A panoramic view of the Venus Jupiter Conjunction on August 17, 2014, taken from the Cairns Esplanade in Queensland Australia. Credit and copyright: Joseph Brimacombe.
The closest planetary conjunction of the year graced the skies this morning, and astrophotographers were out in force to marvel at the beauty. The duo were just 11.9’ apart, less than half the diameter of a Full Moon. Also joining the view was M44, the Beehive Cluster. We start with this gorgeous shot from Queensland, Australia by one of our longtime favorite astrophotographers, Joseph Brimacombe.
But wait… there’s more! Much more! See below:
The Jupiter and Venus conjunction on August 18, 2014 along with the Beehive Cluster. Credit and copyright: Tom Wildoner.Telescopic view of Venus and Jupiter in the morning sky over Lahore, Pakistan. Shot with a Nikon D5100. Credit and copyright: Roshaan Bukhari.Beautiful conjunction of Jupiter and Venus over the Appennines on August 18, 2014. The foreground in the image shows the Peligna Valley in central Italy and the city of Sulmona. Credit and copyright: Giuseppe PetriccaJupiter-Venus-M44 conjunction on August 18, 2014. Image taken with Canon EOS 50D, through Skywatcher ED80. Credit and copyright: Zoran Novak.Close approach of Venus and Jupiter with M44 in the same field on August 18, 2014 over Payson, Arizona. Shot with a Canon XTi DSLR, 5 seconds exposure, ISO 400, 4″ f/4.5 Newtonian. Credit and copyright: Chris Schur.Conjunction between the planets Venus(top) and Jupiter (bottom) as seen from London just before dawn on 18th August 2014. Credit and copyright: Roger Hutchinson.Tight grouping of Venus and Jupiter, captured at twilight on an 18 day old moon, one can see the two planets less than 1 degree apart in the sky. This image was captured at Damdama Lake, Haryana, India. Credit and copyright: Rishabh Jain. When Venus and Jupiter were almost touching in the sky! August 18, 2014 over Königswinter-Heisterbacherrott in Germany. Credit and copyright: Daniel Fischer.Venus and Jupiter 1/2 degree apart low in the pink twilight at lower left, with the waning crescent Moon near Aldebaran at upper right, taken from Alberta Canada on August 18, 2014 at dawn, looking due east. This is a single 1 second exposure at f/4 with the 16-35mm lens and Canon 6D at ISO 800. Credit and copyright: Alan Dyer/Amazing Sky Photography.Venus-Saturn conjunction on August 18, 2014, as see from Topaz Lake on the California – Nevada border. Credit and copyright: Jeff Sullivan/Jeff Sullivan Photography.A sample of four images in various locations/moments at Pescara, Italy. Credit and copyright: Marco Di Lorenzo.
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Jupiter is like a jawbreaker. Dig down beneath the swirling clouds and you’ll pass through layer after layer of exotic forms of hydrogen. What’s down there, deep within Jupiter?
What’s inside Jupiter? Is it chameleons? Candy? Cake? Cheddar? Chemtrails? No one knows. No one can ever know.
Well, that’s not entirely true… or even remotely true. Jupiter is the largest planet in the Solar System and two and a half times the mass of the other planets combined. It’s a gas giant, like Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. It’s almost 90% hydrogen and 10% helium, and then other trace materials, like methane, ammonia, water and some other stuff. What would be a gas on Earth behaves in very strange ways under Jupiter’s massive pressure and temperatures.
So what’s deep down inside Jupiter? What are the various layers and levels, and can I keep thinking of it like a jawbreaker? At the very center of Jupiter is its dense core. Astronomers aren’t sure if there’s a rocky region deep down inside. It’s actually possible that there’s twelve to forty five Earth masses of rocky material within the planet’s core. Now this could be rock, or hydrogen and helium under such enormous forces that it just acts that way. But you couldn’t stand on it. The temperatures are 35,000 degrees C. The pressures are incomprehensible.
Surrounding the core is a vast region made up of hydrogen. But it’s not a gas. The pressure and temperature transforms the hydrogen into an exotic form of liquid metallic hydrogen, similar to the liquid mercury you’d see in a thermometer. This metallic hydrogen region turns inside the planet, and acts like an electric dynamo. Similar to our planet’s own iron core, this gives the planet a powerful magnetic field.
The next level up is still liquid hydrogen, but the pressure’s lower, so it’s not metallic any more. And then above this is the planet’s atmosphere. The upper layers of Jupiter’s atmosphere is the only part we can see. Those bands on the planet are clouds of ammonia that rotate around the planet in alternating directions. The lighter color zones are colder ammonia ice upwelling from below. Here’s the exciting part. Astronomers aren’t sure what the darker regions are.
This animated gif shows Voyager 1’s approach to Jupiter during a period of over 60 Jupiter days in 1979. Credit: NASA.
Still think you want to descend into Jupiter, to try and walk on its rocky interior? NASA tried that. In order to protect Jupiter’s moons from contamination, NASA decided to crash the Galileo spacecraft into the planet at the end of its mission. It only got point two percent of the way down through Jupiter’s radius before it was completely destroyed.
Jupiter is a remarkably different world from our own. With all that gravity, normally lightweight hydrogen behaves in completely exotic ways. Hopefully in the future we’ll learn more about this amazing planet we share our Solar System with.
What do you think? Is there a rocky core deep down inside Jupiter?
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Europa's icy, cracked surface imaged by NASA's Galileo spacecraft Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SETI Institute
Eureka – it’s Europa! And a brand-new image of it, too! (Well, kinda sorta.)
The picture above, showing the icy moon’s creased and cracked surface, was made from images acquired by NASA’s Galileo spacecraft during its exploration of Jupiter and its family of moons in 1997 and 1998. While the data itself isn’t new per se the view seen here has never been released by JPL, and so it’s new to you! (And to me too.)
Europa’s bizarre surface features suggest an actively churning ice shell above a salty liquid water ocean. Credit: JPL
The original high-resolution images were acquired on Nov. 6, 1997, in greyscale and colorized with data acquired during a later pass by Galileo in 1998. The whiter areas are regions of relatively pure water ice, while the rusty red bands are where ice has mixed with salts and organic compounds that have oozed up from deeper within Europa.
The entire image area measures about 101 by 103 miles across (163 km x 167 km).
Europa has long been one of the few places we know of outside our own planet where life could very well have evolved and potentially still exist. Getting a peek below the icy moon’s frozen crust — or even a taste of the recently-discovered water vapor spraying from its south pole — is all we’d need to further narrow down the chances that somewhere, something could be thriving in Europa’s subsurface seas. Get a planetary scientist’s perspective in a video interview with Dr. Mike Brown here.
Launched in October 1989, the Galileo spacecraft arrived at Jupiter in December 1995. Through primary and extended missions Galileo explored the giant planet and its family of moons until plunging into Jupiter’s atmosphere on September 21, 2003. Learn more about Galileo here, and check out some of the amazing images it acquired on the CICLOPS imaging diary page here.
Have you ever noticed that everything in space is a sphere? The Sun, the Earth, the Moon and the other planets and their moons… all spheres. Except for the stuff which isn’t spheres. What’s going on?
Have you noticed that a good portion of things in space are shaped like a sphere? Stars, planets, and moons are all spherical.
Why? It all comes down to gravity. All the atoms in an object pull towards a common center of gravity, and they’re resisted outwards by whatever force is holding them apart. The final result could be a sphere… but not always, as we’re about to learn.
Consider a glass of water. If you could see the individual molecules jostling around, you’d see them trying to fit in as snugly as they can, tension making the top of the water smooth and even.
Imagine a planet made entirely of water. If there were no winds, it would be perfectly smooth. The water molecules on the north pole are pulling towards the molecules on the south pole. The ones on the left are pulling towards the right. With all points pulling towards the center of the mass you would get a perfect sphere.
Gravity and surface tension pull it in, and molecular forces are pushing it outward. If you could hold this massive water droplet in an environment where it would remain undisturbed, eventually the water would reach a perfect balance. This is known as “hydrostatic equilibrium”.
Stars, planets and moons can be made of gas, ice or rock. Get enough mass in one area, and it’s going to pull all that stuff into a roughly spherical shape. Less massive objects, such as asteroids, comets, and smaller moons have less gravity, so they may not pull into perfect spheres.
Jupiter Credit: Christopher Go
As you know, most of the celestial bodies we’ve mentioned rotate on an axis, and guess what, those ones aren’t actually spheres either. The rapid rotation flattens out the middle, and makes them wider across the equator than from pole to pole. Earth is perfect example of this, and we call its shape an oblate spheroid.
Jupiter is even more flattened because it spins more rapidly. A day on Jupiter is a short 9.9 hours long. Which leaves it a distorted imperfect sphere at 71,500 km across the equator and just 66,900 from pole to pole.
Stars are similar. Our Sun rotates slowly, so it’s almost a perfect sphere, but there are stars out there that spin very, very quickly. VFTS 102, a giant star in the Tarantula nebula is spinning 100 times faster than the Sun. Any faster and it would tear itself apart from centripetal forces.
This oblate spheroid shape helps indicate why there are lots of flattened disks out there. This rapid spinning, where centripetal forces overcome gravitational attraction that creates this shape. You can see it in black hole accretion disks, solar systems, and galaxies.
Objects tend to form into spheres. If they’re massive enough, they’ll overcome the forces preventing it. But… if they’re spinning rapidly enough, they’ll flatten out all the way into disks.
This animated gif shows Voyager 1's approach to Jupiter during a period of over 60 Jupiter days in 1979. Credit: NASA.
Back in the 1970’s when NASA launched the two Voyager spacecraft to Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, I remember being mesmerized by a movie created from Voyager 1 images of the movement of the clouds in Jupiter’s atmosphere. Voyager 1 began taking pictures of Jupiter as it approached the planet in January 1979 and completed its Jupiter encounter in early April. During that time it took almost 19,000 pictures and many other scientific measurements to create the short movie, which you can see below, showing the intricate movement of the bright band of clouds for the first time.
Now, 35 years later a group of seven Swedish amateur astronomers achieved their goal of replicating the Voyager 1 footage, not with another flyby but with images taken with their own ground-based telescopes.
“We started this joint project back in December of 2013 to redo the NASA Voyager 1 flyby of Jupiter,” amatuer astronomer Göran Strand told Universe Today. “During 90 days we captured 560 still images of Jupiter and turned them into 90 complete maps that covered the whole of Jupiter’s surface.”
Their newly released film, above details the work they did and the hurdles they overcame (including incredibly bad weather in Sweden this winter) to make their dream a reality. They called their project “Voyager 3.”
Animated gif of the ‘Voyager 3’ team re-enactment of the Voyager 1 flyby. Credit: Voyager 3 team, via Kristoffer Åberg.It is really an astonishing project and those of you who do image processing will appreciate the info in the video about the tools they used and how they did their processing to create this video.
The seven Swedish astronomers who participated in the Voyager 3 project are (from left to right in the photo below) Daniel Sundström, Torbjörn Holmqvist, Peter Rosén (the project initiator), Göran Strand, Johan Warell and his daughter Noomi, Martin Högberg and Roger Utas.
The Swedish team of amateur astronomers who compiled the ‘Voyager 3’ project. Image courtesy Peter Rosén.
NASA's Curiosity Mars rover has caught the first image of asteroids taken from the surface of Mars. The image includes two asteroids, Ceres and Vesta. This version includes Mars' moon Deimos in a circular, exposure-adjusted inset and square insets at left from other observations the same night. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS/Texas A&M
NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover has caught the first image of asteroids taken from the surface of Mars on April 20, 2014. The image includes two asteroids, Ceres and Vesta. This version includes Mars’ moon Deimos in a circular, exposure-adjusted inset and square insets at left from other observations the same night. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS/Texas A&M
More night sky views and surface mosaics below[/caption]
The Curiosity rover has captured the first images of asteroids even taken by a Human probe from the alien surface of the Red Planet during night sky imaging.
And it’s not just one asteroid, but two asteroids caught in the same night time pointing on the Red Planet. Namely, asteroids Ceres and Vesta.
The stupendous image – seen above – was snapped by Curiosity’s high resolution Mastcam camera earlier this week on Sunday, April 20, 2014, Sol 606, whilst she was scanning about during daylight for her next drilling target at “The Kimberley” waypoint she pulled into at the start of this month.
Ceres and Vesta appear as streaks since the Mastcam image was taken as a 12 second time exposure.
“This imaging was part of an experiment checking the opacity of the atmosphere at night in Curiosity’s location on Mars, where water-ice clouds and hazes develop during this season,” said camera team member Mark Lemmon of Texas A&M University, College Station, in a statement.
“The two Martian moons were the main targets that night, but we chose a time when one of the moons was near Ceres and Vesta in the sky.”
View our “Kimberley” region photo mosiacs below to see exactly from where the six wheeled robot took the asteroid image shown above, while driving around the base of “Mount Remarkable”.
And those two asteroids are extra special because not only are they the two most massive objects in the Main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, but they are also the destinations of another superlative NASA unmanned mission – Dawn.
Curiosity Mars rover captured this panoramic view of a butte called “Mount Remarkable” and surrounding outcrops at “The Kimberley ” waypoint on April 11, 2014, Sol 597. Colorized navcam photomosaic was stitched by Marco Di Lorenzo and Ken Kremer. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Marco Di Lorenzo/Ken Kremer – kenkremer.com
The exotic Dawn probe, propelled by a stream of ions, orbited Vesta for a year in 2011 and is now approaching Ceres for an exciting orbital mission in 2015.
Ceres, the largest asteroid, is about 590 miles (950 kilometers) in diameter. Vesta is the third-largest object in the main belt and measures about 350 miles (563 kilometers) wide.
And as if Curiosity’s mouthwatering and heavenly double asteroid gaze wasn’t already spectacular enough, the tinier of Mars’ moons, Deimos, was also caught in that same image.
A trio of star trails is also seen, again due to the 12 second time exposure time.
Furthermore, Mars largest moon Phobos as well as massive planets Jupiter and Saturn were also visible that same Martian evening, albeit in a different pointing.
These celestial objects are all combined in the composite image above.
“The background is detector noise, limiting what we can see to magnitude 6 or 7, much like normal human eyesight. The two asteroids and three stars would be visible to someone of normal eyesight standing on Mars. Specks are effects of cosmic rays striking the camera’s light detector,” says NASA.
An unannotated image is seen below.
NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover has caught the first image of asteroids taken from the surface of Mars. The image includes two asteroids, Ceres and Vesta. In this unannotated version of the 12-second-exposure image, the brightness of Deimos at lower right saturates the image, making the moon appear overly large. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS/Texas A&M
Curiosity’s makers back on Earth are nowhere to be seen. But check out the Curiosity’s earlier photo below of the Earth and Moon from my prior article – here.
To date, Curiosity’s odometer totals 3.8 miles (6.1 kilometers) since landing inside Gale Crater on Mars in August 2012. She has taken over 143,000 images.
The sedimentary foothills of Mount Sharp, which reaches 3.4 miles (5.5 km) into the Martian sky, is the 1 ton robots ultimate destination inside Gale Crater because it holds caches of water altered minerals. Such minerals could possibly indicate locations that sustained potential Martian life forms, past or present, if they ever existed. Martian landscape with rows of curved rock outcrops at ‘Kimberly’ in the foreground and spectacular Mount Sharp on the horizon. NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover pulled into Kimberly waypoint dominated by layered rock outcrops as likely drilling site. This colorized navcam camera photomosaic was assembled from imagery taken on Sol 576 (Mar. 20, 2014). Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Marco Di Lorenzo/Ken Kremer-kenkremer.com
Curiosity has some 4 kilometers to go to reach the base of Mount Sharp sometime later this year.
Stay tuned here for Ken’s continuing Curiosity, Opportunity, Chang’e-3, SpaceX, Orbital Sciences, LADEE, MAVEN, MOM, Mars and more planetary and human spaceflight news.
You are here! – As an Evening Star in the Martian Sky
This evening-sky view taken by NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity shows the Earth and Earth’s moon as seen on Jan. 31, 2014, or Sol 529 shortly after sunset at the Dingo Gap inside Gale Crater. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS/TAMUMars rock rows and Mount Sharp. Martian landscape scene with rows of striated rocks in the foreground and Mount Sharp on the horizon. NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover paused mid drive at the Junda outcrop to snap the component images for this navcam camera photomosaic on Sol 548 (Feb. 19, 2014) and then continued traveling southwards towards mountain base. UHF Antenna at right. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Marco Di Lorenzo/Ken Kremer-kenkremer.com
