Nearly a week after its last photo event, here’s a shot of Comet Lovejoy seen from the Space Station on December 27. On its way back out into the solar system after its close run-in with the Sun on December 15, Lovejoy has since sprouted a beautiful gauzy new tail which now precedes it along…
Category: Comets and Asteroids
A Beautiful Comet-rise at Dawn (VIDEO)
The video above contains a time-lapse movie of Earth’s horizon at dawn on December 21, showing lightning storms, stars, airglow… and the sungrazing comet Lovejoy rising above the atmosphere! (And I must say its new tail looks amazing!)
Comet Lovejoy’s Dazzling Death Dive
The end is definitely near… for comet Lovejoy, at least. The bright sungrazing comet was discovered on December 2, 2011, by Australian amateur astronomer Terry Lovejoy using a ground-based telescope. It was quickly seen that the comet was on a doomsday dive toward the Sun and will not likely survive its close pass of our…
The End of Elenin
So long, Elenin, and thanks for all the conspiracy theories! The comet that has been the subject of so much unfounded fearful speculation since its discovery in December 2010 will be making its closest pass of Earth tomorrow, October 16 – and when they say closest it means 22 million miles, or almost a third…
Can Comets Cause CMEs?
First, watch this sequence: What is it? It’s an animation made from images taken by ESA’s SOHO solar observatory showing a comet diving into the Sun on October 1, and then a large CME (coronal mass ejection) erupting immediately thereafter. Now, typically science has said that there is no connection between comets impacting the Sun…
Got Questions About Comet Elenin?
NASA’s got answers. For some reason, ever since it was first discovered last December, Comet Elenin has been surrounded by a lot of misinformation regarding the danger it poses to Earth. True, it will be swinging around the Sun in a path that takes it “relatively” close to Earth and the other inner planets in…
A Snowman on Vesta
Aptly nicknamed the “Snowman”, these three craters were imaged on August 6, 2011 by NASA’s Dawn spacecraft in orbit around the protoplanet Vesta. Located on Vesta’s northern hemisphere, the craters were first visible to researchers on July 23. Dawn has been in orbit around Vesta for one month now and has already returned many amazingly detailed…
New Vesta Images!
Released today, this is one of several new images taken with the full-frame camera aboard NASA’s Dawn spacecraft currently in orbit around the asteroid Vesta. Look at the detail in the surface! Incredible! This image shows the southern hemisphere of Vesta, and around its equator are long, deep grooves. Many different sizes of craters can…
Now that’s some groovy rock!
NASA’s Dawn spacecraft captured this image of the asteroid Vesta while in orbit on July 18, 2011. The view looks across Vesta’s cratered and heavily-scarred south pole from a distance of about 6,500 miles. Dawn established orbit at Vesta the morning of July 17, 2011. It will spend a year studying the large protoplanet before…
New Images of Tempel 1!
This just in! Cropped and sharpened via high pass slightly by yours truly. More to come! ADDED: Here’s another! Nice lighting here! (I removed some motion blur from this one via Photoshop.) And another (nice resolution here): See more images on the Stardust mission page here. Remember….they’re looking for whatever did this. Could it be…
First Image of Tempel 1
The first image taken by Stardust-NExT as it approached Tempel 1, the comet’s nucleus in clear view but still rather far away. Luckily the comet was centered in the field of view for all the images, but it will take some time to get to the closer-pass images in the download stack. (The 5 closest-pass…
Tempel of Love
This Valentine’s Day – that’s Monday, guys! – NASA’s Stardust spacecraft will have an out-of-this-world date with a heavenly body: the comet Tempel 1, seen above in an image mosaic taken by the Deep Impact spacecraft nearly six years ago. On July 4, 2005, Deep Impact made a rendezvous with Tempel 1, passing as…
Lights in the Dark 