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 …
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 …
Camelopardalis. It’s a strange-sounding name for a constellation, coming from the Greco-Roman word for giraffe, or “camel leopard”. The October Camelopardalids are a collection of faint stars that have no mythology associated with them — in fact, they didn’t begin to appear on star charts until the 17th century. Even experienced amateur astronomers are hard-pressed …
The skies were clear over New Mexico last night — Oct. 6, 2010 — so Rhiannon Blaauw of NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office, Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Ala., captured this image of Comet Hartley 2 at a distance of “only” about 14 million miles from Earth.Hartley 2 has passed out of the constellation Cassiopeia and …
In this image taken on the evening of Friday, Oct. 1, Comet Hartley 2 can be seen in the constellation Cassiopeia (north-east sky, not far from horizon). Hartley 2 will only be in Cassiopeia for a few more day before traveling through the constellation Perseus. It’s a Jupiter Family Comet that we can’t see right now because it’s too tiny at …
It was brief, but it was brilliant! On Saturday, Oct. 2, 2010 at approximately 8:50 p.m. CDT, cameras operated by NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., recorded a slow moving fireball moving from the north to the southwest. Enhanced-color image of Alabama fireball meteor. The fireball was moving approximately 35,300 mph (15.8 …
