Category Archives: Education

Night sky highlights for December 2024

December 2, 2024 TopSpacer

Check out the night sky this month, December 2024. Here are videos and links to websites highlighting the top sights to observe.

** What’s Up: December 2024 Skywatching Tips from NASA – NASA JPL

What are some skywatching highlights in December 2024?

This month, enjoy dazzling views of Venus as the “Evening Star,” Jupiter at its brightest during opposition, and Mars doubling in brightness, and look for the Winter Triangle. The Geminid meteor shower peaks under challenging moonlight conditions, but you might get lucky and catch a shooting star that week before sunrise!

0:00 Intro
0:14 December planet highlights
1:31 The Winter Stars
1:57 The Winter Triangle
2:42 Geminid Meteor Shower
3:14 December Moon phases

Additional information about topics covered in this episode of What’s Up, along with still images from the video, and the video transcript, are available at https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/skywatch….

** What to see in the night sky: December 2024 – BBC Sky at Night Magazine

Pete Lawrence and Paul Abel reveal their pick of the best things to see in the night sky this month.

** Sky & Telescope’s Sky Tour Podcast – December 2024 | Jupiter Shines, Winter Stars, and Many Meteors – Sky & Telescope Youtube

Our monthly Sky Tour #astronomy #podcast provides an informative and entertaining 10-minute guided tour of the #night #sky. Join us for the December 2024 episode and mark the #solstice, be amazed by #Jupiter, welcome the arrival of winter’s bright #stars, and prep for what’s usually the year’s best #meteorshower.

Listen and subscribe to this podcast at https://skyandtelescope.org/observing/ and don’t forget to subscribe to S&T’s YouTube channel to get alerts about new videos, including this monthly podcast.

ESO: First close-up image of a star outside of the Milky Way

November 21, 2024 TopSpacer

A new report from the European Southern Observatory (ESO):

Astronomers take the first close-up picture
of a star outside our galaxy

This is an image of the star WOH G64, taken by the GRAVITY instrument on the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope Interferometer (ESO’s VLTI). This is the first close-up picture of a star outside our own galaxy, the Milky Way. The star is located in the Large Magellanic Cloud, over 160 000 light-years away. The bright oval at the centre of this image is a dusty cocoon that enshrouds the star. A fainter elliptical ring around it could be the inner rim of a dusty torus, but more observations are needed to confirm this feature.

“For the first time, we have succeeded in taking a zoomed-in image of a dying star in a galaxy outside our own Milky Way,”

says Keiichi Ohnaka, an astrophysicist from Universidad Andrés Bello in Chile. Located a staggering 160 000 light-years from us, the star WOH G64 was imaged thanks to the impressive sharpness offered by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope Interferometer (ESO’s VLTI). The new observations reveal a star puffing out gas and dust, in the last stages before it becomes a supernova.

“We discovered an egg-shaped cocoon closely surrounding the star,” says Ohnaka, the lead author of a study reporting the observations published today in Astronomy & Astrophysics. “We are excited because this may be related to the drastic ejection of material from the dying star before a supernova explosion.”

While astronomers have taken about two dozen zoomed-in images of stars in our galaxy, unveiling their properties, countless other stars dwell within other galaxies, so far away that observing even one of them in detail has been extremely challenging. Up until now.

The newly imaged star, WOH G64, lies within the Large Magellanic Cloud, one of the small galaxies that orbits the Milky Way. Astronomers have known about this star for decades and have appropriately dubbed it the ‘behemoth star’. With a size roughly 2000 times that of our Sun, WOH G64 is classified as a red supergiant.

Ohnaka’s team had long been interested in this behemoth star. Back in 2005 and 2007, they used ESO’s VLTI in Chile’s Atacama Desert to learn more about the star’s features, and carried on studying it in the years since. But an actual image of the star had remained elusive.

For the desired picture, the team had to wait for the development of one of the VLTI’s second-generation instruments, GRAVITY. After comparing their new results with other previous observations of WOH G64, they were surprised to find that the star had become dimmer over the past decade.

“We have found that the star has been experiencing a significant change in the last 10 years, providing us with a rare opportunity to witness a star’s life in real time,”

says Gerd Weigelt, an astronomy professor at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany and a co-author of the study. In their final life stages, red supergiants like WOH G64 shed their outer layers of gas and dust in a process that can last thousands of years.

“This star is one of the most extreme of its kind, and any drastic change may bring it closer to an explosive end,”

adds co-author Jacco van Loon, Keele Observatory Director at Keele University, UK, who has been observing WOH G64 since the 1990s.

The team thinks that these shed materials may also be responsible for the dimming and for the unexpected shape of the dust cocoon around the star. The new image shows that the cocoon is stretched-out, which surprised scientists, who expected a different shape based on previous observations and computer models. The team believes that the cocoon’s egg-like shape could be explained by either the star’s shedding or by the influence of a yet-undiscovered companion star.

As the star becomes fainter, taking other close-up pictures of it is becoming increasingly difficult, even for the VLTI. Nonetheless, planned updates to the telescope’s instrumentation, such as the future GRAVITY+, promise to change this soon.

“Similar follow-up observations with ESO instruments will be important for understanding what is going on in the star,”

concludes Ohnaka.

The Large Magellanic Cloud is a satellite galaxy to the Milky Way, located 160 000 light-years away from us. Despite the staggering distance, the GRAVITY instrument of the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope Interferometer (ESO’s VLTI), managed to take a closed-up picture of the giant star WOH G64. This image shows the location of the star within the Large Magellanic Cloud, with with some of the VLTI’s Auxiliary Telescopes in the foreground.

More information

ESO’s Very Large Telescope Interferometer is able to combine light collected by the telescopes of ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), either the four 8-metre Unit Telescopes or the four smaller Auxiliary Telescopes, creating highly detailed pictures of the cosmos. Effectively, this makes the VLTI a “virtual” telescope with a resolution equivalent to the maximum distance between the individual telescopes. This process is highly complex and needs instruments especially dedicated to this task. Back in 2005 and 2007 Ohnaka’s team had access to the first generation of these instruments: MIDI. While impressive for its time, those observations with MIDI only combined the light from two telescopes. Now, researchers have access to GRAVITY, a second-generation instrument able to capture the light of four telescopes. Its improved sensitivity and resolution made the image of WOH G64 possible. But there is more to come. GRAVITY+ is a planned upgrade of GRAVITY which will be able to take advantage of different technological updates performed at the VLTI and VLT. With these, the VLTI will be able to see objects fainter and farther than ever before.

This research was presented in a paper to appear in Astronomy and Astrophysics (https://www.aanda.org/10.1051/0004-6361/202451820).

…

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Night sky highlights for November 2024

November 2, 2024 TopSpacer

Check out the night sky this month, November 2024. Here are videos and a list of websites highlighting the top sights to observe.

** What’s Up: November 2024 Skywatching Tips from NASA – NASA JPL

What are some skywatching highlights in November 2024?

This month, catch planetary views of Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars, witness a close pass of the Parker Solar Probe by Venus, and get ready for an occultation of the bright star Spica by the Moon.

0:00 Intro
0:20 November planet highlights
1:38 Venus & Parker Solar Probe’s flyby
3:03 Occultation of Spica
4:25 October photo highlights
4:38 November Moon phases

** Comet A3, meteor showers and Solar System moons. What’s in the night sky, November 2024 – BBC Sky at Night Magazine

Pete Lawrence and Paul Abel reveal what’s in the night sky in November 2024, including where Comet C/2023 A3 will be, this month’s meteor showers and transits of Jupiter’s and Saturn’s moons.

00:00 Intro
00:15 Inner Solar System
03:20 Outer Solar System
10:16 Galilean Moons
12:18 Saturn’s moons
12:58 Face in Albategnius, Eyes of Clavius
13:58 Jupiter and 11th mag star
15:28 Northern Taurid meteor shower
16:05 Star Tipped Mountain and perigee full Moon
17:50 Leonid meteor shower
17:26 Titan shadow transit
18:46 Comet C/2023 A3 Tsuchinshan-ATLAS
20:28 Deep sky

** Sky & Telescope’s Sky Tour Podcast – November 2024 | Meteor Showers, the Moon, and Mars – Sky & Telescope Youtube

Our monthly Sky Tour #astronomy #podcast provides an informative and entertaining 10-minute guided tour of the #night #sky. Join us for the November 2024 episode and get in sync with the #Moon’s phases, watch the #sky for all five bright #planets (#jupiter, #venus, #mars, #mercury, #saturn), get the lowdown on a #celestial queen, and get ready for three #meteorshower viewings.

Listen and subscribe to this podcast at https://skyandtelescope.org/observing/ and don’t forget to subscribe to S&T’s YouTube channel to get alerts about new videos, including this monthly podcast

Learn more about #observing and #stargazing on our website, https://skyandtelescope.org/ and subscribe to our monthly magazine at https://skyandtelescope.org/subscribe.

This video is sponsored by Celestron – https://www.celestron.com/.

ESO: VLT telescope captures a dark wolf in the sky

October 31, 2024 TopSpacer

A new report from the European Southern Observatory (ESO):

New ESO image captures a dark wolf in the sky

Fittingly nicknamed the Dark Wolf Nebula, this cosmic cloud was captured in a 283-million-pixel image by the VLT Survey Telescope (VST) at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile. Located around 5300 light-years from Earth, the cold clouds of cosmic dust create the illusion of a wolf-like silhouette against a colourful backdrop of glowing gas clouds.

For Halloween, the European Southern Observatory (ESO) reveals this spooktacular image of a dark nebula that creates the illusion of a wolf-like silhouette against a colourful cosmic backdrop. Fittingly nicknamed the Dark Wolf Nebula, it was captured in a 283-million-pixel image by the VLT Survey Telescope (VST) at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile.

Found in the constellation Scorpius, near the centre of the Milky Way on the sky, the Dark Wolf Nebula is located around 5300 light-years from Earth. This image takes up an area in the sky equivalent to four full Moons, but is actually part of an even larger nebula called Gum 55. If you look closely, the wolf could even be a werewolf, its hands ready to grab unsuspecting bystanders…

If you thought that darkness equals emptiness, think again. Dark nebulae are cold clouds of cosmic dust, so dense that they obscure the light of stars and other objects behind them. As their name suggests, they do not emit visible light, unlike other nebulae. Dust grains within them absorb visible light and only let through radiation at longer wavelengths, like infrared light. Astronomers study these clouds of frozen dust because they often contain new stars in the making.

Of course, tracing the wolf’s ghost-like presence in the sky is only possible because it contrasts with a bright background. This image shows in spectacular detail how the dark wolf stands out against the glowing star-forming clouds behind it. The colourful clouds are built up mostly of hydrogen gas and glow in reddish tones excited by the intense UV radiation from the newborn stars within them.

Some dark nebulae, like the Coalsack Nebula, can be seen with the naked eye –– and play a key role in how First Nations interpret the sky [1] –– but not the Dark Wolf. This image was created using data from the VLT Survey Telescope, which is owned by the National Institute for Astrophysics in Italy (INAF) and is hosted at ESO’s Paranal Observatory, in Chile’s Atacama Desert. The telescope is equipped with a specially designed camera to map the southern sky in visible light.

The picture was compiled from images taken at different times, each one with a filter letting in a different colour of light. They were all captured during the VST Photometric Hα Survey of the Southern Galactic Plane and Bulge (VPHAS+), which has studied some 500 million objects in our Milky Way. Surveys like this help scientists to better understand the life cycle of stars within our home galaxy, and the obtained data are made publicly available through the ESO science portal. Explore this treasure trove of data yourself: who knows what other eerie shapes you will uncover in the dark?

Notes

[1] The Mapuche people of south-central Chile refer to the Coalsack Nebula as ‘pozoko’ (water well), and the Incas called it ‘yutu’ (a partridge-like bird).

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Night sky highlights for October 2024

October 2, 2024 TopSpacer

Check out the night sky this month, October 2024. Here are videos highlighting the top sights to observe.

** What’s Up: October 2024 Skywatching Tips from NASA – NASA JPL

What are some skywatching highlights in October 2024?

A potentially bright comet (C/2023 A3) to look for after mid-month, good opportunities to spy the ocean world NASA’s launching to, and the monthly dance of four planets with the Moon.

0:00 Intro
0:21 October planet visibility
0:59 Viewing Europa
2:10 Moon & planet pairings
2:38 Comet C/2023 A3
3:58 September photo highlights
4:12 October Moon phases

** Tonight’s Sky: October 2024 – Space Telescope Science Institute – Tonight’s Sky

Crisp, clear October nights are full of celestial showpieces. Find Pegasus, the flying horse of Greek myth, to pinpoint dense globular star clusters and galaxies, and keep watching for space-based views of M15, NGC 7331, and the Andromeda Galaxy.

About this Series … “Tonight’s Sky” is a monthly video of constellations you can observe in the night sky. The series is produced by the Space Telescope Science Institute, home of science operations for the Hubble Space Telescope, in partnership with NASA’s Universe of Learning. This is a recurring show, and you can find more episodes—and other astronomy videos—at https://hubblesite.org/resource-gallery/tonights-sky.

** Comet C/2023 A3 and other October 2024 stargazing highlights – BBC Sky at Night Magazine

What’s in the night sky this month? Astronomers Pete Lawrence and Paul Abel reveal the best things to see in the sky in October 2024, including Comet A3, Saturn and Jupiter moon events, meteor showers and the deep sky.

00:00 Intro
00:14 Inner planets
03:45 Outer planets
10:42 Thin crescent Moon
12:37 Saturn and moon events
13:54 Southern Taurid meteor shower
14:48 Saturn and moons Titan and Dione
15:34 Perigee full Moon
16:48 moon and Pleiades
17:10 Orionid meteor shower
17:27 Ganymede shadow transit of Jupiter
19:00 Comet C/2023 A3
22:58 Stars, constellations and deep sky

** Sky & Telescope’s Sky Tour Podcast – October 2024 | A Comet, Andromeda, and Pegasus – Sky & Telescope Youtube

Our monthly Sky Tour #astronomy #podcast provides an informative and entertaining 10-minute guided tour of the #nighttime #sky. Join us for the October 2024 episode and ponder the #Moon’s whereabouts; spot a fast-moving #comet, learn what #andromeda and #pegasus have in common, circle around the pole star #Polaris, and watch for meteors shed by #halleyscomet.