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. PLANETS ALIGN: Venus and Saturn are converging for a close encounter on June 30th when the pair will be only 2/3o apart. You can watch the distance shrink in the nights ahead. Step outside after sundown and look west. Venus is the brightest object in the sky; Saturn is the yellow dot right beside it. Sky maps: June 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, July 1. JUHANNUS: In case you missed it, last week in Scandinavia there was a holiday as big as Christmas: the summer solstice. Finns call it Juhannus, and "we celebrate by lighting huge bonfires (kokko) on the beach," says Graham Clements of Naantali, Finland. He took this picture shortly before midnight on June 22nd: "It was a warm evening and the setting sun produced a nice sun pillar, seen to the right of the bonfire," he points out. Sun pillars are created by crystals of ice fluttering down from high clouds. The crystals reflect light from their horizontal faces, spreading a single point of light into a luminous column. Ice in June? Believe it. Clouds 5 to 10 km high are always freezing cold----even on a midsummer night with bonfires blazing. Happy Juhannus! more images: from Camilla Bacher Kiming of Esbjerg, Denmark. MAMMATUS CLOUDS: Remarkably, it is a fact of Nature that the underbelly of an exhausted thunderstorm looks like the underbelly of a cow. These are called mammatus clouds: Photo details: Pentax K10D, ISO 100, F5.6, 1/60s "They were absolutely amazing; the 'pouches' were in constant motion," says Ian McDonald who took the above picture on June 22nd from the Birds Hill Provincial Park in Manitoba, Canada. Not far away in Winnipeg, Kevin Black photographed a similar display: image. It is often said that mammatus clouds signal the approach of bad weather, but new research shows the opposite is true. Mammatus clouds are more often seen when storms are breaking up. "The clouds we saw on June 22nd appeared just after an F4 tornado hit the town of Elie, Manitoba," notes Black. What exactly causes mammatus clouds? It's a big undulating mystery. For details, see The Mysteries of Mammatus Clouds, D. M. Schultz et al, Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences, Volume 63, Issue 10 (October 2006). more images: from Tony Wilder of Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin; from Mohsen Zadsaleh of Tehran, Iran; |