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What’s Up for February 2016?

Five morning planets, Comet Catalina passes Polaris and icy Uranus and icy Vesta meet near Valentine’s Day.

February mornings feature Mercury, Venus, Saturn, Mars and Jupiter. The last time this five-planet dawn lineup happened was in 2005. The planets are easy to distinguish when you use the moon as your guide. Details on viewing HERE.

If you miss all five planets this month, you’ll be able to see them again in August’s sunset sky.

Last month, Comet Catalina’s curved dust tail and straight ion tail were visible in binoculars and telescopes near two galaxies that are close to the handle of the Big Dipper. Early this month, the comet nears Polaris, the North Star. It should be visible all month long for northern hemisphere observers.

There will be more opportunities to photograph Comet Catalina paired with other objects this month. It passes the faint spiral galaxy IC 342 and a pretty planetary nebula named NGC 1501 between Feb. 10 – 29. For binocular viewers, the magnitude 6 comet pairs up with a pretty string of stars, known as Kemble’s Cascade, on Feb. 24.

Finally, through binoculars, you should be able to pick out Vesta and Uranus near one another this month. You can use the moon as a guide on Feb. 12, and the cornerstone and the corner stars of Pegasus all month long.

For more information about What’s Up in the February sky, watch our monthly video HERE. 

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com

New art from my wife!

Made a monster to help me fight art block

Milky Way Panorama - The Pinnacles Desert, Western Australia / Source / by inefekt69

Michel Eugène Chevreul. Couleurs d'un Spectre Solaire. 1864.

Michael Whelan

This is very cool and a pretty big deal. Find out why.

Love me some SU

Have some Astrophyllite doodlies

Love it baby

Astrophyllite (a.k.a. Astro, a.k.a. Phyll) Still working on her design. I have many WIPs of her but I dont want to post them.. lol.

Sad that this is so true...

‘The Time To Act Is Now,’ Says Yellowing Climate Change Report Sitting In University Archive 

BERKELEY, CA—Warning society that it has reached a crucial tipping point from which it may never be able to recover, a brittle, yellowing report sitting in the archives of the University of California’s Bioscience & Natural Resources Library reportedly urged readers Friday that “the time to act against climate change is right now.” “Any further delay in ending the international community’s reliance on fossil fuels and reversing global carbon emission trends places the planet on an irreversible path toward climate catastrophe,” read the faded text of the document, whose musty, degrading pages further cautioned that, without “an immediate and concerted worldwide response,” polar ice caps will melt at an accelerating rate and extreme weather events will grow more frequent and destructive.

More.

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day 2016 September 19 

50,000 Kilometers over the Sun 

What’s happening at the edge of the Sun? Although it may look like a monster is rampaging, what is pictured is actually only a monster prominence – a sheath of thin gas held above the surface by the Sun’s magnetic field. The solar event was captured just this past weekend with a small telescope, with the resulting image then inverted and false-colored. As indicated with illustrative lines, the prominence rises over 50,000 kilometers above the Sun’s surface, making even our 12,700-diameter Earth seem small by comparison. Below the monster prominence is active region 12585, while light colored filaments can be seen hovering over a flowing solar carpet of fibrils. Filaments are actually prominences seen against the disk of the Sun, while similarly, fibrils are actually spicules seen against the disk. Energetic events like this are becoming less common as the Sun evolves toward a minimum in its 11-year activity cycle.