart spacecraft carved a crater into the asteroid Dimorphos on Sept. 26, hurling debris out into space and creating a cometlike trail of dust and rubble stretching several thousand miles. It took days of telescope observations to determine how much the impact altered the path of the 525-foot asteroid around its companion, a much bigger space rock.

Before the impact, the moonlet took 11 hours and 55 minutes to circle its parent asteroid. Scientists had hoped to shave off 10 minutes but NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said the impact altered the asteroid’s orbit by about 32 minutes.

“This mission shows that NASA is trying to be ready for whatever the universe throws at us,” Nelson said during a briefing at NASA headquarters in Washington.

Neither asteroid posed a threat to Earth – and still don’t as they continue their journey around the sun. That’s why scientists picked the pair for the world’s first attempt to alter the position of a celestial body.
Launched last year, the vending machine-size Dart – short for Double Asteroid Redirection Test – was destroyed when it slammed into the asteroid 7 million miles away at 14,000 mph.

The test cost $325 million.

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

 

[jpd]

Stunning image...hope Webb lasts a long time

Webb Telescope Shows the Pillars of Creation Like You’ve Never Seen Them Before

The Webb Space Telescope has just imaged what might be its most iconic target yet: the Pillars of Creation, a monumental arm of the Eagle Nebula.

www.yahoo.com

 

[wader]

The Orionid meteor shower peaks Thursday night. Here's how to watch colorful streaks and fireballs lighting up the sky.

The Orionids appear when Earth travels through debris from Halley's Comet. NASA calls them one of the year's most beautiful meteor showers.

www.yahoo.com

 

[wader]

Stunning image...hope Webb lasts a long time

View attachment 55140

Webb Telescope Shows the Pillars of Creation Like You’ve Never Seen Them Before

The Webb Space Telescope has just imaged what might be its most iconic target yet: the Pillars of Creation, a monumental arm of the Eagle Nebula.

www.yahoo.com

James Webb telescope captures 'knot' of galaxies in the early universe

A James Webb telescope image has unveiled a 'knot' of galaxies from 11.5 billion years ago.

www.yahoo.com

James Webb telescope captures 'knot' of galaxies in the early universe​

The James Webb Space Telescope has produced its second revelatory image in as many days. Scientists using the observatory have discovered a tightly-packed "knot" of at least three galaxies that were forming around a quasar 11.5 billion years ago, just over 2 billion years after the Big Bang. The telescope's near-infrared spectrograph not only showed that the galaxies were orbiting each other at high speeds (up to 435 miles per second), but that this one of the most dense known areas of early galaxy formation. The density is unusually high enough that lead researcher Dominika Wylezalek suggested there may even be two "halos" of dark matter merging in this area.

The quasar itself is unusual. The not-so-elegantly-named SDSS J165202.64+172852.3 is a very red example that doesn't emit as wide a variety of light as already-rare 'normal' quasars. These objects serve as active galactic nuclei and are powered by the gas tumbling into a supermassive black hole at the core of their galaxies.


The imagery also underscores the strength of the Webb telescope's sensors. Earlier studies using the Hubble and Gemini-North telescopes spotted the quasar's outflows, but didn't reveal more than one host galaxy.

 

[Roccus7]

Hold onto you hats as more of these "unseen" asteroids get discovered, or panicked members who use overblown Yahoo News Headlines, start the normal Chicken Little rants...

‘Planet Killer’ Asteroid Spotted That Poses Distant Risk to Earth​

The space rock had been hidden by the glare of the sun, suggesting that more large asteroids are in a solar system region difficult to study from Earth.

Astronomers on the hunt for modestly sized asteroids that could vaporize a city or bulkier beasts that could sterilize Earth’s surface have spotted a new potential threat. But there’s no immediate need to worry — it’ll be many generations until it may pose a danger to our planet.

Detecting uncharted space rocks relies on spying sunlight glinting off their surfaces. But some asteroids occupy corners of the sky in which the sun’s glare smothers them, and, like embers flitting in front of a thermonuclear bonfire, they fade from view.

Last year, in the hope of finding asteroids cloaked by excessive sunlight, an international team of astronomers co-opted a camera primarily designed to investigate the universe’s notoriously elusive dark matter. In an announcement Monday based on a survey first published in September in The Astronomical Journal, the researchers announced the discovery of three new light-drowned projectiles.

One of them, 2022 AP7, is roughly a mile long, and its orbit crosses Earth’s path around the sun, getting as near as 4.4 million miles to Earth itself — uncomfortably close by cosmic standards (although far more distant than Earth’s moon). That makes 2022 AP7 “the largest potentially hazardous asteroid found in the last eight years or so,” said Scott Sheppard, an astronomer at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C., and an author of the study.

After the asteroid was discovered in January, additional observatories studied its motion and other astronomers retrospectively identified it in older images. This data set made it clear that it won’t be paying Earth a visit during the next century, and perhaps far longer.

“There is an extremely low probability of an impact in the foreseeable future,” said Tracy Becker, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute who was not involved with the study.

But the gravitational pull of objects around the solar system — including our own planet — ensures that Earth-crossing asteroids don’t dance the same way forever. The asteroid 2022 AP7 is no exception. “Over time, this asteroid will get brighter and brighter in the sky as it starts crossing Earth’s orbit closer and closer to where the Earth actually is,” Dr. Sheppard said.

It’s possible that “way down the line, in the next few thousand years, it could turn into a problem for our descendants,” said Alan Fitzsimmons, an astronomer at Queen’s University Belfast who was not involved with the study.

And if, in the unluckiest of timelines, 2022 AP7 ultimately impacts Earth?

“This is what we call a planet killer,” Dr. Sheppard said. “If this one hits the Earth, it would cause planetwide destruction. It would be very bad for life as we know it.”

But as we are safe for many generations, this asteroid’s orbit is not its most noteworthy feature. “The interesting thing about 2022 AP7 is its relatively large size,” said Cristina Thomas, a planetary astronomer at Northern Arizona University who was not involved with the study. Its existence suggests that other elephantine asteroids, veiled by the sun’s glare, remain disconcertingly undiscovered.

Today, astronomers looking for potentially hazardous asteroids — those that get at least as close as 4.6 million miles to Earth and are too chunky to be incinerated without incident by our atmosphere — focus on finding rocks around 460 feet across. There are most likely tens of thousands of them, and fewer than half have been identified. They could wreak destruction on a country-size scale. Such threats have motivated NASA and other space agencies to develop planetary defense missions like DART, the spacecraft that successfully adjusted the orbit of a small, nonthreatening asteroid in September.

Most asteroids that are two-thirds of a mile long and larger — far less common, but capable of global devastation — have already been found. But “we know some are still out there to find,” Dr. Fitzsimmons said.

Several no doubt sneak about near Mercury and Venus. But it’s “incredibly difficult to discover objects interior to Earth’s orbit with our current discovery telescopes,” Dr. Thomas said. During most hours of the day, the sun blinds Earth’s telescopes and objects can be hunted only in the few minutes around twilight.

To overcome this limitation, the astronomers who detected 2022 AP7 relied on the Dark Energy Camera on the Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope in Chile. Not only can it examine large swaths of the sky, but it is also sensitive enough to find faint objects engulfed by sunlight. So far, the camera found two additional near-Earth objects: a planet-killer in size whose orbit never crosses Earth’s but takes it closer to the sun than any other known asteroid, flambéing its surface at temperatures extreme enough to liquefy lead; and a smaller, country-killer-size rock that poses no risk.

The twilight survey’s capabilities will eventually be eclipsed by NASA’s Near-Earth Object Surveyor mission. Launching later this decade, this Earth-orbiting infrared observatory will stare into the sun’s glare and find most of the hazardous asteroids that other surveys have missed.

“We want to do everything possible to not be surprised,” Dr. Thomas said. That’s why these surveys exist: to find Earth-impacting asteroids many lifetimes in advance so that, through energetic prods or nuclear explosions, we can send these monsters back into the shadows.

 

[Matts]

The consequences are so dire, that it would be irresponsible not to take reasonable precautions. Kind of like global warming!

 

[wader]

Hold onto you hats as more of these "unseen" asteroids get discovered, or panicked members who use overblown Yahoo News Headlines, start the normal Chicken Little rants...

‘Planet Killer’ Asteroid Spotted That Poses Distant Risk to Earth​

The space rock had been hidden by the glare of the sun, suggesting that more large asteroids are in a solar system region difficult to study from Earth.

Astronomers on the hunt for modestly sized asteroids that could vaporize a city or bulkier beasts that could sterilize Earth’s surface have spotted a new potential threat. But there’s no immediate need to worry — it’ll be many generations until it may pose a danger to our planet.

Detecting uncharted space rocks relies on spying sunlight glinting off their surfaces. But some asteroids occupy corners of the sky in which the sun’s glare smothers them, and, like embers flitting in front of a thermonuclear bonfire, they fade from view.

Last year, in the hope of finding asteroids cloaked by excessive sunlight, an international team of astronomers co-opted a camera primarily designed to investigate the universe’s notoriously elusive dark matter. In an announcement Monday based on a survey first published in September in The Astronomical Journal, the researchers announced the discovery of three new light-drowned projectiles.

One of them, 2022 AP7, is roughly a mile long, and its orbit crosses Earth’s path around the sun, getting as near as 4.4 million miles to Earth itself — uncomfortably close by cosmic standards (although far more distant than Earth’s moon). That makes 2022 AP7 “the largest potentially hazardous asteroid found in the last eight years or so,” said Scott Sheppard, an astronomer at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C., and an author of the study.

After the asteroid was discovered in January, additional observatories studied its motion and other astronomers retrospectively identified it in older images. This data set made it clear that it won’t be paying Earth a visit during the next century, and perhaps far longer.

“There is an extremely low probability of an impact in the foreseeable future,” said Tracy Becker, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute who was not involved with the study.

But the gravitational pull of objects around the solar system — including our own planet — ensures that Earth-crossing asteroids don’t dance the same way forever. The asteroid 2022 AP7 is no exception. “Over time, this asteroid will get brighter and brighter in the sky as it starts crossing Earth’s orbit closer and closer to where the Earth actually is,” Dr. Sheppard said.

It’s possible that “way down the line, in the next few thousand years, it could turn into a problem for our descendants,” said Alan Fitzsimmons, an astronomer at Queen’s University Belfast who was not involved with the study.

And if, in the unluckiest of timelines, 2022 AP7 ultimately impacts Earth?

“This is what we call a planet killer,” Dr. Sheppard said. “If this one hits the Earth, it would cause planetwide destruction. It would be very bad for life as we know it.”

But as we are safe for many generations, this asteroid’s orbit is not its most noteworthy feature. “The interesting thing about 2022 AP7 is its relatively large size,” said Cristina Thomas, a planetary astronomer at Northern Arizona University who was not involved with the study. Its existence suggests that other elephantine asteroids, veiled by the sun’s glare, remain disconcertingly undiscovered.

Today, astronomers looking for potentially hazardous asteroids — those that get at least as close as 4.6 million miles to Earth and are too chunky to be incinerated without incident by our atmosphere — focus on finding rocks around 460 feet across. There are most likely tens of thousands of them, and fewer than half have been identified. They could wreak destruction on a country-size scale. Such threats have motivated NASA and other space agencies to develop planetary defense missions like DART, the spacecraft that successfully adjusted the orbit of a small, nonthreatening asteroid in September.

Most asteroids that are two-thirds of a mile long and larger — far less common, but capable of global devastation — have already been found. But “we know some are still out there to find,” Dr. Fitzsimmons said.

Several no doubt sneak about near Mercury and Venus. But it’s “incredibly difficult to discover objects interior to Earth’s orbit with our current discovery telescopes,” Dr. Thomas said. During most hours of the day, the sun blinds Earth’s telescopes and objects can be hunted only in the few minutes around twilight.

To overcome this limitation, the astronomers who detected 2022 AP7 relied on the Dark Energy Camera on the Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope in Chile. Not only can it examine large swaths of the sky, but it is also sensitive enough to find faint objects engulfed by sunlight. So far, the camera found two additional near-Earth objects: a planet-killer in size whose orbit never crosses Earth’s but takes it closer to the sun than any other known asteroid, flambéing its surface at temperatures extreme enough to liquefy lead; and a smaller, country-killer-size rock that poses no risk.

The twilight survey’s capabilities will eventually be eclipsed by NASA’s Near-Earth Object Surveyor mission. Launching later this decade, this Earth-orbiting infrared observatory will stare into the sun’s glare and find most of the hazardous asteroids that other surveys have missed.

“We want to do everything possible to not be surprised,” Dr. Thomas said. That’s why these surveys exist: to find Earth-impacting asteroids many lifetimes in advance so that, through energetic prods or nuclear explosions, we can send these monsters back into the shadows.

 

[Roccus7]

Watched the eclipse. Fortunately I could watch from indoors, as it's a bit "brisk" out there. Very impressive in my binoculars, BUT orb never got very red as "promised" by the experts. Probably because the air is so clear this morning...

Even lucked out and saw a meteor shoot across the moon...

Best, everything is relative, photo from the phone...

 

[wader]

Webb telescope spots what may be the most distant galaxy yet found​

The James Webb Space Telescope has spotted a remote, reddish galaxy shining just 350 million years after the birth of the cosmos 13.8 billion years ago, surprising astronomers who are struggling to figure out how stars and galaxies could have formed so rapidly in the wake of the Big Bang, researchers said Thursday.

"These observations just make your head explode," Paola Santini, a co-author of a paper describing the discovery in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, said in a statement. "This is a whole new chapter in astronomy. It's like an archaeological dig, and suddenly you find a lost city or something you didn't know about. It's just staggering."

What appears to be the most distant galaxy yet detected shows up as a small red dot in this James Webb Space Telescope image. Data analysis indicates the galaxy was shining just 350 million years after the Big Bang birth of the cosmos, some 50 million years earlier than the previous record holder. / Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, Tommaso Treu (UCLA); image processing: Zolt G. Levay (STScI)

No one yet knows when the first stars turned on after the so-called "dark ages" ended and light first began to travel freely through the universe. But "I think anything earlier than 100 million years would just be really weird," Garth Illingworth, a Webb astronomer and professor at the University of California Santa Cruz, told reporters.

"We were mostly thinking a couple of hundred million years was likely to be where the very first things formed," he said. "But these galaxies potentially are so massive that it may push us back earlier than that two hundred. This is really a great open question -- when did the first stars form? And so these galaxies, I think, will be a pathfinder to that."

The galaxies in question are GLASS-z12, shining 350 million years after the Big Bang, and another dating back to 450 million years, discovered after just four days of analysis as part of the Grism Lens-Amplified Survey from Space, or GLASS, observing program.

As the name implies, the extremely distant galaxies were found in light being gravitationally magnified by the mass of a nearer galaxy cluster. The two observations straddle the previous Hubble record holder, galaxy GN-z11, which was dated to about 400 million years.

The ages of the newly discovered galaxies are not yet fully confirmed — additional spectroscopic analysis is required for that — but astronomers said the observations show clear signs of numerous potentially older galaxies, which would push star formation back even closer to the Big Bang.

These galaxies would have had to have started coming together maybe just 100 million years after the Big Bang," Illingworth said in a NASA statement. "Nobody expected that the dark ages would have ended so early. The primal universe would have been just one hundredth its current age. It's a sliver of time in the 13.8 billion-year-old evolving cosmos."

Tommaso Treu, principal investigator for the GLASS project and a professor at the University of California at Los Angeles, said the survey was meant "to be a way for the astronomical community to get a quick look at what surprises the universe had prepared for us."

Webb telescope spots what may be the most distant galaxy yet found

Scientists say the new observations are just the tip of the iceberg of new discoveries coming in from Webb.

www.yahoo.com

'

 

[Roccus7]

Earth and her Moon from Artemis, in her far orbit of the Moon...

 

[wader]

Saturn’s Moon Titan May Be the ‘Bellwether’ for Alien Life

Photo Illustration by Kelly Caminero / The Daily Beast / GettySaturn has 83 moons. But one of them, Titan, is special. That’s because it’s the only moon in the solar system with a substantial atmosphere. A cold one, to be sure, but an atmosphere nonetheless. On its surface, Titan’s got frigid...

www.yahoo.com

 

[wader]

Every planet in the solar system to be visible in rare "planet parade"​

The planets of the solar system will be lined up in the sky Wednesday night in an astronomical phenomenon, visible from Earth, known as a "planet parade."

The phenomenon, which was also visible Tuesday night, gives skywatchers a good view of Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn with the naked eye. With a pair of binoculars or a telescope, Uranus and Neptune can also be seen.

The planet parade is not an extremely rare occurrence — it tends to happen at least every couple of years. In fact, the eight-planet alignment last happened in June.

In order to see the phenomenon, it is recommended you look south after sunset. From east to west, the planets will appear in this order: Mars, Uranus, Jupiter, Neptune, Saturn, Mercury, Venus.

"People should look southward about 30 to 45 minutes after sunset to catch Mercury and Venus before they're too close to the horizon to observe," said Vahé Peroomian, a professor of astronomy and physics at the University of Southern California. "Jupiter, Saturn and Mars will be visible once it gets dark, from southeast to east."

Planets can appear together in the same part of the sky during their orbits around the sun, Peroomian told CBS News.

 

[wader]

A ‘green’ comet will pass by Earth for the first time in 50,000 years. Here’s where and when to see it.

Comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF) will pass near Earth and the sun this month and could be bright enough for skywatchers to see through telescopes and binoculars.

www.yahoo.com

 

[CELLFISH]

Cape Canaveral, just unloaded something, a visual from Fort Lauderdale remarkable… C22…
.

 

[Roccus7]

Damn, didn't know where to see it or I would have been out there this morning, but I will be there tomorrow before dawn with my binoculars...

Observers in the Northern Hemisphere will have the best chance of spotting the comet if they look in the northwestern skies before dawn. Without a telescope, Comet 2022 E3 (ZTF) will most likely look like a faint, greenish smudge in the sky rather than a bright object, and isn’t likely to have the dramatic, visible tail we saw on Comet NEOWISE in 2020. But it’s still worth checking out; this particular comet takes around 50,000 years to orbit the Sun, so an opportunity to see it will only come once in a lifetime.

COMET 2022 E3 IN STELLARIUM The position of Comet 2022 E3 (ZTF) in the night sky on Feb. 1, 2023, as seen from Pasadena, CA.Image: The Planetary Society/Stellarium

 

[Roccus7]

Damn, didn't know where to see it or I would have been out there this morning, but I will be there tomorrow before dawn with my binoculars...

Observers in the Northern Hemisphere will have the best chance of spotting the comet if they look in the northwestern skies before dawn. Without a telescope, Comet 2022 E3 (ZTF) will most likely look like a faint, greenish smudge in the sky rather than a bright object, and isn’t likely to have the dramatic, visible tail we saw on Comet NEOWISE in 2020. But it’s still worth checking out; this particular comet takes around 50,000 years to orbit the Sun, so an opportunity to see it will only come once in a lifetime.

COMET 2022 E3 IN STELLARIUM The position of Comet 2022 E3 (ZTF) in the night sky on Feb. 1, 2023, as seen from Pasadena, CA.Image: The Planetary Society/Stellarium

Holy Shades of Comet Kohoutek Batman!!

Dragged my sorry azz outside this AM in the chilly 16°F air at 05:00 to see this "Naked Eye" object and saw bupkis with my naked eye or with my binoculars. In fairness, there were some high, light clouds, regardless, if this was such a significant celestial object, it should have been visible...

 

[Roccus7]

Picture of the rising crescent moon behind the Temple of Poseidon in Greece reminds me of my most memorable sailing experience. Did an all night sail from Port Jeff to Block Island and I had the helm going through Plum Gut to catch the rising crescent moon coming over the horizon just before the sun.