EvanL
05-23-2004, 04:06 PM
TERENCE ****INSON
THE UNIVERSE
In the middle of the night at this time of year, enough sunlight floods the high atmosphere above Earth's northern regions to provide twilight at midnight in a number of Canadian cities and towns.
Here in Ontario, we still have a couple of hours of full darkness, but a satellite orbiting above us at several hundred kilometres altitude can remain in sunlight — the same light that causes the late-night twilight for many northern communities.
When the satellite flying in that sunlight happens to be the International Space Station — the largest of the thousands of metallic artificial moons that orbit the Earth — it reflects a lot of light.
On Thursday evening, that's exactly what will happen over Ontario. At 10:09 p.m., the space station will be a real dazzler. It will first appear low in the northwest, to the right of Venus (the brightest starlike object in the sky).
By 10:12 p.m., it will ascend to overhead, cruising past the Big Dipper and rapidly gaining in brightness.
At 10:13 p.m., the station will be slightly past overhead as it reaches maximum brilliance, easily outshining all stars and planets except Venus and possibly Jupiter. Whether it exceeds Jupiter (to the upper right of Venus) depends on the orientation of the station's solar panels relative to the observer's location in southern Ontario.
Hurtling in its orbit at 27,000 kilometres per hour, at an altitude of 360 kilometres, the station will take just five minutes to cross the sky. At 10:14 p.m., it will rapidly dim as it dives into the Earth's shadow, ending one of the most prominent passes of the International Space Station this year.
Visit by a celestial puffball: Initially predicted to be an easy naked-eye object, by the time Comet NEAT actually showed up in southern Ontario on May 8, it was interesting but certainly not spectacular.
The best nights were around May 11-15, when observers well away from the city's late-night glow could see it by eye alone — if they knew exactly where to look.
Binoculars showed a stubby tail about two degrees long — pretty good if you have never seen a comet before, but puny compared with the magnificent tails of the two great comets of the recent past, Hale-Bopp (1997) and Hyakutake (1996).
A gallery of Comet NEAT photos, taken primarily from Canada, can be accessed at:
http://skynewsmagazine.com/pages/cometgallery.html
Jupiter losing its spots? Some of the giant oval features that amateur astronomers have observed for decades in the cloudy atmosphere of Jupiter may soon disappear if Philip Marcus, a mechanical engineering professor at the University of California, is correct.
According to Marcus, changes now underway — especially the merger of three white ovals and other alterations in the structure of the planet's cloud belts — signal the end of Jupiter's current 70-year climate cycle.
A whole new family of spots will emerge in the next decade, Marcus predicts.
Fans of the Great Red Spot can rest easy, though. The most famous of Jupiter's vortices — often compared to a hurricane the size of the Earth — will stay put, he says.
THE UNIVERSE
In the middle of the night at this time of year, enough sunlight floods the high atmosphere above Earth's northern regions to provide twilight at midnight in a number of Canadian cities and towns.
Here in Ontario, we still have a couple of hours of full darkness, but a satellite orbiting above us at several hundred kilometres altitude can remain in sunlight — the same light that causes the late-night twilight for many northern communities.
When the satellite flying in that sunlight happens to be the International Space Station — the largest of the thousands of metallic artificial moons that orbit the Earth — it reflects a lot of light.
On Thursday evening, that's exactly what will happen over Ontario. At 10:09 p.m., the space station will be a real dazzler. It will first appear low in the northwest, to the right of Venus (the brightest starlike object in the sky).
By 10:12 p.m., it will ascend to overhead, cruising past the Big Dipper and rapidly gaining in brightness.
At 10:13 p.m., the station will be slightly past overhead as it reaches maximum brilliance, easily outshining all stars and planets except Venus and possibly Jupiter. Whether it exceeds Jupiter (to the upper right of Venus) depends on the orientation of the station's solar panels relative to the observer's location in southern Ontario.
Hurtling in its orbit at 27,000 kilometres per hour, at an altitude of 360 kilometres, the station will take just five minutes to cross the sky. At 10:14 p.m., it will rapidly dim as it dives into the Earth's shadow, ending one of the most prominent passes of the International Space Station this year.
Visit by a celestial puffball: Initially predicted to be an easy naked-eye object, by the time Comet NEAT actually showed up in southern Ontario on May 8, it was interesting but certainly not spectacular.
The best nights were around May 11-15, when observers well away from the city's late-night glow could see it by eye alone — if they knew exactly where to look.
Binoculars showed a stubby tail about two degrees long — pretty good if you have never seen a comet before, but puny compared with the magnificent tails of the two great comets of the recent past, Hale-Bopp (1997) and Hyakutake (1996).
A gallery of Comet NEAT photos, taken primarily from Canada, can be accessed at:
http://skynewsmagazine.com/pages/cometgallery.html
Jupiter losing its spots? Some of the giant oval features that amateur astronomers have observed for decades in the cloudy atmosphere of Jupiter may soon disappear if Philip Marcus, a mechanical engineering professor at the University of California, is correct.
According to Marcus, changes now underway — especially the merger of three white ovals and other alterations in the structure of the planet's cloud belts — signal the end of Jupiter's current 70-year climate cycle.
A whole new family of spots will emerge in the next decade, Marcus predicts.
Fans of the Great Red Spot can rest easy, though. The most famous of Jupiter's vortices — often compared to a hurricane the size of the Earth — will stay put, he says.