Recently, we announced an invitation for everyone who would like to review space books for Universe Today. We here at Universe Today were overwhelmed by the huge response from readers all over the world. And now, we’re so glad to feature the first book review submitted by Dave DeHetre, an astrophotography enthusiast from Kansas. Here’s Dave’s review of the book, “Celestial Delights: The Best Astronomical Events Through 2020 by Francis Reddy.”

In 2001 or 2002, I can’t remember which, I saw on the TV news that there was going to be a meteor shower that night (the Leonids). At some time late into the night, I found myself unable to sleep, and figured I’d go take a look. I walked barefoot onto my front lawn and looked up to a chaos of movement. There were so many meteors that they almost blended into a static noise pattern. There were dozens of smaller, and several larger streaks across the sky at any given moment. I was impressed. I went inside and woke up my wife, and both of us stood on the lawn, heads craned back, mouths open in awe until impending hypothermia chased us back inside.

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Read the rest of Book Review: Celestial Delights: The Best Astronomical Events Through 2020 (437 words)

© dcast for Universe Today, 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Astronomy, Book Reviews

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Opportunity Phones Home - Dusty Self Portrait from Endeavour Crater on Mars
NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity snapped this self-portrait mosaic showcasing her current work-site location at the rim of Endeavour Crater in the background and dusty solar panels with full view of the High Gain Antenna (HGA) in the foreground as she endures her 5th frigid Martian winter. Inset Mosaic shows dusty Rover Self Portrait in Dec 2011 - Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell/Arizona State Univ. Opportunity is parked on a north-facing slope called Greeley Haven. The panoramic mosaic was assembled from images taken by Opportunity on Martian Sol 2852, 1 February 2012.
Mosaic: NASA/JPL/Cornell/ASU/Marco Di Lorenzo/Kenneth Kremer
Full Self-Portrait below

Opportunity, the Princess of Martian Robots, phoned home dusty new self portraits – above and below – of her beautiful bod basking in the utterly frigid sunshine during her 5th winter on the Red Planet whilst overlooking a humongous crater offering bountiful science.

NASA’s endearing robot is simultaneously carrying out an ambitious array of ground breaking science experiments this winter – providing insight into the mysterious nature of the Martian core – while sitting stationary until the energy augmenting rays of the springtime Sun shower down on Mars from the heavens above.(...)
Read the rest of Opportunity Phones Home Dusty Self-Portraits and Ground Breaking Science (980 words)

© Ken Kremer for Universe Today, 2012. | Permalink | 4 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Curiosity Rover, Mars, Mars Rovers, NASA, Opportunity Rover, Search for Life, Spirit Rover, Water on Mars

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Artist's impression of a binary system containing a stellar-mass black hole called IGR J17091-3624

Astronomers using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory have reported record-breaking wind speeds coming from a stellar-mass black hole.

The “wind”, a high-speed stream of material that’s being drawn off a star orbiting the black hole and ejected back out into space, has been clocked at a staggering 20 million miles per hour — 3% the speed of light! That’s ten times faster than any such wind ever measured from a black hole of its size!

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Read the rest of Chandra Spots a Black Hole’s High-Speed Hurricane (338 words)

© Jason Major for Universe Today, 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: astrophysics, binary system, black hole, Chandra, IGR J17091, winds, X-ray

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MESSENGER wide-angle camera image of Degas crater

This image, acquired by NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft on December 12, 2011, reveals the blue coloration of the 32-mile (52-km) -wide Degas crater located in Mercury’s Sobkou Planitia region.

Degas’ bright central peaks are highly reflective in this view, and may be surrounded by hollows — patches of sunken, eroded ground first identified by MESSENGER last year.

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© Jason Major for Universe Today, 2012. | Permalink | 6 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: crater, Degas, Mercury, MESSENGER, NASA, planet, Solar System

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NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory: A binary system containing a stellar-mass black hole.

SDO AIA image of the Sun and Moon at 14:11 UT on Feb. 21, 2012

The Sun seems to be glowing in traditional Mardi Gras colors in this image, made from three AIA channels taken today at approximately 14:11 UT (about 9:11 a.m. EST) as the Moon passed between it and the Solar Dynamics Observatory spacecraft. Looks like it’s that time of year again!

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© Jason Major for Universe Today, 2012. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: AIA, HMI, lunar transit, Mardi Gras, Moon, NASA, SDO, sun

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GJ1214b, shown in this artist’s view, is a super-Earth orbiting a red dwarf star 40 light-years from Earth. Credit: NASA, ESA, and D. Aguilar (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics)

Would Kevin Costner’s character in the movie “Waterworld” be at home on this exoplanet? The planet GJ 1214b was discovered in 2009 and was one of the first planets where an atmosphere was detected. In 2010, scientists were able to measure the atmosphere, finding it likely was composed mainly of water. Now, with infrared spectra taken during transit observations by the Hubble Space Telescope, scientists say this world is even more unique, and that it represents a new class of planet: a waterworld underneath a thick, steamy atmosphere.

“GJ 1214b is like no planet we know of,” said Zachary Berta of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA). “A huge fraction of its mass is made up of water.”
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© nancy for Universe Today, 2012. | Permalink | 19 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Extrasolar Planets, GJ 1214b, Hubble Space Telescope

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Hubble Space Telescope News: Exoplanet GJ 1214b (artist's impression)Observations by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have come up with a new class of planet, a waterworld enshrouded by a thick, steamy atmosphere. It’s smaller than Uranus but larger than Earth.

Atacama Starry Nights: Episode I

The Atacama Desert of Chile has been called “an astronomer’s paradise,” with its stunningly dark, steady and transparent skies. It is home to some of the world’s leading telescopes, such as the Very Large Telescope (VLT) is located on Paranal. Babak Tafreshi, an astronomer, journalist and director of The World at Night (TWAN) is creating a series of timelapse videos from Paranal, and this is his latest. Just beautiful. You can see more at his Vimeo page.

© nancy for Universe Today, 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Observatories, Timelapse, Videos

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Newly detected series of narrow linear troughs are known as graben, and they formed in highland materials on the lunar farside. These graben are located on a topographic rise with several hundred meters of relief revealed in topography derived from LROC stereo images. Image Credit: NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University/Smithsonian Institution

Recent images from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera provide evidence that the lunar crust may be pulling apart in certain areas. The images reveal small trenches less than a kilometer in length, and less than a few hundred meters wide. Only a small number of these features, known as graben, have been discovered on the lunar surface.

There are several clues in the high-resolution images that provide evidence for recent geologic activity on the Moon.

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© Ray Sanders for Universe Today, 2012. | Permalink | 12 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: ASU, Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter

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Long Exposure Photograph of the ISS Credit: Mark Humpage

If you have seen the International Space Station (ISS) pass over a few times with your own eyes, (here’s our guide on seeing it) you may want to have a go at photographing it.

Photographing the ISS is very worthwhile and gratifying. There are two basic methods; one being easy and the other being a little more difficult. Both methods are incredibly rewarding and good results can be obtained fairly quickly, once you have mastered the basics. (...)
Read the rest of A Beginner’s Guide to Photographing The International Space Station (ISS) (557 words)

© Adrian West for Universe Today, 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: international space station, ISS

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A two-stage Terrier-Black Brant rocket arced through aurora 200 miles above Earth as the Magnetosphere-Ionosphere Coupling in the Alfvén resonator (MICA) mission investigated the underlying physics of the northern lights. Stage one of the rocket has just separated and is seen falling back to Earth. Photo by Terry E. Zaperach, NASA.

Over the weekend, a two-stage sounding rocket launched into a sky shimmering with green aurora. On board were instruments that will help shed new light on the physical processes that create the Northern Lights and further our understanding of the complex Sun-Earth connection.

“We’re investigating what’s called space weather,” said Steven Powell from Cornell University. “Space weather is caused by the charged particles that come from the Sun and interact with the Earth’s magnetic field. We don’t directly feel those effects as humans, but our electronic systems do.”
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Read the rest of Dramatic Rocket Launch Into an Aurora (343 words)

© nancy for Universe Today, 2012. | Permalink | 4 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: aurora, launches, Poker Flat Range

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ESA Top News: ESA and the French space agency, CNES, are inviting 60 Twitter followers to a joint European SpaceTweetup in Toulouse, France, for the docking of ATV Edoardo Amaldi to the International Space Station next month.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory News and Features: A NASA-led science team has created an accurate, high-resolution map of the height of Earth's forests.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory News and Features: Mating of NASA's NuSTAR observatory to its Pegasus rocket is underway.

ESA Top News: The three satellites that make up ESA’s Swarm magnetic field mission were presented to the media today. Following a demanding testing programme, the satellites were displayed in the cleanroom before they are shipped to Russia for their July launch.

Gemini Observatory : Figure 1: Gemini Multi-Object Spectrograph (on Gemini North, GMOS-N) observation of the “Plutino” binary system 2007 TY430, which is located nearly 40 astronomical units (AU) from the Sun. (The average distance between the Earth and Sun is 1 AU.) The pair is separated by about 42,000 km, which appears here at maximum separation of only 0.7 arcsecond on the sky. read more

Science and Technology Facilities Council News and Press Releases: Like all observatories, the Joint Astronomy Centre (JAC) routinely tracks the number of published scientific papers each year based on data from our two telescopes - this is then used as a measure of the observatory's productivity. We are delighted to report that 2011 saw both telescopes setting new records for this number of publications

ESA Top News: PR 3 2012 - ESA’s Automated Transfer Vehicles (ATVs) are an essential contribution by Europe to running the International Space Station. Naming the fifth after Belgian scientist Georges Lemaître continues the tradition of drawing on great European visionaries to reflect Europe’s deep roots in science, technology and culture.

HubbleSite NewsCenter -- Latest News Releases: Get larger image formats Astronomers are watching a delayed broadcast of a spectacular outburst from the unstable, behemoth double-star system Eta Carinae, an event initially seen on Earth nearly 170 years ago. Dubbed the "Great Eruption," the outburst first caught the attention of sky watchers in 1837 and was observed through 1858. But astronomers didn't have sophisticated science instruments to accurately record the star system's petulant activity. Luckily for today's astronomers, some of the light from the eruption took an indirect path to Earth and is just arriving now, providing an opportunity to analyze the outburst in detail. The wayward light was heading in a different direction, away from our planet, when it bounced off dust clouds lingering far from the turbulent stars and was rerouted to Earth, an effect called a "light echo." Because of its longer path, the light reached Earth 170 years later than the light that arrived directly.