Month: January 2020
Nacreous Clouds over Sweden
Vivid and lustrous, wafting iridescent waves of color filled this mountain and skyscape near Tanndalen, Sweden on January 3. Known as nacreous clouds or mother-of-pearl clouds, they are rare. This northern winter season they have been making unforgettable appearances at...
Perihelion to Aphelion
Perihelion for 2020, the point in Earth’s elliptical orbit when it is closest to the Sun, occurred on January 5th. The distance from the Sun doesn’t determine the seasons, though. Those are governed by the tilt of Earth’s axis of...
Galaxies in the River
Large galaxies grow by eating small ones. Even our own galaxy engages in a sort of galactic cannibalism, absorbing small galaxies that are too close and are captured by the Milky Way’s gravity. In fact, the practice is common in...
IC 405: The Flaming Star Nebula
Rippling dust and gas lanes give the Flaming Star Nebula its name. The orange and purple colors of the nebula are present in different regions and are created by different processes. The bright star AE Aurigae, visible toward the image...
Tumultuous Clouds of Jupiter
Some cloud patterns on Jupiter are quite complex. The featured tumultuous clouds were captured in May by NASA’s robotic Juno spacecraft currently orbiting our Solar System’s largest planet. The image was taken when Juno was only about 15,000 kilometers over...
A Starry Night of Iceland
On some nights, the sky is the best show in town. On this night, the sky was not only the best show in town, but a composite image of the sky won an international competition for landscape astrophotography. The featured...
Quadrantids over the Great Wall
Named for a forgotten constellation, the Quadrantid Meteor Shower is an annual event for planet Earth’s northern hemisphere skygazers The shower’s radiant on the sky lies within the old, astronomically obsolete constellation Quadrans Muralis. That location is not far from...
The Fainting of Betelgeuse
Begirt with many a blazing star, Orion the Hunter is one of the most recognizable constellations. In this night skyscape the Hunter’s stars rise in the northern hemisphere’s winter sky on December 30, 2019, tangled in bare trees near Newnan,...
Betelgeuse Imagined
Why is Betelgeuse fading? No one knows. Betelgeuse, one of the brightest and most recognized stars in the night sky, is only half as bright as it used to be only five months ago. Such variability is likely just normal...