Image Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls
The Perseid meteor shower, one of the biggest meteor showers of the year, will be at its brightest early in the morning on Wednesday, August 12. Read on for some tips on how to watch the night sky this week – and to find out: what exactly are the Perseids, anyway?
Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls
Your best chance to spot the Perseids will be between 2 AM and dawn (local time) the morning of August 12. Find a dark spot, avoid bright lights (yes, that includes your phone) and get acclimated to the night sky.
Your eyes should be at peak viewing capacity after about 30 minutes; though the Moon may block out some of the dimmer meteors, you should still be able to see up to 15-20 an hour. If you’re not an early bird, you can try and take a look soon after sunset (around 9 PM) on the 11th, though you may not see as many Perseids then.
Credit: NASA/MEO
If it’s too cloudy, or too bright, to go skywatching where you are, you can try again Wednesday or Thursday night – or just stay indoors and watch the Perseids online!
Our Meteor Watch program will be livestreaming the Perseids from Huntsville, Alabama on Facebook (weather permitting), starting around 9 p.m. EDT on August 11 and continuing through sunrise.
Because all of a meteor shower’s meteors have similar orbits, they appear to come from the same place in the sky – a point called the radiant.
The radiant for the Perseids, as you might guess from the name, is in the constellation Perseus, found near Aries and Taurus in the night sky.
Credit: NASA/Joel Kowsky
Right! The Perseids are actually fragments of the comet Swift-Tuttle, which orbits within our solar system.
If you want to learn more about the Perseids, visit our Watch the Skies blog or check out our monthly “What’s Up” video series. Happy viewing!
Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com
This shows the development of imagery we have for nebulae!
Image: Jack Hughes /Twitter: @jackmrhughes
#ScienceIsCool #WeAreTheUniverse #StarSeed #Universe #Beyond #Space
Starry Greetings!
Let’s start hot objects month with our infamous red hypergiant: VY CANIS MAJORIS!
https://www.universetoday.com/39472/vy-canis-majoris/
http://astrobob.areavoices.com/2012/01/28/the-biggest-star-in-the-sky-and-how-to-see-it/
https://www.universetoday.com/13507/what-is-the-biggest-star-in-the-universe/
https://www.space.com/31209-hypergiant-star-vy-canis-major-weight-loss.html
Astronomers used archival data from the Hubble Space Telescope and other observatories to analyze the spectral properties of the white dwarf star G238-44.
Detected elements show that the dead star swallows debris from both the inside and the outside of its system. It's a case of "cosmic cannibalism," say the study's authors, published on the Hubble Telescope website.
G238-44 was a Sun-like star that lost its outer layers and no longer burned fuel through nuclear fusion. The discovery that stellar debris simultaneously captures matter from its asteroid belt and Kuiper belt-like regions at the edge of the solar system, including ice bodies, is significant because it suggests that a "water tank" may be a common feature in outer areas. of planetary systems.
‼️When a star like the Sun expands and becomes a red giant, at the end of its life, it loses mass by releasing its outer layers.
➡️A consequence of this may be the gravitational scattering of small objects, such as asteroids, comets and satellites, to the large planets in the system. Hit in this way, surviving objects can be thrown into very eccentric orbits.‼️
☑️ "After the phase of the red giant, the remaining white dwarf star is compact - no bigger than Earth. The planets get very close to the star and experience strong forces of attraction that break them to pieces, creating a disk of gas and dust that eventually falls on the surface of the white dwarf star, "said Johnson.
Official video with credit where appropriate for the above images.
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Venezuela by Jonas Piontek
Astronomy and the other wonders you witness when you look to the skies.
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