Where's Saturn? Is that a UFO--or the ISS? What's the name of that star? Get the answers from mySKY--a fun new astronomy helper from Meade. | | | FLYBY ALERT: Tonight, the International Space Station begins a week-long series of bright evening flybys over North America. The busily expanding station is now as bright as Venus even when it doesn't fly directly overhead; some observers report seeing it through clouds. US and Canadian readers, find out when to look using our new Simple Satellite Tracker. SOLAR ACTIVITY: No sunspots? No problem, solar activity can happen even when the sun is "blank." Yesterday, John Adair of England looked through his Coronado SolarMax90 and witnessed "a massive prominence erupting." The full sequence of images shows "material was eventually ejected into space." Shortly thereafter, the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) tracked a coronal mass ejection (CME) billowing away from the sun: movie. If Earth had been in the path of the CME, we would be expecting auroras tomorrow night. Maybe next time. Note: The bright object in the SOHO animation is Mercury, which is approaching the sun for a close conjunction on April 15th and 16th. Mark your calendar and join SOHO for a ringside seat. 3D MOON OF MARS: Grab your 3D glasses. Two weeks ago, NASA's Mars Reconnaisance Orbiter (MRO) targeted martian moon Phobos and took a pair of high-resolution pictures. Mission scientists have combined them to make a startling red-blue anaglyph. Glasses on? Behold. The 2D view is nearly as good: Long ago, something struck Phobos and almost shattered the tiny moon. The scar of that impact, 9km-wide Stickney crater, is located at the top of the image. Color filters in MRO's camera reveal a blue splash of material around Stickney's rim. What is it? No one knows. Equally striking are Phobos' many long grooves and crater chains. Although these seem to radiate from Stickney, recent studies show that most are not related to the crater. Instead they come from the planet below; when asteroids hit Mars, debris flies up and scores Phobos. The grooves seem to emerge from Stickney only because the crater faces Mars. Finally, note the bright features lining inner slopes of Stickney. These are thought to be landslides--on a moon where the pull of gravity is only 0.001 g! Visit the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter home page for more information, March 2008 Aurora Gallery [Aurora Alerts] [Night-sky Cameras] |