The evening sky has provided some real treats lately. For the Northern Hemisphere, we see Mars, small and red, and Saturn with its rings flattening out, visible shortly after sunset in the western sky. In the southeast is Jupiter, with its many moons and details. On July 16 and 17 we had the Full Moon sitting closely to Jupiter all night.
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   If you are a Northern Hemisphere early riser, you may be able to catch a glimpse of Comet Boattini as a naked eye object during July. Boattini is not an impressive-looking comet, but it is there to see. The comet will not be an easy find, since it rises only a few degrees above the eastern horizon before sunrise. The comet rises higher in the sky each night, but the Moon will increase in brightness as the month progresses.
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   We are now 100 years after the impact of an asteroid of immense size. This impact is still the talk of asteroid observers and researchers.  It exploded over a point in the old Siberian Desert in the northern part of Russia. The place is Tunguska.

   Researchers are still finding out information about the Tunguska Blast of ‘08, and it still awes people when they think about the power that had to have been unleashed by the collision of the asteroid as it collided with Earth and Earth’s atmosphere.
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   No, I’m not thinking about Jimmi Hendrix. Well, maybe a little, especially when California is covered with so much smoke from the wild fires that it is turning the Sun purple.

   The 1 micron-sized ash particles that are floating in the atmosphere along the west coastal region of the U.S.A. scatter the red light and allow more blue light through. The combined effect is to make white light appear with a purple hue. The smoke has caused such a thick layer in the air that people are ordered to stay inside as much as possible. The thick pollution also makes observing the Sun without proper filters easy. (IT IS NOT RECOMMENDED TO LOOK DIRECTLY AT THE SUN WITHOUT PROPER FILTERS.) More information can be found at spaceweather.com.

   I recently received a note from Manoj Pai, India, through one of the online groups. Manoj informed me that a famous science writer from that part of the world had passed away. Professor G.T. Narayana Rao wrote books on science and often wrote against the pseudo sciences, especially astrology. Since Manoj felt that the news was important enough to share with people in other countries, I thought I would pass some information and links to more.

   Rao will be missed in Kannada. He wrote science textbooks, science literature and articles for various publications. He also made presentations to the scientific community. Some links to his work and work about Prof. G.T. Narayano Rao were sent to me by Manoj Pai: “Four Honored with Doctorate“, an article in the Kannada language, “What the Stars Foretell for our Avivekanandas.”

   Not knowing the culture of India, I hope I wrote the above information appropriately.

MESSENGER (Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geochemistry, and
Ranging), the first space mission designed to orbit Mercury was launched on August 3, 2004. On January 14, 2008, the Narrow Angle Camera (NAC), part of the Mercury Dual Imaging System (MDIS) aboard the spacecraft, captured new and different views of the elusive planet. http://messenger.jhuapl.edu/gallery/sciencePhotos/view.php?gallery_id=2Photos of two of the larger craters, located near the planet’s south pole, depict images of dark halos surrounding crater rims. This information  suggests that these craters were formed more recently than others of similar size and may have been formed by ejectae from asteroid or comet impacts or from asteroid or comet explosions melting portions of the rocky planet’s surface and splashing these so called “impact melts” across the area. Scientists are carefully studying the acquired images to determine the composition of the newly revealed subsurface material in attempt to extract Mercury’s Material Mysteries.

Mark your calendars for World UFO day this Tuesday, July 2, 2008

celebrating the supposed alien spacecraft landing in Roswell, NM in 1947.

This year Roswell’s UFO Day conference is July 3-6 with many interesting speakers.

The Goddard Planetarium also offers a varied children’s programme.

Thousands of visitors from the US and around the world, attend this yearly convention.

Most of us know that at night we use averted vision to find our way around in the dark. Some of us have better night vision than others, and some of us have better vision in general than others of us. At night we naturally tend to use the rod-cells in our eyes, but doing so leaves us without good resolution. To focus directly on an object and gain details, we must use the cone-cells. If we focus on a star at night, that star may disappear from our vision if it is not bright enough to overcome the eye’s tendency to make it vanish from view. (More on cones and rods)
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As astronomers, we are frequently asked why the Moon looks very large when it is on the horizon. My standard answer is that we have a reference to use along the horizon, so the Moon looks larger than when it is higher in the sky with nothing to compare it to. If a person stretches out his/her arm full length, and puts up a pinky finger, the end of the finger should cover the Moon no matter where it is in the sky. Some people use a dime to cover the sight of the Moon.
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Discovery returns today after a successful 14 day mission to install the Japanese Pressurized Module (JPM) and Kibo’s robotic arm system. Kibo’s logistics module was moved from the Harmony node to the JPM. Having delivered Greg Chamitoff, Discovery returns with Garrett Reisman who was working aboard the Space Station for the past three months. Discovery has two windows of opportunity to land today … Read more …