| FLYBY ALERT!
Space shuttle Discovery launches on May 31st. Get your flyby
alerts from Space
Weather PHONE |
|
|
TWIST AND SHOOT:
Last week, over a period of two days (May 9th and 10th), NASA's
Stereo-B spacecraft observed a troupe of magnetic filaments dancing
along on the limb of the sun. For reasons that will become clear
when you watch the performance, mission scientists have entitled
the movie Twist and Shoot: 4.4
MB Quicktime, 8.1
MB mpeg.
SOLAR CONJUNCTION:
There's a nice sky show underway that would surely make news except
for one thing: looking at it hurts! Venus and the
Pleiades star cluster are converging on the Sun. (continued
below)
Humans eyes can't see the conjunction because of the sun's painful
glare. The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) has no such
trouble; a coronagraph onboard
the spacecraft blocks bright sunlight to reveal stars and planets
on the verge of the sun itself. On May 22-23 the Sun-Pleiades-Venus
triangle will shrink in width to only 5o. Join SOHO for
a ringside
seat.
LUNAR TRANSIT:
On May 15th, the International Space Station flew over Slovakia--and
right in front of the Moon. A team of astronomers led by Roman Piffl
had their Nikon
D200 ready and they caught the winged silhouette passing just
south of the Sea of Tranquillity:
Photo Credit: Roman
Piffl, Tomáš Maruška, Ivan Majchrovič, Miro Grnja
"It was really amazing!" says Piffl. "We were on
the centerline of the transit 20 km southeast of Bratislava, the
capital of Slovakia."
Now is a good time for Europeans to see the International Space
Station with their own eyes. For the next two weeks, the behemoth
spacecraft will be making a series of bright flybys of Europe, sometimes
three or four times a night. Try our new global Satellite
Tracker to find out when to look.
April
2008 Aurora Gallery
[Aurora Alerts] [Night-sky
Cameras] |
