Heads Up: Total Eclipse of the Moon Sunday Evening January 20

On Sunday evening, January 20, there will be a nice total lunar eclipse (where the Earth’s shadow darkens the full moon) visible in all of North America. Since this is the day before Martin Luther King Day in the U.S., many students will not have school the next day and can stay up to enjoy the celestial spectacle with their families.

Total eclipses of the Moon are perfectly safe to look at, don’t require special viewing equipment, and are visible all over one hemisphere of planet Earth. Your eyes are just fine to see the show. This is quite a contrast with the total eclipses of the Sun, where viewing can sometimes hurt your eyes, special equipment is a big help, and the best show is only visible in a narrow path. As Bernie would say, the lunar eclipse is for the 99%, not just the special 1%!

A more detailed information sheet I put together (with questions and answers, plus the timing in each time zone of the continental U.S.) can be found at:
http://bit.ly/mooneclipse2019 

Here is wishing you a cloudless evening, and a few hours thinking about the heavens and not the craziness in Washington.

[Our beautiful photo is by Conrad Jung of the Chabot Space and Science Center, 2007]

Andrew Fraknoi: Exploring the Universe: Encounter with the Furthest Object Humanity Has Ev...

Andrew Fraknoi: Exploring the Universe: Encounter with the Furthest Object Humanity Has Ev...: Tonight, the New Horizons spacecraft will fly by a chunk of ancient ice and dirt nicknamed "Ultima Thule." 4.1 billion miles ...

Encounter with the Furthest Object Humanity Has Ever Explored

Tonight, the New Horizons spacecraft will fly by a chunk of ancient ice and dirt nicknamed "Ultima Thule." 4.1 billion miles distant from us, this small world, estimated at perhaps 20 miles across, is the the furthest object ever visited and examined by human technology. We should have first pictures and other information about it by Wednesday, when NASA plans a press conference.

The accompanying image shows an artist's attempt to draw this minor member of the zone beyond Neptune we call the Kuiper Belt. Pluto is also a member of this belt, but with far better property and voting rights than little Ultima. Several observations from afar have suggested that Ultima is elongated (maybe even two chunks that might just barely touch) and reddish. Its orbit indicates that it may well be very ancient, one of the first building blocks from which our solar system (the planets and moons that accompany the Sun) was assembled more than 4 1/2 billion years ago.

Moving at 32,000 miles per hour, and with sunlight only 1/2 of one percent as bright as it is at Earth, New Horizon's cameras will be put to the test to take pictures. The power (from radioactive materials) available to power the spacecraft is now only 190 watts! We will get within 2200 miles of the Ultima, closer than we got to Pluto with the same spacecraft in 2015.

New Horizons can either point at its target or at Earth. So it will at first send very little information and spend most of its time as it whizzes by pointing at Ultima. When it has gone by, it will point back to Earth and take 20 months to send the encounter data back to Earth (it's transmission rate is slow, but steady, much like this Facebook page.)

By the way, the term Ultima Thule means "Beyond the Known World"; it was term used on medieval maps to mark parts of our planet that were not yet explored and thus were veiled in mystery.  (It was a nickname suggested in a public naming contest run by the SETI Institute.)

Keep your fingers crossed that things go better 4 billion miles from Washington DC than they have gone at home! 

Andrew Fraknoi: Exploring the Universe: A New Selfie from Mars

Andrew Fraknoi: Exploring the Universe: A New Selfie from Mars: NASA's InSight lander on Mars has sent back its first "selfie" -- a great mosaic of 11 images, taken by the color camera o...

A New Selfie from Mars

NASA's InSight lander on Mars has sent back its first "selfie" -- a great mosaic of 11 images, taken by the color camera on the "elbow" of its robotic arm. You can clearly see the round solar panels (7 feet wide) which collect power for the lander, and, between them, the instrument deck for measuring weather, marsquakes, and other conditions on Mars. Eventually, the instrument package nicknamed the mole will try to dig a hole 16 feet deep and see how heat flows inside the red planet. It's terrific to see InSight's systems slowly being tried out and working so well.

Click on the picture to see it larger.

Andrew Fraknoi: Exploring the Universe: A Possible New Planet Around the Second Closest St...

Andrew Fraknoi: Exploring the Universe: A Possible New Planet Around the Second Closest St...: A Possible New Planet Around the Second Closest Star System to Earth An international team of astronomers is announcing the possible d...

A Possible New Planet Around the Second Closest Star System to Earth

An international team of astronomers is announcing the possible discovery of a planet around the second closest star system to us, Barnard’s Star. A mere 6 light-years away, the star is a faint red dwarf which gives off only four hundredths of a percent of the Sun’s light energy. The planet, which could be as massive as 3 Earths, is orbiting at the same distance as Mercury is from the Sun, but is still colder than Saturn and unlikely to harbor life as we know it.

Since the closest star system to us also has a known planet in it, this discovery (if it is confirmed) would make it even more likely that planets are “more common than dirt” out there. Four planetary systems would then be known among the stars 10 light-years or closer. Some 2900 planetary systems (containing almost 4,000 planets) have now been found in our galactic neighborhood.

The new planet, which takes 233 days to orbit, was detected from the very slight “wiggles” that the planet’s gravity (as it goes around) gives to the motion of its star. The wiggles are so small that it took 20 years of observations, using special equipment on various telescopes around the world, to identify them. While it’s still possible that their combined observations have another explanation, the 63 authors on the paper announcing the planet have dug deeply into their data statistics and claim that the planet idea is the most likely explanation. Not all experts in the field agree that this is a definite detection. Instruments of the future, with better ability to detect tiny star wiggles, will ultimately decide if the planet is real.

Our image shows an artist conception of what the the “cold, hostile desert” surface of the planet around Barnard’s Star, with a temperature of -270 degrees Centigrade, might look like. (You will need to take your parka if you go.)