FATHER'S DAY: Skip the tie. This year, give Dad the stars -- a gift subscription to Space Weather PHONE. | | | NLC ALERT: Noctilucent cloud season is underway. In the past week, sky watchers have spotted glow-in-the-dark electric blue tendrils over England, Canada, Ireland, Northern Ireland and the Netherlands. Check the photo gallery for observing tips and be alert for NLCs! SOLAR ECLIPSE: Last Thursday, June 12th, Andrew Brown witnessed a lovely solar eclipse over London. No one else saw it? Obviously, they weren't standing in the right spot. Brown explains: "For three days every June, the setting sun aligns itself with a distant Astra / Sky TV satellite dish to create a false solar eclipse!" "This sequence shows the sun passing behind the dish, creating first a partial and then an annular eclipse. Totality lasts for around 30 seconds!" A real solar eclipse is just around the corner. On August 1st, 2008, the Moon will blot out the sun over parts of Canada, northern Greenland, central Russia, Mongolia, and China. Millions of people will witness totality--no antenna required. Get the full story from NASA. NOT THE ISS: On June 11th in the Netherlands, amateur astronomer Ralf Vandebergh trained his backyard telescope on a speck of light moving across the night sky and snapped this picture: "It looks like a bad photo of the International Space Station (ISS)," he says, "but it isn't. This is a much much smaller object with an orbit twice as high as that of the ISS." The little winged spacecraft is SeaSat 1. Launched in June 1978, SeaSat 1 was the first satellite to monitor Earth's oceans using synthetic aperture radar (SAR). A massive short-circuit disabled SeaSat 1 only four months later, but that was time enough to demonstrate the feasibility of SAR ocean studies and blaze a trail for radar-sats of the future. "This old spacecraft is still in our night sky," says Vandebergh. "The pass on June 11th was amazing. It was [about as bright as a 3rd magnitude star] and visible for 9 minutes in total." Readers, would you like to see SeaSat 1? We've just added it to our Satellite Tracker: click here for flybys. May 2008 Aurora Gallery [Aurora Alerts] [Night-sky Cameras] |