Comet ISON has increased in brightness significantly in the past day : Comet ISON Comes to Life! – Homepage Observing/SkyandTelescope.com
Veteran comet observer John Bortle reports that Comet ISON is undergoing a major outburst. It was six times brighter when he observed it this morning (November 14th) than on the previous morning.
Two Russian Cosmonauts made a spacewalk today at the International Space Station and lit a flame within a special device to represent the Olympic flame. This is in commemoration of the upcoming Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, that start on Feb. 7, 2014.
Comet ISON (C/2012 S1) could become visible to low power telescopes and binoculars, and maybe even to the naked eye, in the next few weeks. The website The ISON Atlas aims to help people find out “Where to find Comet ISON in the sky”. The post for this month: OCTOBER 2013 | The ISON Atlas
Here’s an image of the comet taken by Adam Block at the Mt. Lemmon SkyCenter/University of Arizona:
Mercury 7 astronaut Scott Carpenter has died at the age of 88:
Here is a 10 minute documentary about his Aurora 7 flight:
Update: Here’s a nice gallery of images showing Carpenter and family and also middle class life in the early 1960s: Scott Carpenter (1925 – 2013): Rare and Classic Photos of a NASA Legend – LIFE.com
The Juno spacecraft successfully ricocheted from earth yesterday to set itself on course to Jupiter (see earlier posting) : Juno goes into safe mode during Earth flyby – Spaceflight Now.
It went into safe mode, some time around closest approach to earth. In safe mode a spacecraft shuts most everything down except the most essential services and prepares to reboot on command from mission control. It’s a way of dealing with potential computer problems that might otherwise put the system into a permanent hanged state.
Despite this glitch, it looks like everything went well.
Amateur observers around the world were able to track and image the spacecraft during its visit: Amateur Images Show Juno’s ‘Slingshot’ Around Earth Was a Success – Universe Today