Category Archives: Space

The face of the sun is fluffy gold, without any sunspots. The action is at the edge of the sun where Jack Newton of British Columbia photographed this enormous prominence for spaceweather.com

And it’s only 50 million light years away. You could make it a weekend.

UPDATE  The details, since the original pix has been taken down: Spiral galaxy NGC 7331 is often touted as an analog to our own Milky Way. About 50 million light-years distant in the northern constellation Pegasus…

One meteor every five minutes isn’t much of a show, but if you have to be up anyway and you can find a pretty clear horizon (nevermind trying to escape light pollution, that’s too far to drive) meteorologist Bob Rose has a reminder:

"The Southern Delta Aquarid meteor shower peaks on Friday, July 28th. Go outside before dawn on Friday morning, look south, and you could see a meteor every five minutes or so. No one knows where these meteors come from. They could be remains of a long-dead comet or debris from an asteroid-asteroid collision. Curious fact: There is a debris stream nearly parallel to this one. Earth will pass through it on August 8th, producing the Northern Delta Aquarid meteor shower. It’s a mystery, too."

Lotsa mysteries in the naked universe. The meteor "season," so to speak, is just getting underway (see Stardate list of upcomers), so if you don’t have to be up around 4 a.m. Friday, it’s good to start thinking about making time to do it in the months ahead, to go see a reminder of where you live. The big picture.

The black areas in these NASA radar images (taken Friday) are believed to mark Saturn’s moon Titan as the only place besides Earth in the solar system to have lakes. Even if they are hydrocarbon lakes of liquid methane or ethane.

"The Cassini spacecraft, using its radar system, has discovered very strong evidence for hydrocarbon lakes on Titan. Dark patches, which resemble terrestrial lakes, seem to be sprinkled all over the high latitudes surrounding Titan’s north pole."

So, as soon as I say I’m going to go easy on the images and worry about copyright, up I throw a University of Texas photo of its McDonald Observatory, in the (Jeff) Davis Mountains of West Texas.

But this is one of my fav places in the Lone Star, where I was fortunate enough to get to go repeatedly in the 1980s and 1990s as a newspaper reporter. So much that when I retired, the editors gracefully awarded me not a gold watch or whatever but two nights at a rancho-hotel in nearby Fort Davis (for observatory visits) which the boy and Mom and I will take advantage of (most likely) next spring.

L to R: The Otto Struve 2.1 meter, the 11-meter Hobby-Eberly in the distant middle, and the 2.7 meter  Harlan Smith, which was used in the 1960s to map the visible side of the moon before the astronauts landed.

The late Harlan Smith, who once gave me a memorable tour of the solar system via one of the small telescopes under the little domes on the right side of the picture, envisioned the Hobby-Eberly but died of cancer before it was finished in 1997. The observatory has a good visitor’s program.

I wonder if the cooks still bake cookies for the astronomers who, of course, work the night shift?

UPDATE  Noticed some searchers hunting for the story of the crime at McDonald. Here ’tis: "…one February night in 1970 a McDonald Observatory employee (not a Texan, but an Ohioan newly hired from another observatory!) suffered a breakdown and carried a pistol to the observing floor of the 107-inch [2.7 meter] telescope. He fired a shot at his supervisor, and then unloaded the rest of the clip into the primary mirror. Happily, fused silica is more resilent than ordinary glass, and the big mirror did not break. The craters have been bored out and painted black to reduce any light-scattering effect, and the end result is simply a slight reduction in the efficiency of the telescope. It is now the equivalent of a 106-inch telescope. The incident made the national television news, with Walter Cronkite describing it before a projection showing the wrong telescope upside down." Heh.

Earthrise from moon/NASA