Mount Washington Valley Astronomy | Astronomy, Science & Space

Astronomy Sky Calendar – May 2012

Sky Watch for May 2012 Mercury– will be tough to observe this month. It will be very low in the morning twilight. Mercury will sink into the Sun’s glare by midmonth. It will be in conjunction with the Sun on the 27th.For the latest images and other details, see: http://messenger.jhuapl.edu/ Venus– will be high in the southwestern sky just after sunset early in the month. It will be blazing at magnitude -4.7 early in the month. After being higher than usual in the sky for a few months it will sink rapidly. As this happens its disk will grow...

A Martian dust devil roughly 12 miles (20 kilometers) high was captured winding its way along the Amazonis Planitia region of Northern Mars on March 14, 2012 by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Despite its height, the plume is little more than three-quarters of a football field wide (70 yards, or 70 meters). Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UA

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has now spotted a gigantic Martian dust devil roughly 20 kilometers (12 miles) high, churning through the Amazonis Planitia region of northern Mars. The HiRISE camera (High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment) captured the event on March 14, 2012. Scientists say that despite its height, the plume is just 70 meters (70 yards) wide. The image was taken during late northern spring, two weeks short of the northern summer solstice, a time when the ground in the northern mid-latitudes is being heated most strongly by the sun. NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter captured imagery of a Red...

Sky Watch for April 2012 Mercury– will be tough to observe this month. It will be very low in the morning twilight glare. This month it will be at its best on the 18th when it will be at the furthest angle from the Sun. Even though it will be shinning at magnitude 0.3, it will be tough to pick out of the pre sunrise glare. For the latest images and other details, see: http://messenger.jhuapl.edu/ Venus– will be high in the southwestern sky just after sunset all month. It will be blazing at magnitude -4.6 by midmonth and hard...

Venus, Jupiter and the Pleiades April 3, 2012

As the bright planets Venus and Jupiter go their own separate ways Venus continues to grow ever-brighter as the northern spring evenings warm up hovering in the west-northwest sky high above the setting sun. Venus is will continue its celestial display as it passes near the well-known Pleiades (M45) star cluster in the western sky on Tuesday April 3, 2012. There is nothing else like the Pleiades star cluster in the sky. Greek mythology calls the Pleiades the Seven Sisters, the daughters of Atlas and Pleione. Atlas, rebelled against Zeus, the king of the gods, who retaliated by sentencing...

Light reflected from a planet carries the 'fingerprint' of its atmospheric composition.

NASA’s Kepler spacecraft is discovering a veritable avalanche of alien worlds. Recent finds include planets with double suns, massive “super-Earths” and “hot Jupiters,” and a miniature solar system. The variety of planets circling distant suns is as wonderful as it is surprising. As the numbers mount, it seems to be just a matter of time before Kepler finds what astronomers are really looking for: an Earth-like planet orbiting its star in the “Goldilocks zone”—that is, at just the right distance for liquid water and life. “I believe Kepler will find a ‘Goldilocks planet’ within the next two years,” says...

Do underground oceans vent through the tiger stripes on Saturn's moon Enceladus? Long features dubbed tiger stripes are known to be spewing ice from the moon's icy interior into space, creating a cloud of fine ice particles over the moon's South Pole and creating Saturn's mysterious E-ring.

In a series of tantalizingly close flybys to the moon, named “Enceladus,” NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has revealed watery jets erupting from what may be a vast underground sea. These jets, which spew through cracks in the moon’s icy shell, could lead back to a habitable zone that is uniquely accessible in all the solar system. “More than 90 jets of all sizes near Enceladus’s south pole are spraying water vapor, icy particles, and organic compounds all over the place,” says Carolyn Porco, an award-winning planetary scientist and leader of the Imaging Science team for NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. “Cassini has...