Picture Of The Day!

The 2023 Annular Eclipse as seen from Albuquerque, NM // Jordan Martin

2023 December 29

Shakespeare in Space Image Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI

Explanation: In 1986, Voyager 2 became the only spacecraft to explore ice giant planet Uranus close up. Still, this newly released image from the NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) on the James Webb Space Telescope offers a detailed look at the distant world. The tilted outer planet rotates on its axis once in about 17 hours. Its north pole is presently pointed near our line of sight, offering direct views of its northern hemisphere and a faint but extensive system of rings. Of the giant planet’s 27 known moons, 14 are annotated in the image. The brighter ones show hints of Webb’s characteristic diffraction spikes. And though these worlds of the outer Solar System were unknown in Shakespearean times, all but two of the 27 Uranian moons are named for characters in the English Bard’s plays.

∞ Source: apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap231229.html

3/19: Our public night is cancelled. The forecast keeps getting worse. We'll try again next week!

Happy fun fact Friday!

Did you know that the largest canyon system in the solar system is Valles Marineris on Mars? The image shows the Valles Marineris compared to the US coast to coast and the Grand Canyon!

Source: NASA

Planet Venus as seen by the Japanese spacecraft Akatsuki built by Institute of Space & Astronautical Science/Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency

Pumpkin space latte, anyone? ☕

Hubble captured this festive array of stars, Terzan 12, found in the Milky Way about 15,000 light-years from Earth. The stars in this cluster are bound together by gravity in a sphere-like shape and are shrouded in gas and dust. As the starlight travels through that gas and dust to Earth, blue light scatters, leaving the redder wavelengths to come through.

Download the full-resolution image here.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space!

Rosette Nebula by space.by.jase

The brown dwarf W1935 is a bit of a mystery. Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope picked up glowing methane—a sign that the object’s upper atmosphere is being heated. But the brown dwarf has no host star, so where could the heat be coming from?

In our solar system, Jupiter and Saturn show methane emission due to the presence of auroras—what we call the Northern Lights on Earth. W1935 might also have auroras, which could be powered by energetic particles from a nearby, active moon, like Jupiter’s Io: https://webbtelescope.pub/4aKMkBF

Dragons fighting in space?

Just kidding. These "dragons" are made up of gas and dust in the emission nebula NGC 6188, which is 4000 lightyears away in the Ara constellation!

Image by: Carlos Taylor

Space News!

A star located 12,000 lightyears from Earth engulfed one of its planets! It was previously believed that planets were engulfed by their stars expanding, but that isn't the case here. The planet, over millions of years, orbited closer to its star, to the point it was eventually engulfed by the star. The image is an artist's rendition of what happened.