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Emission Nebula Sh2-64 in Serpens | Schulman Telescope
Sh2-64 is a star-forming region in the Milky Way galaxy located in the constellation Serpens. In this region, interstellar gas, forming a diffuse nebula, surrounds a cluster of several hundred new-born stars.
Distance: 1,400 light years
Technical Details:
Optics: Schulman 32-inch RCOS Telescope
Camera: SBIG STX16803
The 0.81 m (32 in) Schulman Telescope is a Ritchey-Chrétien reflector built by RC Optical Systems and installed in 2010. It is operated by the Mount Lemmon SkyCenter and is Arizona's largest dedicated public observatory. The Schulman Telescope was designed from inception for remote control over the Internet by amateur and professional astrophotographers worldwide. It is currently the world's largest telescope dedicated for this purpose.
Image Credit & Copyright: Adam Block/Mount Lemmon SkyCenter/University of Arizona
Newly Detected Comet C/2023 P1 (Nishimura): Tails Growing Near Sun
Comet Nishimura is expanding. More precisely, the tails of comet C/2023 P1 (Nishimura) are growing as it nears the Sun. Discovered in August 2023, the comet is already near naked eye brightness as it now moves inside the Earth's orbit. The comet will be nearest the Earth next week, but nearest the Sun the week after—on September 17, 2023. Speculation holds that expelled ice and dust from Comet Nishimura's last visit to the inner Solar System may have created the Sigma Hydrids meteor shower which peaks yearly in December. If so, then this meteor shower may become more active, refreshed with new comet debris.
This image of Comet Nishimura was captured from Edgewood, New Mexico, USA four nights ago, showing a long ion tail structured by interactions with the solar wind. The solar wind is a stream of charged particles released from the upper atmosphere of the Sun, called the corona.
Look for this comet near your eastern horizon just before sunrise for the next few mornings, but very near your western horizon just after sunset next week—as its coma continues to brighten and its tails continue to grow.
C/2023 P1 (Nishimura) is a long-period comet discovered by Hideo Nishimura on Aug. 12, 2023. With an observation arc of seven months, the orbital period of the comet is estimated to be 434 years. An eccentricity of 0.996 gives the comet a semi-major axis (average distance from the Sun) of about 57 astronomical units (AU), which is comparable to the average distance of Eris at 68 AU. The comet will not leave the Solar System and will come to aphelion (farthest distance from the Sun) in the year 2227.
1 astronomical unit (AU) = equal to 150 million kilometers (93 million miles) or 8.3 light-minutes
An astronomical unit is a unit of length, roughly the distance from Earth to the Sun.
Japanese amateur astronomer Hideo Nishimura discovered the comet in images he obtained using a 200-mm f/3 telephoto lens mounted on a Canon EOS 6D on Aug. 12, 2023, when the comet was 1 AU from the Sun.
Esto es lo que necesitas saber sobre Encélado | NASA en Español
Bajo su superficie helada, la luna de Saturno Encélado esconde muchas sorpresas: un depósito de agua líquida, compuestos químicos orgánicos y fuentes hidrotermales. Descubre lo que necesitas saber sobre Encélado, un mundo oceánico que podría presentar condiciones favorables para la vida.
NASA's Michoud Assembly Facility in Louisiana: Supporting Human Spaceflight
On September 7, 1961, NASA named the Michoud Assembly Facility (MAF) to be the sole manufacturing plant for building human space flight vehicles. This year MAF is responsible for producing space flight hardware for Apollo, Shuttle, and now Artemis. Throughout the years, MAF has endured several natural disasters which tested their resiliency—a test they continue to pass time and time again.
Credit: NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC)
NASA's SpaceX Crew-6 Mission Safely Returns to Earth | This Week @NASA
NASA's SpaceX Crew-6 mission safely returns to Earth, the tech demo hitching a ride on NASA's Psyche spacecraft, and studying ancient life on Earth to better understand Mars . . . a few of the stories to tell you about—This Week at NASA!
Credit: National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)
A Storm Brewing in the Indian Ocean | International Space Station
A storm is seen in the Indian Ocean from the International Space Station as it orbited 259 miles above nearing the coast of the Indonesian island of Sumatra.
An international partnership of space agencies provides and operates the elements of the International Space Station (ISS). The principals are the space agencies of the United States, Russia, Europe, Japan, and Canada. The ISS has been the most politically complex space exploration program ever undertaken.
Astronauts Moghbeli & Rubio Talk to Georgia Students | International Space Station
Aboard the International Space Station, Expedition 69 Flight Engineers Frank Rubio and Jasmin Moghbeli of NASA answered pre-recorded questions about life and work on the orbiting laboratory during an in-flight event Sept. 7, 2023, with students at Dames Ferry Elementary School in Gray, Georgia. Rubio and Moghbeli are in the midst of science missions living and working aboard the microgravity laboratory to advance scientific knowledge and demonstrate new technologies. Such research benefits people on Earth and lays the groundwork for future human exploration through the agency’s Artemis missions, which will send astronauts to the Moon to prepare for future expeditions to Mars.
NASA Astronaut Jasmin Moghbeli Official NASA Biography:
An international partnership of space agencies provides and operates the elements of the International Space Station (ISS). The principals are the space agencies of the United States, Russia, Europe, Japan, and Canada. The ISS has been the most politically complex space exploration program ever undertaken.
Virgin Galactic Completes Second Private Astronaut Flight: Galactic 03
Virgin Galactic announced the completion of its second private astronaut flight, ‘Galactic 03.’ on Sept. 8, 2023. The mission flew three of Virgin Galactic’s first customers.
‘Galactic 03’ was Virgin Galactic’s fourth successful spaceflight in the past four months, and the third flight of Virgin Galactic’s inaugural commercial spaceflight season. The flight followed the Company’s first research mission in June 2023 and first private astronaut mission in August.
Onboard Galactic 03:
Astronaut 014 Ken Baxter from the United States of America
Astronaut 015 Timothy Nash from South Africa
Astronaut 016 Adrian Reynard from the United Kingdom
Spaceship VSS Unity was piloted by Commander Nicola Pecile and Pilot Michael Masucci; Chief Astronaut Instructor Beth Moses was also on board. Mothership VMS Eve was piloted by Commander Jameel Janjua and Pilot Kelly Latimer.
An international partnership of space agencies provides and operates the elements of the International Space Station (ISS). The principals are the space agencies of the United States, Russia, Europe, Japan, and Canada. The ISS has been the most politically complex space exploration program ever undertaken.
An international partnership of space agencies provides and operates the elements of the International Space Station (ISS). The principals are the space agencies of the United States, Russia, Europe, Japan, and Canada. The ISS has been the most politically complex space exploration program ever undertaken.
Emission Nebula IC 417 in Auriga | Schulman Telescope
IC 417 is an emission nebula almost 100 light-years across, located about 10,000 light-years away from Earth in the constellation of Auriga.
Technical Details
Optics: Schulman 32-inch RCOS Telescope
Camera: SBIG STX16803
The 0.81 m (32 in) Schulman Telescope is a Ritchey-Chrétien reflector built by RC Optical Systems and installed in 2010. It is operated by the Mount Lemmon SkyCenter and is Arizona's largest dedicated public observatory. The Schulman Telescope was designed from inception for remote control over the Internet by amateur and professional astrophotographers worldwide. It is currently the world's largest telescope dedicated for this purpose.
Image Credit & Copyright: Adam Block/Mount Lemmon SkyCenter/University of Arizona
Using NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, which launched in 2004, scientists have discovered a black hole in a distant galaxy repeatedly nibbling on a Sun-like star. The object heralds a new era of Swift science made possible by a novel method for analyzing data from the satellite’s X-ray Telescope (XRT).
When a star strays too close to a monster black hole, gravitational forces create intense tides that break the star apart into a stream of gas. The leading edge swings around the black hole, and the trailing edge escapes the system. These destructive episodes are called tidal disruption events. Astronomers see them as flares of multiwavelength light created when the debris collides with a disk of material already orbiting the black hole.
Recently, astronomers have been investigating variations on this phenomena, which they call partial or repeating tidal disruptions.
During these events, every time an orbiting star passes close to a black hole, the star bulges outward and sheds material, but survives. The process repeats until the star looses too much gas and finally breaks apart. The characteristics of the individual star and black hole system determine what kind of emission scientists observe, creating a wide array of behaviors to categorize.
On June 22, 2022, XRT captured Swift J0230 for the first time. It lit up in a galaxy around 500 million light-years away in the northern constellation Triangulum. Swift’s XRT has observed nine additional outbursts from the same location roughly every few weeks.
Scientists propose that Swift J0230 is a repeating tidal disruption of a Sun-like star orbiting a black hole with over 200,000 times the Sun’s mass. They estimate the star loses around three Earth masses of material on each pass. This system provides a bridge between other types of suspected repeating disruptions and allowed scientists to model how interactions between different star types and black hole sizes affect what we observe.
Swift J0230’s discovery was possible thanks to a new, automated search of XRT observations called the Swift X-ray Transient Detector.
After the instrument observes a portion of the sky, the data is transmitted to the ground, and the program compares it to previous XRT snapshots of the same spot. If that portion of the X-ray sky has changed, scientists get an alert. In the case of Swift J0230, astronomers were able to rapidly coordinate additional observations of the region.
Video Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
Producer: Sophia Roberts (AIMM)
Science writer: Jeanette Kazmierczak (University of Maryland College Park)
Sierra Dream Chaser Spaceplane: CRS-2 Mission Profile | International Space Station
Learn how the world’s only commercial spaceplane flies from launch to landing for its upcoming NASA CRS-2 mission to resupply the International Space Station. With its unique design, Dream Chaser incurs a 1.5g re-entry before landing at NASA’s Shuttle Landing Facility at Kennedy Space Center, making critical cargo accessible faster.
Glittering Globular Star Cluster Terzan 12 in Sagittarius | Hubble
Globular star cluster Terzan 12
This composite image shows the location of the globular star cluster Terzan 12 in Sagittarius as seen by the Hubble Space Telescope.
The glittering globular cluster Terzan 12—a vast, tightly bound collection of stars—fills the frame of this image from the NASA/European Space Agency Hubble Space Telescope. This star-studded stellar census comes from a string of observations that aim to systematically explore globular clusters located towards the center of our galaxy, such as this one in the constellation Sagittarius. The locations of these globular clusters—deep in the Milky Way galaxy—mean that they are shrouded in gas and dust, which can block or alter the wavelengths of starlight emanating from the clusters.
Distance:15,000 light years
Image Description: The frame is completely filled with bright stars, ranging from tiny dots to large, shining stars with prominent spikes. In the lower-right the stars come together in the core of the star cluster, making the brightest and densest area of the image. The background varies from darker and warmer in color, to brighter and paler where there are more stars.
Here, astronomers were able to sidestep the effect of gas and dust by comparing the new observations made with the razor-sharp vision of Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys and Wide-Field Camera 3 with pre-existing images. Their observations should shed light on the relation between age and composition in the Milky Way’s innermost globular clusters.
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, R. Cohen (Rutgers University)
Japan Launches Moon Lander & XRISM Satellite | Tanegashima Space Center
Japan launched a rocket on September 7, 2023, carrying a lunar lander and X-ray telescope to explore the origins of the universe. The HII-A rocket lifted off from the Tanegashima Space Center in southwestern Japan carrying the X-Ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission (XRISM) satellite. This is a joint mission between the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and NASA to study the universe. The XRISM satellite aims to pry apart high-energy light into the equivalent of an X-ray rainbow using an instrument called Resolve. The mission’s other instrument, developed by JAXA, is called Xtend. It will give XRISM one of the largest fields of view of any X-ray imaging satellite flown to date.
Once XRISM reaches its operating orbit 550 km above Earth’s surface, scientists and engineers will begin a ten-month phase of testing and calibrating the spacecraft’s scientific instruments and verifying the science performance of the mission. XRISM will then spend at least three years observing the most energetic objects and events in the cosmos based on proposals elaborated by scientists all over the world.
The Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) is a Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) mission designed to demonstrate accurate lunar landing techniques. SLIM will not take a direct route to the moon. After a lunar transfer orbit burn, it will make a lunar flyby, heading into a wide loop away from the Earth-moon system before returning to enter lunar orbit in around four months’ time. This will save on propellant.
The landed weight will be about 210 kg. The landing objective is to be within 100 meters of the target point, the ejecta blanket of Shioli crater (a crater centered at approximately 13.322 S, 25.232 E). Shioli is a small lunar impact crater that is located within the much larger Cyrillus crater on the near side of the Moon. It is a young crater with a prominent ray system.
SLIM launched on September 7, 2023, as a "ride-share" payload with the XRISM mission.
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