| AURORA ALERTS:
Did you miss the Northern Lights of June 25th? Next time get
a wake-up call from Space
Weather PHONE. |
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DISCOVERIES AT MERCURY:
Mercury's magnetic field is "alive."
Volcanic vents ring Mercury's giant Caloris basin while the planet
itself is surrounded by a plasma nebula of unexpected complexity.
These are just a few of the discoveries made by NASA's MESSENGER
spacecraft and reported in a special July 4th issue of Science
magazine. Science@NASA has the full
story.
PLANETS AND FIREWORKS:
Not every light in the sky is an explosive.
Look to the right of the fireworks in this Friday night photo from
Alvaro Garay of Casselberry,
Florida:
The three starry pinpricks are Saturn, Mars and Regulus, aligned
for Independence Day. "Happy 4th of July!" says Garay.
Happy 5th of July, too. Tonight the same star and planets will
be joined in alignment by the slender crescent Moon. If you have
a backyard
telescope, scan it along the line. In one quick sweep you can
see the rings of Saturn, the little red disk of Mars and a grand
panorama of lunar mountains and craters. The show begins after sunset:
sky
map.
more images: from
Sam Cole of Austin, Texas; from
Mohammad Taher Pilevar of Hamedan, Iran; from
Sorin Hotea of Alanya, Turkey; from
Ken Maytag of Carpinteria, California; from
Pierre-Paul Feyte of La Romieu, Gascony, France
GRAB THAT ROCK:
Put on your 3D
glasses and reach out. Can you grab the rock?
It seems so near, but this rock is actually 319 million
kilometers away at the feet of the Phoenix Mars lander. Spaceweather
reader Stuart Atkinson of
Kendal, UK, created the anaglyph by combining right- and left-eye
images from Phoenix's stereo camera. "The rock seems to be
riddled with holes," he says. "Fascinating!"
Behold
the complete scene. To the right is one of the trenches Phoenix
has been digging. Next week, after a brief 4th of July holiday,
mission scientists will command Phoenix to begin
chemical analyses of icy soil scraped
from the Snow White trench. This should reveal the sample's salt
and mineral content, whether it contains nutrients friendly to life,
and something of the ice's history. Was it once a nutrient-rich
fluid? Stay tuned for updates.
UPDATED:
2008 NLC Photo Gallery
[NLC
Tutorial] [Night-sky
Cameras]
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