Coil-like shapes in clouds, created by their passage over the Prince Edward Islands in the south Indian Ocean. Credit: NASA/Terra/MODIS.
These are some of the strangest looking clouds I’ve seen from the fleet of Earth-observing satellites. These coil-like or bow-wave-shaped clouds were created by the clouds passing over the Prince Edward Islands, in the south Indian Ocean. It was taken by the Terra satellite with the MODIS instrument (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) on March 26, 2013.
Update: Vitaliy Egorov from the Russian website allmars.net has sent us an animation of these coil clouds as seen by the Russian satellite Elektro-L:
Animation is made up of 17 frames made satellite “Electro-L” from 12:30 to 20:30 GMT March 26, 2013 at 1 frame per 30 minutes. Photo: Roscosmos / NTSOMZ / Electro-L / allmars.net.
The images are taken from a different angle than the Terra satellite. You can see more at Egorov’s website.
NASA says MODIS is playing a vital role in the development of validated, global, interactive Earth system models able to predict global change accurately enough to assist policy makers in making sound decisions concerning the protection of our environment.
Comet C/2011 L4 Panstarrs, taken from New Mexico Skies between on March 25, 2013 using an FSQ 10.6 and STL11K camera. 65 frames over 18 min each with an exposure time of 2.0 sec. The stars have been enhanced for effect. Credit and copyright: Joseph Brimacombe.
Get ready for an comet encounter of the extragalactic kind. In less than a week, Comet PANSTARRS will slide by the Andromeda Galaxy, the brightest galaxy visible in northern hemisphere skies. On and around that date, you’ll be able to see them both glowing softly together in late evening and early morning twilight.
The Andromeda Galaxy is the closest large galaxy to our Milky Way. It’s easily visible in binoculars in the constellation Andromeda. Credit: Adam Evans
Their apparent proximity if of course pure sleight of hand; the comet will be a mere 121 million miles (195 million km) from Earth on that date compared to Andromeda’s 2.5 billion light years. For what it’s worth, 121 million miles (195 million km) equates to 0.00002 light years. Let’s just say they’re WAY far apart in reality. Their juxtaposition will make for enjoyable binocular viewing as well as offer astrophotographers an opportunity to create a classic image.
Comet PANSTARRS on March 22 photographed with a 200mm lens at dusk on a motorized tracking platform. Credit: Bob King
Last night under the clearest of skies I easily found Comet C/2011 L4 PANSTARRS in the constellation Andromeda about 15 degrees above the horizon an hour after sunset. Twilight was still a factor as was the rising full moon. That’s probably why the comet remained at the very limit of naked eye vision. Binoculars – I use 10x50s – clearly showed the comet’s bright parabolic head and two degrees (four full diameters) of tail streaming up and to the right.
Comet PANSTARRS shown every three days as it moves across Andromeda, passing near the Andromeda Galaxy around April 3. You can use Cassiopeia to point you to Beta Andromedae and from there to the comet. The map shows the sky facing northwest about one hour after sunset. Comet and galaxy brightness are exaggerated for the sake of illustration. Stellarium
The comet has faded considerably since it first emerged into the evening twilight three weeks ago. Its head now shines around magnitude 3.5 and is noticeably fainter than the stars of the Big Dipper. As compensation, PANSTARRS is now easier to find, since it’s both higher up in the sky and near a string of moderately bright stars in the constellation Andromeda.
PANSTARRS treks northward through Andromeda en route to the W of Cassiopeia in the next two weeks. It won’t be long before the comet becomes circumpolar and remains visible all night long. The term refers to celestial objects that circle around the pole star without setting. The Big Dipper is the most familiar circumpolar constellation for much of the U.S. and Canada.
Comet PANSTARRS in the early dawn sky during the first part of April. Once again, you can use Cassiopeia to help get you there. Don’t forget binoculars! They’re now essential to seeing the comet. The map shows the sky facing northeast about 75 minutes before sunrise. Stellarium
On its journey to all-night visibility, PANSTARRS started pulling a double-shift this week. You can now see it both at dusk and at dawn. Although a bright moon will compromise the dawn view for a few days, you can watch for the comet low in the northeastern sky starting about hour and 15 minutes before sunrise. For the moment, it’s about the same altitude above the horizon during both morning and evening hours. Evening is still preferred only because the bright moon has finally departed the sky during the hour or so the comet is visible.
Jose Chambo’s photo of Comet C/2011 L4 PANSTARRS from Spain on March 15 reveals a broad dust tail and narrower red-tinted tail. The red tail may be from sodium atoms released by materials colliding with each other as they jet off the comet’s nucleus. Click image to see more photos. Credit: José J. Chambó
Through my 15-inch telescope last night, PANSTARRS’ head held a brilliant topaz gem – the false nucleus. This tiny ball of bright, fuzzy light contains the icy comet itself, hidden behind a fury of its own dust and vapor boiled off by the sun’s heat.
Here’s some additional images and videos of PANSTARRS that Universe Today has received from readers:
Zlatan Merakov created this timelapse from images he took on March 20 from Smolyan, Bulgaria.
The view of Comet PANSTARRS L4 on 03-22-2013 over Warrenton, Virginia. Modified Canon Rebel Xsi DSLR 30 second exposure, ISO 1600, University Optics 80mm F6 Refractor (600mm). Credit and copyright: John Chumack.Comet C/2011 Pan-STARRS over Gradara Castle in Italy. Credit and copyright: Niki Giada.
It was an event that took the world by surprise: On the morning of February 15, 2013 a 7,000-ton asteroid crashed into the Earth’s atmosphere. According to NASA, the Siberian meteor exploded with the power of 30 Hiroshima bombs and was the largest object to burst in the atmosphere since the Tunguska event of 1908. This video from PBS’s science show NOVA aired last night on television and is now available to watch online. (Note: the video may not yet be available to watch in all areas of the world.)
The show reveals what scientists have gleaned so far about this object from the numerous dashcam videos in Russia and other data, and how this event could have been much worse.
It features interviews with several scientists, including Peter Brown and Margaret Campbell-Brown from the University of Western Ontario, Mark Boslough from the University of New Mexico, Dan Durda from the Southwest Research Institute and Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweickart, who is now Chair Emeritus of the B612 Foundation, the organization that is building the “Sentinel” telescope to search for asteroids heading for Earth.
Photographer and panoramacist Andrew Bodrov has again taken advantage of that old shutterbug, the Curiosity rover, and the images she’s taken of her surroundings. This huge new interactive panorama stretches across 90,000 x 45,000 pixels, and includes 295 images from the Narrow Angle Camera taken on Sols 136-149 and 112 images from Medium Angle Camera taken on Sol 137. Enjoy playing around and visiting Curiosity’s ‘hood. If you click the link below the pan, it will take you to the host website where the panorama spreads across your screen. Enjoy!
FYI, today is Sol 228 for Curiosity on Mars. Has it been that long already?
Here’s a look at Apollo 11 for those with short attention spans. In just 100 seconds you can see the highlights of one of the most extraordinary voyages in human history. “Even short 1-second shots can reveal an incredible amount of information,” says Spacecraft Films, the company that has produced tons of great videos/DVDs of our explorations of space.
If you’re into getting more detail, below is an incredibly slow and in-depth look at the launch of the 4th flight of the Saturn I rocket, which took place 50 years ago today. This is also from Spacecraft Films.
The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has captured this vivid image of spiral galaxy Messier 77 — a galaxy in the constellation of Cetus, some 45 million light-years away from us. The streaks of red and blue in the image highlight pockets of star formation along the pinwheeling arms, with dark dust lanes stretching across the galaxy’s starry centre. The galaxy belongs to a class of galaxies known as Seyfert galaxies, which have highly ionised gas surrounding an intensely active centre. Credit: NASA, ESA & A. van der Hoeven
Discovered on October 29, 1780 by Pierre Mechain, this active Seyfert galaxy is magnificent to behold in amateur equipment and even more so in NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope photographs. Located in the constellation of Cetus and positioned about 45 million light years away, this spiral galaxy has a claim to fame not only for being strong in star formation, but as one of the most studied galaxies of its type. Cutting across its face are red hued pockets of gas where new suns are being born and dark dustlanes twist around its powerful nucleus.
When Mechain first observed this incredible visage, he mistook it for a nebula and Messier looked at it, but did not record it. (However, do not fault Messier for lack of interest at this time. His wife and newly born son had just died and he was mourning.) In 1783, Sir William Herschel saw it as an “Ill defined star surrounded by nebulousity.” but would change his tune some 8 years later when he reported: “A kind of much magnified stellar cluster; it contains some bright stars in the centre.” His son, John Herschel, would go on to catalog it – not being very descriptive either.
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This video zooms in on spiral galaxy Messier 77. The sequence begins with a view of the night sky near the constellation of Cetus. It then zooms through observations from the Digitized Sky Survey 2, and ends with a view of the galaxy obtained by Hubble. Credit:NASA, ESA, Digitized Sky Survey 2. Acknowledgement: A. van der Hoeven
At almost double the size of the Milky Way, we now know it is a barred spiral galaxy. According to spectral analysis, Messier 77 has very broad emission lines, indicating that giant gas clouds are rapidly moving out of this galaxy’s core, at several hundreds of kilometers per second. This makes M77 a Seyfert Type II galaxy – one with an expanding core of starbirth. In itself, that’s quite unique considering the amount of energy needed to expand at that rate and further investigations found a 12 light-year diameter, point-like radio source at its core enveloped in a 100 light year swath of interstellar matter. A miniature quasar? Perhaps… But whatever it is has a measurement of 15 million solar masses!
Deep at its heart, Messier 77 is beating out huge amounts of radiation – radiation suspected to be from an intensely active black hole. Here the “galaxy stuff” is constantly being drawn towards the center, heating and lighting up the frequencies. Just this area alone can shine tens of thousands of times brighter than most galaxies… but is there anything else hiding there?
“Active galactic nuclei (AGNs) display many energetic phenomena—broad emission lines, X-rays, relativistic jets, radio lobes – originating from matter falling onto a supermassive black hole. It is widely accepted that orientation effects play a major role in explaining the observational appearance of AGNs.” says W. Jaffe (et al). “Seen from certain directions, circum-nuclear dust clouds would block our view of the central powerhouse. Indirect evidence suggests that the dust clouds form a parsec-sized torus-shaped distribution. This explanation, however, remains unproved, as even the largest telescopes have not been able to resolve the dust structures.”
Before you leave, look again. Clustered about Messier 77’s spiral arms are deep red pockets – a sign of newly forming stars. Inside the ruby regions, neophyte stars are ionising the gas. The dust lanes also appear crimson as well – a phenomenon called “reddening” – where the dust absorbs the blue light and highlights the ruddy color. A version of this image won second place in the Hubble’s Hidden Treasures Image Processing Competition, entered by contestant Andre van der Hoeven.
The Cassini spacecraft observes three of Saturn's moons set against the darkened night side of the planet. Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Anyone looking for miscellanies from the early days of the Solar System can likely find them all in one place: the Saturn system. A new analysis of data from the Cassini spacecraft suggests that Saturn’s moons and rings are “antiquities” from around the time of our Solar System’s very beginnings.
“Studying the Saturnian system helps us understand the chemical and physical evolution of our entire solar system,” said Cassini scientist Gianrico Filacchione, from Italy’s National Institute for Astrophysics. “We know now that understanding this evolution requires not just studying a single moon or ring, but piecing together the relationships intertwining these bodies.”
The rings, moons, moonlets, and other debris date back more than 4 billion years. They are from around the time that the planetary bodies in our neighborhood began to form out of the protoplanetary nebula, the cloud of material still orbiting the sun after its ignition as a star.
Data from Cassini’s visual and infrared mapping spectrometer (VIMS) have revealed how water ice and also colors — which are the signs of non-water and organic materials –are distributed throughout the Saturnian system. The spectrometer’s data in the visible part of the light spectrum show that coloring on the rings and moons generally is only skin-deep.
Using its infrared range, VIMS also detected abundant water ice – too much to have been deposited by comets or other recent means. So the authors deduce that the water ices must have formed around the time of the birth of the solar system, because Saturn orbits the sun beyond the so-called “snow line.” Out beyond the snow line, in the outer solar system where Saturn resides, the environment is conducive to preserving water ice, like a deep freezer. Inside the solar system’s “snow line,” the environment is much closer to the sun’s warm glow, and ices and other volatiles dissipate more easily.
The effects of the small moon Prometheus loom large on two of Saturn’s rings in this image taken a short time before Saturn’s August 2009 equinox. Credit: NASA
The colored patina on the ring particles and moons roughly corresponds to their location in the Saturn system. For Saturn’s inner ring particles and moons, water-ice spray from the geyser moon Enceladus has a whitewashing effect.
Farther out, the scientists found that the surfaces of Saturn’s moons generally were redder the farther they orbited from Saturn. Phoebe, one of Saturn’s outer moons and an object thought to originate in the far-off Kuiper Belt, seems to be shedding reddish dust that eventually rouges the surface of nearby moons, such as Hyperion and Iapetus.
A rain of meteoroids from outside the system appears to have turned some parts of the main ring system – notably the part of the main rings known as the B ring — a subtle reddish hue. Scientists think the reddish color could be oxidized iron — rust — or polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, which could be progenitors of more complex organic molecules.
One of the big surprises from this research was the similar reddish coloring of the potato-shaped moon Prometheus and nearby ring particles. Other moons in the area were more whitish.
“The similar reddish tint suggests that Prometheus is constructed from material in Saturn’s rings,” said co-author Bonnie Buratti, a VIMS team member based at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. “Scientists had been wondering whether ring particles could have stuck together to form moons — since the dominant theory was that the rings basically came from satellites being broken up. The coloring gives us some solid proof that it can work the other way around, too.”
“Observing the rings and moons with Cassini gives us an amazing bird’s-eye view of the intricate processes at work in the Saturn system, and perhaps in the evolution of planetary systems as well,” said Linda Spilker, Cassini project scientist, based at JPL. “What an object looks like and how it evolves depends a lot on location, location, location.”
Filacchione’s paper has been published in the Astrophysical Journal.
M 42 in Orion using the 'Hubble "Palette.' Images by Gary Gonnella, image editing by Paul M. Hutchinson.
The enormous cloud of dust and gas that makes up the Orion Nebula is featured in this beautiful astrophoto. This image was a joint effort, with images taken by Gary Gonnella – a regular on our Virtual Star Parties – and image editing by Paul Hutchinson. Paul used the “Hubble Palette” – named for the Hubble Space Telescope and its capability of imaging in very narrow wavelengths of light using various filters. This enables astrophotographs to reveal details of objects in space that can’t be seen by the human eye. Here, the filters used produced different colors: were Hydrogen Alpha=Green, S=Red, O=Blue. Paul said he combined two exposures, a 1 minute and 10 second exposure, to reduce the blow-out in the bright center of the nebula. The results are striking!
Compare this great image to another image of the Orion Nebula, recently taken by the WISE telescope (Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer), below. Colors in this image represents specific infrared wavelengths. Blue represents light emitted at 3.4-micron wavelengths and cyan (blue-green) represents 4.6 microns, both of which come mainly from hot stars. Relatively cooler objects, such as the dust of the nebulae, appear green and red. Green represents 12-micron light and red represents 22-micron light.
The Orion Nebula as seen by the WISE telescope. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA
The Orion nebula is part of the larger Orion molecular cloud complex, which also includes the Flame nebula. This region is actively making new stars.
Want to get your astrophoto featured on Universe Today? Join our Flickr group or send us your images by email (this means you’re giving us permission to post them). Please explain what’s in the picture, when you took it, the equipment you used, etc.
Mercury's southern polar region as seen from MESSENGER. (Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins UniversityApplied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington).
Move over, Tolkien & Tryggvadóttir. Yesterday, an announcement was made that the International Astronomical Union (IAU) approved proposed names for nine new craters on the planet Mercury. The names honor deceased writers, artists and musicians following the convention established by the IAU for naming features on the innermost world.
The announcement comes as NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft has completed mapping of the surface of Mercury earlier this month. A good majority of these features were established at Mercury’s southern polar region, one of the last areas of the planet to be mapped by MESSENGER.
The craters honored with a newly assigned moniker are:
Donelaitis, named after 18th century Lithuanian poet Kristijonas Donelaitis, author of The Seasons and other tales and fables.
Petofi, named after 19th century Hungarian poet Sandor Petofi, who wrote Nemzeti dal which inspired the Hungarian Revolution of 1848.
Roerich, named after early 20th century Russian philosopher and artist Nicholas Roerich, who created the Roerich Pact of 1935 which asserted the neutrality of scientific, cultural and educational institutions during time of war.
Hurley, named after the 20th century Australian photographer James Francis Hurley, who traveled to Antarctica and served with Australian forces in both World Wars.
Lovecraft, named after 20th century American author H.P. Lovecraft, a pioneer in horror, fantasy and science fiction.
Alver, named after 20th century Estonian author Betti Alver who wrote the 1927 novel Mistress in the Wind.
Flaiano, named after 20th century Italian novelist and screenwriter Ennio Flaiano who was a pioneer Italian cinema and contemporary of Federico Fellini.
Pahinui, named after mid-20th century Hawaiian musician Charles Phillip Kahahawai Pahinui, influential slack-key guitar player and part of the “Hawaiian Renaissance” of island culture in the 1970’s.
L’Engle, named after American author Madeleine L’Engle, who wrote the young adult novels An Acceptable Time, A Swiftly Tilting Planet & A Wind in the Door. L’Engle passed away in 2007.
Five of the newly named craters in the south pole region of Mercury (circled in red). Note that the final portion of the USGS map, although recently released, has yet to be filled in! (Credit: USGS).
The nine new crater names join 95 others named thus far. The MESSENGER surface mapping campaign has been ongoing since the spacecraft’s first flyby of Mercury in January 2008. MESSENGER entered permanent orbit around world on March 18th, 2011.
MESSENGER missions operations engineer Ray Espiritu was instrumental in getting Pahinui’s name in the running.
“I wanted to honor the place where I grew up and still call home,” Espiritu said. ”The Pahinui crater contains a possible volcanic vent, and its name may inspire other scientists as they investigate the volcanic processes that helped to create Mercury, just as investigation of the Hawaiian volcanoes helps us understand the volcanic processes that shape Earth as we know it today.”
Pahinui Crater. (Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington).
Lovecraft is another interesting selection on the list. The name of the famous horror writer was in the running last month for the naming of Pluto’s moons P4 & P5, and New Horizons principle investigator Alan Stern hinted that Lovecraft may still find a home on a surface feature as New Horizons reveals Pluto & Charon in July 2015. It would be a fitting tribute to a fine writer. Could we end up with Lovecraft marking not only the solar system’s “hubs of hell” on Mercury, but its frozen outer wastelands as well?
There was more news yesterday in the realm of astrogeology and the planet Mercury. The IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature also made the distinction between features described as valles and catenaeon the surface of Mercury. Catenae are described as crater chains, and MESSENGER has sufficient resolution that several valles have been revealed as such. Catenae on Mercury are named after radio astronomy observatories, while valles are named after abandoned cities of antiquity. Thus, Haystack Vallis is now Haystack Catena, Goldstone Vallis is now Goldstone Catena, and Arecibo Vallis is now Arecibo Catena, and, well, you get the idea.
Arecibo Catenae (formerly known as Arecibo Vallis) as imaged by MESSENGER in 2008. (Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington).
MESSENGER has proven to be a boon for planetary science. The spacecraft was launched in 2004 and took almost 7 years and 6 flyby assists (one past the Earth, two past Venus and three past Mercury) to become the first spacecraft to orbit the tiniest planet in our solar system. Mercury was first seen up close by Mariner 10 in 1974 and even then we only mapped 45% of its surface. Scientists had to wait until MESSENGER to fill in the remainder of Mercury’s map.
The next mission to Mercury isn’t until the planned arrival of the joint ESA/JAXA BepiColombo mission in 2022.
And don’t forget to watch for Mercury as it reaches greatest elongation on Easter Day low in the dawn sky. I managed to catch sight of it low to the east with binoculars for the first time this apparition this morning about 40 minutes prior to local sunrise. It’s amazing to think that ground-based professional telescopes & even amateur astronomers can actually image fuzzy details on the planet’s surface that match up with what MESSENGER is revealing!
All fascinating stuff to contemplate as we welcome the newest named craters to our ever expanding map of Mercury… now, will there ever be a Miskatonic University within the walls of Lovecraft crater?
Chris Hadfield all dressed up for another day in space. Credit: Chris Hadfield (Twitter)
Chris Hadfield — the ever-tweeting, always charming Canadian running the space station these days — has had an eventful few months in space. If he’s not chatting with Captain Kirk, he’s playing guitar or, as it turns out, making very watchable videos.
Being on television requires a certain flair. You need to talk in sound bites, cultivate a charismatic presence, and keep the action moving enough so people don’t flip the channel. For an astronaut, who usually works methodically, carefully and slowly, working on television must be fully alien (pun intended) to how one does the technical parts of the job.
But Hadfield — who knows how to study a situation and make the most of it — has created videos with hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube. Whatever he’s doing is working.
Universe Today checked up on Hadfield’s secrets to success by watching the most popular videos in a playlist curated by the Canadian Space Agency. Here are the top five. Strangely, the last one doesn’t even include Hadfield’s face or voice.
5) Chris Hadfield Talks with the Queen’s Representative in Canada
If you’re all about cute questions from kids, or enjoy a brush with royalty, this lengthy press conference with Hadfield is very interesting. This is a bit of a marathon charm session on Hadfield’s part, but he pulls it off with his charismatic aplomb. One of the best answers demonstrates what he’s learned about weightless life: “I can fly. I can go in different directions,” Hadfield says enthusiastically, spinning before the camera.
4) Chris Hadfield Demonstrates How Astronauts Wash Their Hands in Zero G
For a question that came out of a routine Q&A with kids, Hadfield’s performance is pretty good. He demonstrates that soapy water looks like some sort of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles-like ooze in space, and compares life on the space station to life on a sailboat, all while simply washing his hands. It’s almost existential.
3) Nail Clipping in Space
It turns out that Hadfield chooses to cut his nails because long ones interfere with his guitar playing. We wouldn’t want that to happen (and neither would the Barenaked Ladies), so fortunately Hadfield gets right on the problem, positions himself over an air vent and trims them with an ordinary nail clipper. Charmingly, this was not fully scripted, as he makes a mistake with the first clipping.
2) Chris Hadfield’s Space Kitchen (aka how to make a peanut butter sandwich in space)
With words you’d never hear on Martha Stewart — “We’ve got one tortilla. Oh, got away!” — Hadfield slathers condiments on to a tortilla and eats it. His sense of humor helps break up a very routine act; we’d be scared to be one of his kids after seeing the stern way in which he says, “Disinfectant wipe!”
1) Mixed Nuts in Space
This video is oddly mesmerizing, and that’s not just because of the UFO-type music near the beginning. It’s quite a simple setup: Hadfield shoots a bunch of nuts floating around inside of a can. But face it, it looks awfully weird for those of us used to grabbing similar packages off the kitchen shelf. Maybe that’s why this video has more than 4 million views.
