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The Bright Blue Star Spica in Virgo | New Forest Observatory
Shown here is spectacular Spica, the lead star in the constellation Virgo and the brightest blue star in the entire night sky. This photo was taken from the New Forest Observatory, U.K., on May 5, 2024. Viewed through a pair of decent binoculars, Spica's intense blue color, when its high in the sky, becomes quite obvious. Its B-V index (an indication of the redness or blueness of a star) is -0.23. Only 3 stars in the sky are bluer, but none are as bright.
Spica has a magnitude of 0.98.
Distance: 250 light years
It is a spectroscopic binary star and rotating ellipsoidal variable—a system whose two stars are so close together they are egg-shaped rather than spherical, and can only be separated by their spectra. The primary is a blue giant and a variable star of the Beta Cephei type.
Image & Caption Credit: Greg Parker
Location: New Forest Observatory, U.K. Coordinates: 50.819681, -1.590349
Solar Sailing Our Way to The Outer Planets | NASA Space Tech
NASA researchers are working on a concept to use solar sail technology to get to Neptune and Uranus in a fraction of the time that it would take with current propulsion technology. Using the power of the Sun, the concept called SCOPE—short for ScienceCraft for Outer Planet Exploration—could help us unlock the secrets of the scarcely visited ice giants in our outer solar system.
NASA 360 takes a look at the NASA Innovative Advanced Concept (NIAC) that could help us learn more about Neptune and Uranus. To learn more visit: https://go.nasa.gov/45pzBRI
To watch the in-depth presentation about this topic please visit the 2022 NIAC Symposium Vimeo site:
This video represents a research study within the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program. NIAC is a visionary and far-reaching aerospace program, one that has the potential to create breakthrough technologies for possible future space missions. However, such early-stage technology developments may never become actual NASA missions.
This Supermoon was visible on September 17th, 2024, in Cleveland, Ohio, USA. On this day, the full moon was a partial lunar eclipse; a supermoon; and a harvest moon. A “supermoon” occurs when a full Moon coincides with the Moon’s closest approach to Earth in its elliptical orbit, a point known as perigee. During every 27-day orbit around Earth, the Moon reaches both its perigee, about 226,000 miles (363,300 km) from Earth, and its farthest point, or apogee, about 251,000 miles (405,500 km) from Earth. Because the Moon’s orbit wobbles and differs depending on where the Sun and Earth are in their orbits, the exact distance of these closest and furthest points varies, with supermoons occurring closer or farther than others.
“Supermoon" is not an official astronomical term, but typically it is used to describe a full Moon that comes within at least 90 percent of perigee. Supermoons only happen three to four times a year, and always appear consecutively. Throughout most of Earth's orbit around the sun, perigee and the full Moon do not overlap.
Shenzhou-19 Spacecraft & Rocket Rollout to Launchpad | China Space Station
The combination of the Shenzhou-19 crewed spaceship and a Long March-2F Y19 carrier rocket has been successfully transferred to the launching area at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China on Tuesday afternoon, Oct. 22, 2024.
At 16:00, the combination was lifted from the assembly and test facility and smoothly transported via a vertical transfer method to the launch site. The entire transfer process covered a distance of 1.5 kilometers and took approximately two hours.
The spacecraft and rocket combination weighs over 40 tons and stands nearly 60 meters tall.
The completion of this vertical transport signifies that the rocket has officially entered the final phase of launch preparations.
Subsequent activities will include a series of function checks and joint tests, with a launch expected to take place later this month.
Gao Minzhong, a senior engineer with the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, highlighted the emphasis on safety and precision during the transport.
"We have optimized the control of positioning accuracy upon the combination's arrival at the destination and prepared multiple backup plans to guarantee a reliable and foolproof transfer," Gao said.
China is scheduled to launch the Shenzhou-19 crewed spaceship and welcome the Shenzhou-18 crew back to the Earth in late October, according to the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA).
The three-member Shenzhou-18 crew was sent into space on April 25.
Shenzhou-19 Crewed Spacecraft Prepared for Launch | China Space Station
The combination of the Shenzhou-19 crewed spacecraft atop its Long March-2F Y18 carrier rocket was made ready for the imminent vertical transfer to the launching area at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China on Tuesday, October 21, 2024.
At around 15:00 on Tuesday, the technical staff at the assembly test building were making final checks before transferring the combination to the launching pad 1.5 kilometers away.
The engineers had completed the removal of the air supply hose from the rocket fairing, and cleaned, closed and inspected all the connections between the fairing and the outside to ensure that the inside of the fairing is safely isolated from the outside environment during the transfer.
In an interview with CCTV, Gao Minzhong, senior engineer with the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, detailed more preparatory work at the final assembly test building ahead of the transfer.
"The pre-transfer work can be summarized into four major aspects. The first is the check and test of the rocket and escape tower in the technical area. The second is the propellant filling and cylinders filling of the spacecraft. The third is to dock the spacecraft escape tower and the assembled rocket assembly to form a spacecraft-rocket-escape tower combination. And the fourth is to complete all the preparatory work before the transfer today. Now, each system is working smoothly, and the preparatory work has been completed. The conditions for vertical transfer are in place," Gao said.
The combination is set to move towards the launching pad at around 16:00 on a mobile launch platform along a seamless rail. The engineer noted that the timing of the transfer depends mainly on the temperature, wind speed and track conditions.
The ideal temperature is 0 to 30 degrees Celsius, and the conditions at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center are just right, according to Gao.
"The total height of the spaceship-rocket-escape tower combination on the mobile launch platform is nearly 70 meters, so there are relatively strict requirements for the wind speed, which should be controlled to below 10 meters per second. There is a 1.5-kilometer specially-built track for vertical transfer from the assembling building to the launch pad. The transfer has high requirements for the track gauge, flatness and straightness, with millimeter-level accuracy," Gao explained.
China is scheduled to launch the Shenzhou-19 crewed spaceship and welcome the Shenzhou-18 crew back to the Earth in late October, according to the China Manned Space Agency earlier this month.
The three-member Shenzhou-18 crew was sent into space on April 25.
Globular Star Cluster Messier 5 in Serpens Caput: Surprising 'Vitality' | Hubble
The globular cluster Messier 5, shown here in this NASA/European Space Agency Hubble Space Telescope image, is one of the oldest belonging to the Milky Way galaxy. The majority of its stars formed more than 12 billion years ago, but there are unexpected newcomers on the scene, adding vitality to this aging population.
Stars in globular clusters form in the same stellar nursery and grow old together. The most massive stars age quickly, exhausting their fuel supply in less than a million years, and end their lives in spectacular supernovae explosions. This process should have left the ancient cluster Messier 5 with only old, low-mass stars. These stars have aged and cooled and have become red giants, while the oldest stars have evolved even further into blue horizontal branch stars.
Yet astronomers have spotted many young, blue stars in this cluster, hiding amongst the much more luminous ancient ones. Astronomers think that these laggard youngsters, called blue stragglers, were created either by stellar collisions or by the transfer of mass between binary stars. Such events are easy to imagine in densely populated globular clusters where a few million stars are tightly packed together.
Messier 5 lies at a distance of about 25,000 light-years in the constellation of Serpens (The Snake). This image was taken with the Wide Field Channel of Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys. The picture was created from images taken through a blue filter (F435W, colored blue), a red filter (F625W, colored green) and a near-infrared filter (F814W, colored red). The total exposure times per filter were 750 s, 400 s and 567 s, respectively. The field of view is about 2.6 arcminutes across.
Comet C/2023 A3 over California's Sierra Mountains with M5 Star Cluster
The tails of Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS were a sight to behold. Pictured, C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan–ATLAS) was captured near peak impressiveness last week over the Eastern Sierra Mountains in California, USA. The comet had a bright tail, along with a distinct anti-tail pointing in nearly the opposite direction. The globular star cluster M5 can be seen on the right, far in the distance. As it approached the sun, it was unclear if this comet, a crumbling iceberg, would disintegrate completely as it warmed in the bright sunlight. In reality, the comet survived to become brighter than any star in the night (magnitude -4.9), but unfortunately was then so nearly in front of the Sun that it was hard for many casual observers to locate. Whether Comet Tsuchinshan-Atlas becomes known as the Great Comet of 2024 now depends, in part, on how impressive incoming comet C/2024 S1 (ATLAS) becomes over the next two weeks.
C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan–ATLAS) is a comet from the solar system's Oort cloud discovered by the Purple Mountain Observatory east of Nanjing, China, on January 9, 2023, and independently found by the automated Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) in South Africa on February 22, 2023. ATLAS is funded by NASA's planetary defense office, and developed and operated by the University of Hawaii's Institute for Astronomy. C/2023 A3 passed perihelion (closest approach to the Sun) at a distance of 0.39 AU (58 million km; 36 million miles) on September 27, 2024.
The Oort cloud is theorized to be a vast cloud of icy planetesimals surrounding the Sun at distances ranging from 2,000 to 200,000 AU (0.03 to 3.2 light-years). The concept of such a cloud was proposed in 1950 by the Dutch astronomer Jan Oort, in whose honor the idea was named. Oort proposed that the bodies in this cloud replenish and keep constant the number of long-period comets entering the inner Solar System—where they are eventually consumed and destroyed during close approaches to the Sun.
Un archipiélago galáctico en un mar de materia oscura | NOIRLab en español
Cosmoview Episodio 88: NGC 1270 es sólo un miembro más de los que hay en el Cúmulo de Perseo, un grupo de miles de galaxias ubicadas a unos 240 millones de años luz de la Tierra en la constelación de Perseo. Esta imagen fue tomada con el Espectrógrafo Multi-Objeto de Gemini (GMOS, por sus siglas en inglés) en el telescopio de Gemini Norte, la mitad boreal del Observatorio Internacional Gemini que es financiado en parte por la Fundación Nacional de Ciencia de Estados Unidos y operada por NOIRLab de NSF. La fotografía captura una deslumbrante colección de galaxias en la región central de este enorme cúmulo.
Credit: Observatorio Internacional Gemini/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/
Procesamiento de imágenes: J. Miller & M. Rodriguez (International Gemini Observatory/NSF NOIRLab), T.A. Rector (University of Alaska Anchorage/NSF NOIRLab), M. Zamani (NSF NOIRLab)
Acknowledgements: PI: Jisu Kang (Seoul National University)
Galaxy NGC 1270 in Perseus Entangled in a Web of Dark Matter | Gemini North
Cosmoview Episode 88:NGC 1270 is just one member of the Perseus Cluster, a group of thousands of galaxies that lies around 240 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Perseus. This image shows a dazzling collection of galaxies in the central region of this enormous cluster. It was taken with the Gemini Multi-Object Spectrograph (GMOS) on the Gemini North telescope, one half of the International Gemini Observatory. It is supported in part by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and operated by NSF's NOIRLab.
Since 2002 Gemini North has also been known as the Frederick C. Gillett Gemini North telescope. Dr. Gillett, who died in April 2001, was one of the primary visionaries of the Gemini telescopes. He was instrumental in assuring that the design of Gemini's twin 8-meter telescopes would make major scientific contributions to astronomy.
Credit: International Gemini Observatory / NOIRLab / NSF / AURA / N. Bartmann (NSF NOIRLab)/J. Pollard/NASA/ESA/F. Summers (STScl) Image Processing: J. Miller & M. Rodriguez (International Gemini Observatory/NSF NOIRLab), T.A. Rector (University of Alaska Anchorage/NSF NOIRLab), M. Zamani (NSF NOIRLab) Acknowledgements: PI: Jisu Kang (Seoul National University)
Journey toGalaxy NGC 1270 in The Perseus Galaxy Cluster
NGC 1270 is just one member of the Perseus Cluster, a group of thousands of galaxies that lies around 240 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Perseus. This image shows a dazzling collection of galaxies in the central region of this enormous cluster. It was taken with the Gemini Multi-Object Spectrograph (GMOS) on the Gemini North telescope, one half of the International Gemini Observatory. It is supported in part by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and operated by NSF's NOIRLab.
Since 2002 Gemini North has also been known as the Frederick C. Gillett Gemini North telescope. Dr. Gillett, who died in April 2001, was one of the primary visionaries of the Gemini telescopes. He was instrumental in assuring that the design of Gemini's twin 8-meter telescopes would make major scientific contributions to astronomy.
Credit: International Gemini Observatory / NOIRLab / NSF / AURA / N. Bartmann (NSF NOIRLab) Image Processing: J. Miller & M. Rodriguez (International Gemini Observatory/NSF NOIRLab), T.A. Rector (University of Alaska Anchorage/NSF NOIRLab), M. Zamani (NSF NOIRLab) Acknowledgements: PI: Jisu Kang (Seoul National University)
Pan of Galaxy NGC 1270 in The Perseus Galaxy Cluster | Gemini North
NGC 1270 is just one member of the Perseus Cluster, a group of thousands of galaxies that lies around 240 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Perseus. This image shows a dazzling collection of galaxies in the central region of this enormous cluster. It was taken with the Gemini Multi-Object Spectrograph (GMOS) on the Gemini North telescope, one half of the International Gemini Observatory. It is supported in part by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and operated by NSF's NOIRLab.
Since 2002 Gemini North has also been known as the Frederick C. Gillett Gemini North telescope. Dr. Gillett, who died in April 2001, was one of the primary visionaries of the Gemini telescopes. He was instrumental in assuring that the design of Gemini's twin 8-meter telescopes would make major scientific contributions to astronomy.
Credit: International Gemini Observatory/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/N. Bartmann (NSF NOIRLab) Image Processing: J. Miller & M. Rodriguez (International Gemini Observatory/NSF NOIRLab), T.A. Rector (University of Alaska Anchorage/NSF NOIRLab), M. Zamani (NSF NOIRLab) Acknowledgements: PI: Jisu Kang (Seoul National University)
Galaxy NGC 1270 in The Perseus Galaxy Cluster | Gemini North Telescope
NGC 1270 is just one member of the Perseus Cluster, a group of thousands of galaxies that lies around 240 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Perseus. This image shows a dazzling collection of galaxies in the central region of this enormous cluster. It was taken with the Gemini Multi-Object Spectrograph (GMOS) on the Gemini North telescope, one half of the International Gemini Observatory. It is supported in part by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and operated by NSF's NOIRLab.
Since 2002 Gemini North has also been known as the Frederick C. Gillett Gemini North telescope. Dr. Gillett, who died in April 2001, was one of the primary visionaries of the Gemini telescopes. He was instrumental in assuring that the design of Gemini's twin 8-meter telescopes would make major scientific contributions to astronomy.
Credit: International Gemini Observatory/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/ Image Processing: J. Miller & M. Rodriguez (International Gemini Observatory/NSF NOIRLab), T.A. Rector (University of Alaska Anchorage/NSF NOIRLab), M. Zamani (NSF NOIRLab) Acknowledgements: PI: Jisu Kang (Seoul National University) Release Date: Oct. 21, 2024
Red Sprite over Central Africa | International Space Station
NASA astronaut Matthew Dominick: "A red sprite shoots out above a lightning strike over Central Africa."
"I was getting setup to take images of Cairo. On the approach across Africa there was a bunch of lightning. Out of 800 or so images there was a red sprite!"
Red Sprites: These mysterious bursts of light in the upper atmosphere momentarily resemble gigantic jellyfish. One unusual feature of sprites is that they are relatively cold. They operate more like long fluorescent light tubes than hot compact light bulbs. In general, red sprites take only a fraction of a second to occur and are best seen when powerful thunderstorms are visible from the side.
Image details: 50mm, f1.2, 1/10s, ISO 3200, denoised
Station Commander: Suni Williams Roscosmos (Russia): Alexander Grebenkin, Alexey Ovchinin, Ivan Vagner, Aleksandr Gorbunov NASA: Matthew Dominick, Mike Barrett, Jeanette Epps, Butch Wilmore, Don Pettit, Nick Hague
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.
Image Credit: NASA's Johnson Space Center (JSC)/Astronaut Matthew Dominick
Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS over ESO SupernovaPlanetarium in Munich, Germany
Earth has a majestic new visitor. Seen last week above the European Southern Observatory (ESO) Supernova Planetarium & Visitor Center, the comet C/2023 A3, also known as Tsuchinshan-ATLAS, comes to us from the distant Oort Cloud—a gigantic cluster of icy objects that envelops the Solar System. As it got closer to the Sun, it heated up and developed tails of dust and gas observed by comet watchers around the world, including at the ESO Headquarters in Munich, Germany.
The comet was first detected in early 2023 by two independent facilities: the Tsuchinshan observatory in China and a telescope from the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS), located in South Africa. Since then, it has been getting closer, reaching its closest distance to the Sun in September 2024. Its brightness peaked in early October, and the comet is now dimming down as it embarks on a long journey back home.
This object is one of the brightest comets of the last two decades, and it was easily visible to the naked eye. In this time-lapse video, hundreds of frames were taken every few seconds with different cameras and lenses to produce the sped-up video seen here.
C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan–ATLAS) is a comet from the solar system's Oort cloud discovered by the Purple Mountain Observatory east of Nanjing, China, on January 9, 2023, and independently found by the automated Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) in South Africa on February 22, 2023. ATLAS is funded by NASA's planetary defense office, and developed and operated by the University of Hawaii's Institute for Astronomy. C/2023 A3 passed perihelion (closest approach to the Sun) at a distance of 0.39 AU (58 million km; 36 million miles) on September 27, 2024.
The Oort cloud is theorized to be a vast cloud of icy planetesimals surrounding the Sun at distances ranging from 2,000 to 200,000 AU (0.03 to 3.2 light-years). The concept of such a cloud was proposed in 1950 by the Dutch astronomer Jan Oort, in whose honor the idea was named. Oort proposed that the bodies in this cloud replenish and keep constant the number of long-period comets entering the inner Solar System—where they are eventually consumed and destroyed during close approaches to the Sun.
Credit: European Southern Observatory (ESO)/L. Calçada, F. Kamphues, J. C. Muñoz-Mateos, B. Speet Duration: 22 seconds Release Date: Oct. 21, 2024
NASA's Artemis II Astronauts 'Get Hands On' with Orion | Lockheed Martin
Over several visits to our campus in Littleton, Colorado, NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen, and their backup crew have been hard at work testing Orion’s crew module hatch.
This is important training that puts hundreds of opening and closing cycles on a hatch to test its durability. With the need to operate the hatch so many times, the training sessions serve as a great opportunity for the crew to train on the many ways the hatch can operate in a variety of situations.
See how testing is done to simulate real-life mission conditions, and hear firsthand from astronaut Victor Glover about the importance of flight hardware training.
The approximately 10-day Artemis II Mission will be NASA’s first crewed flight test of the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and Orion spacecraft around the Moon to verify today’s capabilities for humans to explore deep space and pave the way for long-term exploration and science on the lunar surface, including landing the first woman and the first person of color on the Moon.
The Artemis II crew module is now undergoing acoustic testing ahead of integration with the European Service Module (ESM).
Artemis II will launch no earlier than September 2025.
Pan of Spiral Galaxy IC 3225: Celestial 'Cannonball' in Virgo | Hubble
The spiral galaxy appearing in this Hubble picture is named IC 3225. It looks remarkably like it has been launched from a cannon, speeding through space like a comet with a tail of gas streaming from its disc behind it. Appearances can be deceiving with objects so far from Earth—IC 3225 itself is about 100 million light-years away. However, the galaxy’s location suggests causes for this active scene, because IC 3225 is one of over 1,300 members of the Virgo galaxy cluster. The density of galaxies in the Virgo cluster creates a rich field of hot gas between them, the so-called ‘intracluster medium’. The cluster’s extreme mass has galaxies careening around its center in very fast orbits. Ramming through the thick intracluster medium, especially close to the cluster’s center, places an enormous ‘ram pressure’ on the moving galaxies that strips gas from them as they go.
IC 3225 is not so close to the cluster core right now. Nevertheless, astronomers have deduced that it has undergone this ram pressure stripping in the past. The galaxy looks as though it has been impacted by this. It is compressed on one side and there has been noticeably more star formation on this leading edge, while the opposite end is stretched out of shape. Being in such a crowded field, a close call with another galaxy could also have tugged on IC 3225 and created this shape. The sight of this distorted galaxy is a reminder of the forces at work on astronomical scales. It can move and reshape entire galaxies,
Image Description: A spiral galaxy. Its disc glows visibly from the center, and has faint dust threaded through it. A spiral arm curves around the left edge of the disc and is noticeably more dense with bright blue spots, where there are hot and new stars, than the rest. Opposite, the disc stretches out into a short tail where it covers a distant background galaxy. Around it, other distant galaxies and nearby stars are visible.
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