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EARTH-DIRECTED ERUPTION:
On Saturday, Oct. 17th, starting around 18:24
UT, a spotless active region in the sun's southern hemisphere
erupted, hurling a faint coronal mass ejection (CME) in the
general direction of Earth. SOHO's extreme UV telescope recorded
this movie
of the blast. High-latitude sky watchers should be
alert for auroras on Oct. 19th or 20th when the CME arrives.
LUNAR IMPACT PLUME:
There was a plume after all. Observers on
Earth had their doubts after LCROSS and its Centaur booster
rocket hit the Moon on Friday, Oct. 9th. The twin lunar impacts
failed to produce visible plumes of debris, prompting speculation
that something had gone wrong. On the contrary, members of
the LCROSS science team are now calling the experiment "a
smashing success."
Fifteen seconds after the Centaur hit the shadowy floor of
crater Cabeus, the LCROSS spacecraft flying 600 km overhead
took the following picture of a plume measuring 6 to 8 km
wide:
"There is a clear indication of a plume
of vapor and fine debris," says LCROSS principal investigator
Tony Colaprete of NASA/Ames. "The ejecta brightness appears
to be at the low end of our predictions and this may be a
clue to the properties of the material the Centaur hit."
Nine cameras and spectrometers on LCROSS captured
every phase of the Centaur's impact: the
intial flash, the debris plume, and the creation of the
Centaur's crater. "We are blown away by the data
returned," says Colaprete. "The team is working
hard on the analysis and the data appear to be of very high
quality."
But did the impact reveal any water at the bottom
of Cabeus? The LCROSS team isn't ready to say yet. Combining
their data with those of other observatories and analyzing
the full dataset could take weeks. According to NASA, "any
new information will undergo the normal scientific review
process and will be released as soon as it is available."
For more information, read NASA's Oct. 16th
press
release and browse the gallery
of images.
MORNING PLANETS IN
MOTION: On Friday morning in Bretagne, France,
photographer Laurent
Laveder woke before dawn to watch Venus, Saturn and the
Moon rise together over a local marina. "I made a 50-minute,
22-megabyte movie of the event," he says. Click on the
image to set the scene in motion (DivX
required):
Launch
a 22 MB avi movie
"The show was cut short by the arrival of the clouds,
but it was great anyway!" he says. Challenge: Watch the
movie again
and find the blue heron. It's asleep on one of the boats.
more images: from
Miguel Claro of Cacilhas, Almada, Portugal; from
Azhy Chato Hasan of Erbil city, Kurdistan Region, Iraq;
from
Marco Meniero of Roma, Italy; from
Mohammad Mehdi Asgari of Arak, Iran; from
Mark Staples of Little Lake Santa Fe, Waldo, FL; from
James W. Young near San Bernardino, CA; from
Mohammad Javad Fahimi at the Jabaliyeh Dome in Kerman,
Iran; from
Todd Carlson of Burk's Falls, Ontario, Canada; from
Antonio Finazzi of Chiuduno, Bergamo - Italy; from
Jens Hackmann of Weikersheim, southern Germany
Sept.
2009 Aurora Gallery
[previous Septembers: 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004, 2002, 2001]
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