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JUPITER
& THE MOON:
Tomorrow morning, Sunday, Feb. 19th, if you happen to
be awake at the crack of dawn, look out the window. Jupiter
and the Moon are having a pretty close encounter. The
pair are so bright you can see them even after the sky
turns morning blue: sky
map.
NOVA!
A few days ago, the star RS
Ophiuchi exploded. Not the whole star, just some material
dumped onto it by a neighboring red giant. The resulting
nuclear conflagration is visible to the naked eye--barely--in
the constellation Ophiuchus just before dawn: sky
map. Astrophotographer
John Chumack
snapped this picture of RS Ophiuchi on Feb. 16th:
Normally
RS Ophiuchi would be indistinguisable from the scatter
of dim background stars in this image, but as a nova,
it stands out front and center. The explosion multiplied
RS Ophiuchi's brightness by a factor of 1700--from magnitude
12.5 to 4.5. "But, cautions Chumack, "the nova
is fading now, currently at mag 5.3, so get out and take
a look [before it disappears]."
DOUBLE
RAINBOW:
Whenever you see one rainbow, look for another, because
rainbows always come in pairs. Witness this Feb. 2nd photo
from Dan Bush
of McFall, Missouri:
"I used a fisheye lens to capture the entire rainbow,
which appeared very close to the photographer at one point,"
says Bush.
The
bright inner rainbow is the primary
bow, caused by sunbeams reflecting
once inside falling raindrops. It's the bow you usually
see. The less-bright outer rainbow is the secondary
bow, caused by sunbeams reflecting
twice inside raindrops. Secondary bows often go unnoticed,
because they are usually very faint, but they are always
there.
SPACE WEATHER
SPACE WEATHER
