Astronaut Leland Melvin Includes His Rescued Dogs In Best NASA Portrait Ever.

What’s Up for March 2016?

In March, Jupiter, it’s moons and moon shadows will all be visible in the sky. Find out when and where to look up:

Jupiter dominates the evening sky this month, rising at sunset and setting at dawn. On March 8, Jupiter reaches what is called “opposition”. Imagine that Jupiter and the sun are at opposite ends of a straight line, with the Earth in between. This brings Jupiter its closest to Earth, so it shines brighter and appears larger in telescopes.

On the nights of March 14 – 15, March 21 – 22 and March 29, two of Jupiter’s moons will cross the planet’s disk. 

When the planet is at opposition and the sun shines on Jupiter’s moons, we can see the moon’s shadow crossing the planet. There are actually 11 of these double shadow transits in March!

The next six months will be awesome times for you to image Jupiter when it’s highest in the sky; near midnight now, and a little earlier each night through the late summer.

Even through the smallest telescopes or binoculars, you should be able to see the two prominent belts on each side of Jupiter’s equator made up of the four Galilean moons: Io, Europa Ganymede and Calisto. If you have a good enough view, you may even see Jupiter’s Red Spot!

Our Juno spacecraft will arrive at Jupiter on July 4th of this year and will go into orbit around the giant planet. Right now, the Juno mission science team is actively seeking amateur and professional images of the planet. These images are uploaded to a Juno website, and the public is invited to discuss points of interest in Jupiter’s atmosphere.

Locations will later be voted on and the favorites will be targets for JunoCam, the spacecraft’s imaging camera. Once JunoCam has taken the images, they’ll be posted online. Imaging participants can then process these raw mission images and re-upload them for others to view.  

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T-2 hours - JASON-3 and Falcon 9 stand tall on the west coast. For the second time in its history, a SpaceX Falcon 9 v1.1 rocket stands at Vandenberg Air Force Base’s SLC-4E ready for launch. The 224 foot tall rocket will carry the joint NASA/NOAA JASON-3 satellite to study Earth’s oceans. Of the 20 flights of the Falcon 9 to date, all but one has occurred from Cape Canaveral’s SLC-40. The inaugural flight of Falcon 9 v1.1, Cassiope in September 2013, was also the debut of the vehicle on the west coast. The JASON-3 mission will see the final v1.1 Falcon 9 performing the vehicle’s second west coast flight. Liftoff will occur in the middle of a 30-second launch window, at 1:42 pm EST (10:42 am PST). NASA TV coverage started at 11 am EST. Watch the launch live here. p/c: SpaceX/NASA

A photo of Jupiter. Took by Voyager with VGISS on February 01, 1979 at 23:13:23. Detail page on OPUS database.

hubble’s panorama of the carina nebula, some 7500 light years away from earth, and about fifty light years in length here. stars old and new illuminate clouds of cosmic dust and gas, like the clumping hydrogen from which they were born. 

the top star seen at the bisection of the first two panels, part of the eta carinae binary star system (most stars are in binary systems), is estimated  to be more than a hundred times the mass of the sun - large enough to go supernoava in about a million years. 

it also produces four million times as much light as the sun, and was once the second brightest star in the night sky. but surrounding dust and gas has dimmed our view of the star, though it’s still visible in the night sky to all but those in the most light polluted cities.

the fifth panel shows ‘the mystic mountain,’ where nascent stars in the dust cloud are spewing hot ionized gas and dust at 850,000 miles an hour. eventually, the ultraviolet radiation from these stars will blow away the dust, leaving visible the stars, like the cluster seen at the top of the panel, which were formed only half a million years ago.

Jupiter’s moon, Callisto.

Grasping the stars 💫⭐

A recap of January in pictures! Winters the best time for astrophotography which is why I’ve had plenty of opportunities to get outside and capture the cosmos! 

Ultraviolet Coverage of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field

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Tilt Shift filters applied to Hubble Space Telescope photos.

Tilt Shift filters make the foreground and background of images more blurred, changing the depth of field of these images. 

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Shuttle Plume Shadow Points to the Moon

In early 2001 during a launch of Atlantis, the Sun, Earth, Moon, and rocket were all properly aligned for this photogenic coincidence. First, for the space shuttle’s plume to cast a long shadow, the time of day must be either near sunrise or sunset. Only then will the shadow be its longest and extend all the way to the horizon. Finally, during a Full Moon, the Sun and Moon are on opposite sides of the sky. Just after sunset, for example, the Sun is slightly below the horizon, and, in the other direction, the Moon is slightly above the horizon. Therefore, as Atlantis blasted off, just after sunset, its shadow projected away from the Sun toward the opposite horizon, where the Full Moon just happened to be.

Image Credit: Pat McCracken, NASA

(via NASA)