Category Archives: Space

Hubble’s hard won view of Pluto and its moon Charon from 2.6 billion miles. Frozen rocks in the deepfreeze suburbs of the solar system. Until 2015 and a robot spacecraft’s visit, this is the best NASA can do for a portrait of Pluto, the newly demoted planet. The god of the underworld joins an asteroid, Ceres, and a  planet-candidate with a number in the Kuiper Belt as one of three new dwarf-planets. Talk about historical revisionism, even though it’s really scientific revision, however scientific it may really be. Solar System Newly Defined: Eight planets, three dwarf-planets. But it really ought to be four dwarf planets, since Charon is almost as big as Pluto.

HONK IF… Then, the inevitable happened: "like-minded astronomers [have] begun a petition to get Pluto reinstated. Car bumper stickers compelling motorists to "Honk if Pluto is still a planet" have gone on sale over the internet and e-mails circulating about the decision have been describing the IAU as the ‘Irrelevant Astronomical Union’". 

Aurora over Yellowknife, Canada, last night, from Spaceweather.com which says the display was not related to today’s geomagnetic storm but just "a place where auroras have a habit of appearing for no particular reason. A little gust of solar wind or a twitch of the interplanetary magnetic field (IMF) is all it takes to produce bright Northern Lights. Yellowknife’s secret? It’s located near the Arctic Circle in the heart of aurora country."

Perseid meteor over Colorado/NASA

Folks planning to heed the email making the rounds about the spectacular sky show Aug. 27 should plan to do something else. Alas, Mars will really not be the size of the full moon.

It might be, if the dusty red planet broke out of its orbit and came wandering our way, in which case its gravity would play hell with the tides, and make coastal living, at the least, unpleasant.

More likely, Mars will continue in its usual orbit, and from here on water world it will be just a pinpoint of light, a flashing little star, because it’s never closer to us than 35 million miles away.

Auroras over Colorado, 3:59 a.m., August 7, 2006. Credit: Thad V’Soske, in a 75-second exposure, via spaceweather.com. Pretty colors thanks to an unexpected stream of solar wind hitting the earth this morning and creating a geomagnetic storm.