APOD 2.4

The wonders of the universe mix with the wonders of imagination with this artist's concept of dust disks that may be forming planets. The observations are done of nearby stars by infrared light. The Spitzer Space Telescope and the Herschel Space Observatory have found that planetary system HD 95086 has 2 dust disks (above)- a hot one near the star and a cooler one at a further distance. The artist took the liberty of forming their own planets with rings. The planets may explain why there's such a large gap between the rings by their absorption and deflecting of dust via their gravity. HD 95086 is a blue star about 60% larger than our own. It lie 300 light years from Earth, but is visible with binocular toward the constellation of Carina. By monitoring these rings, astronomers may get an inside look at how our own solar system formed.

APOD 2.3

One of my observation posts that I made during a week of unclear skies was on a podcast from Astronomycast.com -and the podcast? the Rosetta Mission in route to land on a comet. Well I guess I'll count this as a success! Philae, after two bounces, landed on C67/P Churyumov-Gerasimenko. There is less illumination for the solar pannels than astronomers had hoped for- but that is the only complaint. All sytems are fully functional and the pictures (like the one above) are coming through nice and clear. The Rosetta Mission won't come to and end (if all goes well) until December of 2015, after the comet has passed by the Sun.

APOD 2.2

Words cannot begin to describe my envy for the person standing atop a mountian and getting an up close and personal look at an aurora. To see an aurora in person is on my personal bucket list, and whoever this person is got an experinec of a lifetime. The person in is northen Norway, on the summit of the Austnesfjorden fjord close to the town of Svolvear on the Lofoten island. Due to the sun reaching its maximum surface activity of its 11 year magnetic cycle, auroras like this one have not been a rarity.

APOD 2.1

Black holes. The ultimate nightmare, the unknown, the "once you go in you'll never come back" of  the universe. The picture above is a computer generated image of what it would look like to confront a black hole straight on. The gravity of a black hole is so powerful that it bends light and sends it back towards you. Black holes are the densest state of matter in the universe (that we know of). This particular image's background is form the 2MASS infrared sky survey, and the stars used are from the Henry Draper catalog.

The Great World-Wide Star Count

Date: 10/28/14
Local Times: 8:30
Magnitude Limiting Magnitude 3 (Cygnus)
Lat: 27.26
Lon: -82.46
Country: United States of America

It was extremely cool to be apart of something this big!

Stargazing (10.18.14)

The brave souls that fought off the mosquitos got to opportunity to see many abnormalities of the sky. Judging by the ability to see all 7 stars of Ursa Minor- tonight was what astronomers call a "severe clear".
Some of the astronomical objects we saw:
M27
M57
M11
The Summer Triangle
Ursa Minor
Alberio (the binary)
Epsilon Lyrae  (the double double)
Job's Coffin
5 Satellites
1 shooting star (meteor)
Cepheious
The Northern Cross
Antares
Around 6 1st magnitude stars
Mars
Saturn

Nights like these are a great time to keep looking up!

APOD 1.8

Some of the astronomical happenings that we've observed we cannot yet fully identify and understand. One of those phenomena is the allusive 'lighting sprite". An APOD member was lucky enough to catch a video of the sprite (at 10,000 frames per second). The clip is seconds long; but the lighting is unusual. Instead of usual, clean, streaks- the lightning sprite more resembles bombs dropping to the ground. Only certain thunderstorms carry lightning sprites, which is why it's so difficult for those who try to be able identify their origins. Like many astronomical occurrences- our technology will have to catch up to the universe before we can get a full understanding,.