Today's Word Of The Day Is "earthshine" Which Is When The Earth Reflects The Sun's Light So That It Makes

Wed. Nov. 15 - We will be closed tonight due to cloud cover.

Yuck:

Public nights are here!

Wed. Nov. 8 - Observatory closed due to cloud cover. We'll try again next week.

Wed. 4/16: We'll be open from 8:30 - 9:45 tonight!

Picture of the Day!

The Pencil Nebula, 800 light-years away and nearly 5 light-years long, is a small part of the Vela supernova remnant. This supernova shock wave travels through space at over 500,000 kilometers per hour!

Image credit: Helge Buesing

The brown dwarf W1935 is a bit of a mystery. Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope picked up glowing methane—a sign that the object’s upper atmosphere is being heated. But the brown dwarf has no host star, so where could the heat be coming from?

In our solar system, Jupiter and Saturn show methane emission due to the presence of auroras—what we call the Northern Lights on Earth. W1935 might also have auroras, which could be powered by energetic particles from a nearby, active moon, like Jupiter’s Io: https://webbtelescope.pub/4aKMkBF

Cosmic fireworks ahead! This dramatically colorful image shows MACS J0717, one of the most complex and distorted galaxy clusters known. It was formed by the collision of four smaller galaxy clusters. A visible-light image from the Hubble Space Telescope shows hundreds of galaxies, both within the cluster and throughout the background, and myriad foreground stars. A pink overlay represents radio data from the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array, which traces enormous shock waves and turbulence. The diffuse emission in blue, from the Chandra X-ray Observatory, highlights gas with temperatures of millions of degrees. Credit: NASA, ESA, CXC, NRAO/AUI/NSF, STScI, and R. van Weeren (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics); NASA, ESA, J. Lotz (STScI), and the Hubble Frontier Fields team. ALT TEXT: Hundreds of small galaxies of various shapes on the black background of space. They are concentrated near the center of the image. Dramatic pink ribbons form a curving L shape near the center. Below them, a linear pink feature with a blue blob in the middle extends from upper left to lower right. Diffuse blue light fills much of the field of view and is brightest just to the right of the pink ribbons.

Wow - the visible star at the center of the planetary nebula is an A-type giant star. It's the companion of the white dwarf which spawned the nebula itself. (Loved the pic so much I had to read about the object a little).

NGC 1514 // Marc Fischer

Pumpkin space latte, anyone? ☕

Hubble captured this festive array of stars, Terzan 12, found in the Milky Way about 15,000 light-years from Earth. The stars in this cluster are bound together by gravity in a sphere-like shape and are shrouded in gas and dust. As the starlight travels through that gas and dust to Earth, blue light scatters, leaving the redder wavelengths to come through.

Download the full-resolution image here.

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WOW!

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Zoozve, my beloved