Archive
Close Pairing Of Venus And Mars On February 20-21
Credit: Sky & Telescope Diagrame.
Look west in twilight this Friday and Saturday (February 20th and 21st), and an unusual astronomical sight will await you.
Brilliant Venus and faint Mars will be paired remarkably close in the sky. And on Friday evening, the crescent Moon joins them in a tight bunch, a beautiful sight. On Saturday Venus and Mars appear even closer together, with the crescent Moon now looking down on them from above.
When it comes to “eyeball astronomy,” nothing is more satisfying than to see a pair of celestial objects appear close together in the sky, what astronomers call a conjunction. And 2015, notes Sky & Telescope’s longtime contributing editor Fred Schaaf, truly deserves to be called the “Year of the Conjunctions.” In January we watched Venus and Mercury come together in the evening twilight, and now comes a similarly close pairing of Venus and Mars. On Saturday they’ll appear 1/2° apart for viewers in North America. That’s about the width of a pencil held at arm’s length.
Link To Full Story
Venus Express Goes Gently Into The Night
Copyright ESA–C. Carreau
ESA’s Venus Express has ended its eight-year mission after far exceeding its planned life. The spacecraft exhausted its propellant during a series of thruster burns to raise its orbit following the low-altitude aerobraking earlier this year.
Since its arrival at Venus in 2006, Venus Express had been on an elliptical 24‑hour orbit, traveling 66 000 km above the south pole at its furthest point and to within 200 km over the north pole on its closest approach, conducting a detailed study of the planet and its atmosphere.
However, after eight years in orbit and with propellant for its propulsion system running low, Venus Express was tasked in mid-2014 with a daring aerobraking campaign, during which it dipped progressively lower into the atmosphere on its closest approaches to the planet.
Normally, the spacecraft would perform routine thruster burns to ensure that it did not come too close to Venus and risk being lost in the atmosphere. But this unique adventure was aimed at achieving the opposite, namely reducing the altitude and allowing an exploration of previously uncharted regions of the atmosphere.
Venus And Jupiter: Superclose Conjunction Before Dawn On August 18th
If you’re willing to rise before dawn on Monday, August 18th, you’ll be rewarded with the sight of the closest planet pairing of 2014 — and not just any planets, but the two brightest ones: Venus and Jupiter.
On that morning, these two worlds will form a striking “double star” low in the eastern sky. They will appear only 1⁄3° apart — a bit tighter than that in the eastern U.S. — close enough for both to be easily covered by the tip of your little finger at arm’s length.
You can start watching for Venus and Jupiter after they’ve cleared the east-northeastern horizon, as early as 80 minutes before sunrise, but make sure your view in that direction is wide open and unobstructed by trees or buildings. The best views will probably be from 60 to 30 minutes before sunrise, depending on how clear the air is, when the planets will be not quite so low.
As close as this conjunction is for early risers in North America, the pairing will be even tighter for skywatchers in Europe. From there, Venus and Jupiter will appear just 0.2° apart, about half the width of a pencil held at arm’s length.
The Glory Of Venus
The glory on Venus cloud tops in false colors. © ESA/MPS/DLR/IDA
When travelling above the clouds, airplane passengers sometimes witness a glory: a light phenomenon similar to a ring-shaped rainbow. Droplets in the clouds back-scattering the sunlight are responsible for this appearance. A team of scientists led by the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) in Göttingen have now fully imaged a glory on Venus – and thus for the first time on a planet other than Earth. The data was obtained by ESA’s space probe Venus Express. The data imply that the sulfuric acid in Venus’ cloud tops could additionally contain pure sulfur or iron chloride – and may help solve one of the oldest mysteries of Venus research.
The veil of clouds surrounding Venus is as beautiful as it is hostile to life. Sulfuric acid constitutes their main component. Together with the planet’s dense atmosphere composed mainly of carbon dioxide, this cloud cover causes Venus’ extreme greenhouse effect. Temperatures of more than 400 degrees Celsius are common on the planet’s surface. The exact composition of the creamy-yellow clouds is still unclear. Almost 90 years ago, ground-based observations had shown that these clouds “swallow” ultraviolet light of certain wavelengths. Sulfuric acid alone cannot be responsible for this effect.
NASA Cassini Spacecraft Provides New View Of Saturn And Earth
NASA has released a natural-color image of Saturn from space, the first in which Saturn, its moons and rings, and Earth, Venus and Mars, all are visible.
The new panoramic mosaic of the majestic Saturn system taken by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, which shows the view as it would be seen by human eyes, was unveiled at the Newseum in Washington on Tuesday.
Cassini’s imaging team processed 141 wide-angle images to create the panorama. The image sweeps 404,880 miles (651,591 kilometers) across Saturn and its inner ring system, including all of Saturn’s rings out to the E ring, which is Saturn’s second outermost ring. For perspective, the distance between Earth and our moon would fit comfortably inside the span of the E ring.
“In this one magnificent view, Cassini has delivered to us a universe of marvels,” said Carolyn Porco, Cassini’s imaging team lead at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo. “And it did so on a day people all over the world, in unison, smiled in celebration at the sheer joy of being alive on a pale blue dot.”
Dramatic Pairing Of Crescent Moon And Venus On September 8th
Soon after the Sun dips below the western horizon on Sunday, September 8th, anyone looking in that direction will see a dramatic sight: a pretty crescent Moon paired closely with the dazzling planet Venus, the “Evening Star.”
“This is one you won’t want to miss,” says Alan MacRobert of Sky & Telescope magazine. “These are the two brightest objects in the nighttime sky.”
Start looking for the pair about 30 minutes after sunset. The farther south and east you are in North America, the closer they’ll appear. From locations along the East Coast, the they’ll be only about 1½° apart — about the width of your index finger at arm’s length. By the time darkness falls on the West Coast, the Moon will have edged slightly farther away.
Full Story: http://www.skyandtelescope.com/about/pressreleases/Moon-and-Venus-September-8th.html
Super-Hurricane-Force Winds On Venus Are Getting Stronger
Venus cloud tops. Credit: ESA/MPS/DLR/IDA
As the closest planet to Earth, Venus is a relatively easy object to observe. However, many mysteries remain, not least the super-rotation of Venus’ atmosphere, which enables high altitude winds to circle the planet in only four days. Now images of cloud features sent back by ESA’s Venus Express orbiter have revealed that these remarkably rapid winds are becoming even faster.
Similar in size to Earth, Venus has an extremely dense, carbon-dioxide-rich atmosphere and the planet’s surface is completely hidden by a blanket of bland, yellowish cloud. Only at ultraviolet wavelengths (and to a lesser extent in the infrared) do striking cloud streaks and individual cells emerge, due to the presence of some unknown UV absorber in the cloud deck.
By tracking the movements of these distinct cloud features, observers have been able to measure the super-hurricane-force winds that sweep around the planet at the cloud tops, some 70 km above the scorching volcanic plains.
Full Story: http://sci.esa.int/science-e/www/object/index.cfm?fobjectid=51937
Also: http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/Venus_Express/The_fast_winds_of_Venus_are_getting_faster
Venus Vortices Go For Chaotic Multi-Storey Strolls Around The Poles
Credit: ESA/VIRTIS/INAF-IASF/Obs. de Paris-LESIA/Universidad del País Vasco (I. Garate-Lopez)
A detailed study of Venus’ South Polar Vortex shows a much more chaotic and unpredictable cyclone than previously thought. The analysis reveals that the center of rotation of the vortex wanders around the pole differently at different altitude levels in the clouds of Venus. In its stroll around the Pole, in layers separated by 20 km, the vortex experiences unpredictable changes in its morphology.
The results of this study are published online in Nature Geoscience today.
The study, entitled ‘A chaotic long-lived vortex at the southern pole of Venus’, used infrared images from VIRTIS instrument onboard the European Space Agency’s Venus Express spacecraft. VIRTIS provides spectral images at different levels of the atmosphere and allows the observation of the lower and upper clouds of Venus.
Full Story: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/03/130324152140.htm
When A Planet Behaves Like A Comet
A comparison of the ionosphere of Venus under different solar wind conditions. Credit: ESA/Wei et al. (2012)
ESA’s Venus Express has made unique observations of Venus during a period of reduced solar wind pressure, discovering that the planet’s ionosphere balloons out like a comet’s tail on its nightside. The ionosphere is a region of weakly electrically charged gas high above the main body of a planet’s atmosphere. Its shape and density are partly controlled by the internal magnetic field of the planet.
For Earth, which has a strong magnetic field, the ionosphere is relatively stable under a range of solar wind conditions. By comparison, Venus does not have its own internal magnetic field and relies instead on interactions with the solar wind to shape its ionosphere. The extent to which this shaping depends on the strength of the solar wind has been controversial, but new results from Venus Express reveal for the first time the effect of a very low solar wind pressure on the ionosphere of an unmagnetised planet.
As this significantly reduced solar wind hit Venus, Venus Express saw the planet’s ionosphere balloon outwards on the planet’s ‘downwind’ nightside, much like the shape of the ion tail seen streaming from a comet under similar conditions.
Full Story: http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/When_a_planet_behaves_like_a_comet
Also: http://sci.esa.int/science-e/www/object/index.cfm?fobjectid=51315
Venus Transit And Lunar Mirror Could Help Astronomers Find Worlds Around Other Stars
When Venus passes in front of the Sun it hides a part of our star’s rotating surface. Because of rotation, the spectrum of the Sun (created splitting the different colours of light using a spectrograph) is slightly different on each side. On one side, the solar surface is rotating towards the observer and so its light will be ‘blueshifted’, meaning the lines seen in a spectrum move towards shorter wavelengths. On the other, the surface is rotating away from the observer, so its light is ‘redshifted’, meaning that the lines move towards longer wavelengths.
By looking at the reflected light from the lunar surface, this is averaged out as a broadening of the various lines. When Venus moves in front of the Sun from east to west, it first blocks out the surface moving towards us and then the surface moving away from us. This causes a distortion in the spectral lines known as the “Rossiter-McLaughlin effect”.
The astronomers realised that the High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS) spectrograph installed on a 3.6m telescope at La Silla in Chile, part of the European Southern Observatory (ESO), would be sensitive enough to detect the effect and that the Moon would be in the right place too. The Moon was slightly ahead of the Earth in its orbit, so ‘saw’ the transit a couple of hours later than terrestrial observers. This also meant that the Moon was in the night time sky in Chile, making it possible for the La Silla telescope to operate safely and observe the change in the solar spectrum.
AstroNews 