The first total lunar eclipse in two years will grace the sky the night of Monday, Dec. 20, and we want you to be there. Sure, it’s a school night, but with winter solstice and a new year upon us, what better time to gather your family and friends to see the moon in a …
Things are getting a little stranger in the asteroid belt these days! Objects in this zone of the solar system are known to be rocky bodies, though in the past few years several of these bodies have had cometary features detected. One such body is 596 Scheila, which has always been confidently called a main-belt …
Baby, it’s cold outside — but you can still enjoy the best meteor shower of the year. The 2010 Geminid meteor shower promises to be lively, with realistic viewing rates of 50-80 meteors per hour and potential peaks reaching 120 meteors per hour. Anytime between Dec. 12-16 is a valid window for Geminid-watching, but the …
Last night the NASA All-sky Meteor cameras detected their first Geminid fireball of 2010! The fireball, detected from cameras positioned in both Huntsville, Ala., and Chickamauga, Ga., was first spotted over southern Tennessee at a height of 58.7 miles above the ground. It streaked across the sky over northern Alabama at a speed of 76,300 …
The animation below shows the motion of Comet Ikeya-Murakami on Nov. 13, 2010, captured with a New Mexico-based telescope operated remotely by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. The images were taken near dawn and show the comet’s movement over a period of 45 minutes. Each exposure was three minutes in length, and the faint angled streak …
One of my (many) pet peeves in data visualization is vertical exaggeration. For example, here’s a 3D rendered view (from the south looking north) of Mount Etna: Compared to the real thing, photographed from the International Space Station (from the north looking south): The 3D view is scaled so the volcano appears much higher than […]
In the process of writing captions I can run into some amazing stuff, like this photo of incandescent rocks arcing through the sky during the collapse of a lava bench near Kilauea.
Despite the fullness of the moon, the all-sky meteor camera at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., managed to detect a decent number of Orionid meteors this October — 41 in total! Thesemeteors, produced by debris from Halley’s Comet, travel at 146,000miles per hour and burn up high in the atmosphere. Most Orionids werefirst detected …
Using the Marshall Space Flight Center 0.5 meter telescope in New Mexico, NASA astronomer Rob Suggs captured this view of the tiny asteroid 2010 TG19 as it made its way among the stars of the constellation Pegasus. Taken before sunup on Oct. 15, the animated sequence shows the movement of the asteroid, then 4.25 million miles away from …
MSFC astronomer Bill Cooke took this five-minute exposure of Comet Hartley 2 late on the night of Saturday, Oct. 16, 2010, using a 10″ telescope in New Mexico. The comet, which has now reached naked eye visibility, was just under 11.5 million miles from Earth and sporting a coma over a degree across — twice the size of the …
