The Only Super Moon of 2017

Did you see it. The only Super Moon of 2017 was yesterday and last night. It was 14 percent wider than the average full moon and 30 % brighter. It was glorious. It is the first in a series of three Super Moons. The next will be on  1 January 2018 and the last of the series of three on 31 January.

Super Moons are not really bigger or brighter in an absolute sense, it just seems so because the moon is nearer in its orbit around the Earth by about 10%.

As an additional bonus the last of this series of Super Moons will also be a blue moon. Blue moons are strictly a feature of our calendar. Two full moons in one calendar month make the last one a blue moon. Also the 31 Jnauary Super Moon will be a Lunar eclipse as well, but it will only be visible over the Western half of North America   😒.

When next you see a full moon look for the rabbit in the moon. Yes there is one and it does not take a pair of binoculars to see it.

SO, ENJOY THE NEXT TWO SUPER MOONs. 😊

The Interstellar Asteroid That Just Missed Us

Update on post Re Interstellar Asteroid Near Miss 2017 October.

https://Spaceweather.com  2017 Nov 20 published an update on this once in a Solar Sytem (SS) Lifetime event (a small exaggeration), a near miss by an interstellar asteroid. The thing was about 400 meters long and looked like a cigar. It was made of metal and rock and was spininning around its vertical axis once every 7.3 hours. We first saw it after it had already rounded the Sun and was on its way out of the SS. It missed the Earth by about 15,000,000 miles. The Sun for comparison is only 93.000,000 miles away.

Picture below is an artist's concept and is credit spaceweather.com. See above link for the full story and an animation of the event..

Sun Dogs and Icebows Over Sun City

Did you see the sun dogs and icebows yesterday afternoon, 20 November 2017. It was beautiful 😊.
Just in case you didn't see the event here it is!!! Looks like something from the movie Arrival, doesn't it? It was not a spaceship, it was a natural, but rare event. Enjoy. (Explanation and credits below.)

This photo is a panoramic composite taken from my front yard at 14:42 on 2017 Nov 20 using my Android cell phone with a little help from Google Photos (GP). I took the pictures (5), GP made the panoramic. This was visible for over an hour from all over Sun City. There was more above the rare semi-circle above the Sun (mostly the secondary and tertiary rainnbows) but I couldn't get it in the photo due to glare 😆. The Sun Dogs are the bright spots on eaither side of the Sun created by ice cystals in the atmosphere. The oval around the Sun is an icebow, similar to a raindow but created by ice instead of water, The bight spot at the top is the top of the Sun Pillar that you can barely see between the ground and the top of the photo.

If you pay attention to the sky you can see all kinds of wonderful things even in the middle of the day.😉

J Jeffrey, Host, Sun City Hilton Head Skywatchers, 2017Nov 21.

Astro Goings-on for 2017 Nov 12

Did you know that:

Astronomers have now seen a Black Hole (BH) jet turn on then off then on again. Oh, yes, they do emit powerful jets of energy and particles from their magnetic poles, but not normally in an on again, off again fashion. Doesn't come from inside the BH though, it's just the leftovers from their most recent meal.

Black holes aren't the only thing happening in the sky. There appears to be at least a second planet around Proxima Centauri, the closest str system to us, embedded in the dust ring around this old, small, red dwarf just 4.2 light years away.

And just because of the passage of a star behind the biggest moon of Neptune, Triton, scientists have been able to take a look at its ultrathin atmosphere.

There’s also been some stellar explosions that we thought were supernovae that just keep happening again and again and again. What’s going on with that?

A little closer to home a few events have the astronomical community raising their collective eyebrows: first, we just had a near miss by an out of our solar system (think interstellar) asteroid; second, the first Chinese space station, Tiangong 1, will crash, uncontrolled, into the Earth early next year; and thirdly, we are in the middle of a periodic conjunction fest of Jupiter and Venus and sometimes the moon.

There’s more but I don’t have time to go on and on about it. To see a full report on these and other astronomical goings-on ctrl+click on this website:  www.skyandtelescope.com/astronomy-news.

Keep looking up,Your Skywatcher Host.

P.S. - Our Nov 2017 meeting will be in the Lakehouse Tuesday, 2017 Nov 14, subject: 40th Anniversay of the Voyager Probes. Doors open at 1830. Meeting begins at 1900.

Next Mars rover will have 23 eyes

Next Mars rover will have 23 eyes

By Deborah Byrd in HUMAN WORLD | SPACE | November 5, 2017

Deborah Byrd created the EarthSky radio series in 1991 and founded EarthSky.org in 1994. Today, she serves as Editor-in-Chief of this website. She has won a galaxy of awards from the broadcasting and science communities, including having an asteroid named 3505 Byrd in her honor. A science communicator and educator since 1976, Byrd believes in science as a force for good in the world and a vital tool for the 21st century. "Being an EarthSky editor is like hosting a big global party for cool nature-lovers," she says.

Cameras have come a long way since the first Mars rover in 1997. The newest Mars rover from NASA – on the Mars 2020 mission – will have a wider field of view, plus more color and 3-D imaging.



This image presents a selection of the 23 cameras on NASA’s 2020 Mars rover. Many are improved versions of the cameras on the Curiosity rover, with a few new additions as well. Image via NASA.

Mars hasn’t been spectacular in our sky in 2017, but it’ll have a memorable opposition in 2018. Then Mars will be especially close to us, and when many will be speaking of this neighboring red world, shining so brightly in our skies. The 2020 opposition of Mars will be excellent as well, which is why NASA choose 2020 as the year to send a new rover to Mars. Because Earth and Mars will come particularly close that year, the Mars 2020 mission will need relatively less power to travel to Mars, thus lowering mission costs and risks. Various details of the mission have already been published, and this week – October 31, 2017 – NASA announced that the new Mars 2020 rover will have 23 “eyes,” that is, 23 cameras. 

That’s in contrast to five cameras for NASA’s Mars Pathfinder mission in 1997, whose rover, Sojourner, was the first to creep across Mars’ surface. And it’s more cameras than Curiosity’s 17; Curiosity is the most recent Mars rover, and the Mars 2020 mission is building on its technologies.

Camera technology has, clearly, taken a quantum leap since Sojourner in 1997. 

Mars 2020’s cameras will be designed, NASA said, to:

… create sweeping panoramas, reveal obstacles, study the atmosphere, and assist science instruments. They will provide dramatic views during the rover’s descent to Mars and be the first to capture images of a parachute as it opens on another planet. There will even be a camera inside the rover’s body, which will study samples as they’re stored and left on the surface for collection by a future mission.

Jim Bell of Arizona State University, Tempe, principal investigator for 2020’s Mastcam-Z, the rover’s main eyes (the Z stands for zoom), said:

The cameras on 2020 will include more color and 3-D imaging than on Curiosity.

Some camera lenses will also have a wider field of view. That’s critical for the 2020 mission, which will try to maximize the time spent doing science and collecting samples. Colin McKinney of JPL, product delivery manager for the new engineering cameras, said:

Our previous Navcams would snap multiple pictures and stitch them together. With the wider field of view, we get the same perspective in one shot.

Read more about Mars 2020’s new cameras via NASA

This diagram by Roy L. Bishop shows why 2020 is a good time to send a spacecraft to Mars. It shows the distance between Earth and Mars at Mars once-every-2-year oppositions, when Earth is passing more or less between Mars and the sun. Mars’ distance at opposition varies on a 15-year cycle. Image copyright Royal Astronomical Society of Canada. Used with permission. Visit the RASC estore to purchase the Observers Handbook, a necessary tool for all skywatchers.

The Mars 2020 spacecraft will follow an entry, descent, landing process similar to that used in landing the Mars rover Curiosity in 2012, but with major technological advancements. Read more about Curiosity’s landing, which space engineers jokingly described as 7 minutes of terror.

The Mars 2020 spacecraft entry, descent, landing process will have some flexibility that Curiosity did not have.

When NASA's Mars Pathfinder touched down in 1997, it had five cameras: two on a mast that popped up from the lander, and three on NASA's first rover, Sojourner.

Since then, camera technology has taken a quantum leap. Photo sensors that were improved by the space program have become commercially ubiquitous. Cameras have shrunk in size, increased in quality and are now carried in every cellphone and laptop.

That same evolution has returned to space. NASA's Mars 2020 mission will have more "eyes"than any rover before it: a grand total of 23, to create sweeping panoramas, reveal obstacles, study the atmosphere, and assist science instruments. They will provide dramatic views during the rover's descent to Mars and be the first to capture images of a parachute as it opens on another planet. There will even be a camera inside the rover's body, which will study samples as they're stored and left on the surface for collection by a future mission.

A Snapshot of Some Mars 2020 Cameras

› Enhanced Engineering Cameras: Color, higher resolution and wider fields of view than Curiosity's engineering cameras.

› Mastcam-Z: An improved version of Curiosity's MASTCAM with a 3:1 zoom lens.

› SuperCam Remote Micro-Imager (RMI): The highest-resolution remote imager will have color, a change from the imager that flew with Curiosity's ChemCam.

› CacheCam: Will watch as rock samples are deposited into the rover's body.

› Entry, descent and landing cameras: Six cameras will record the entry, descent and landing process, providing the first video of a parachute opening on another planet.

› Lander Vision System Camera: Will use computer vision to guide the landing, using a new technology called terrain relative navigation.

› SkyCam: A suite of weather instruments will include a sky-facing camera for studying clouds and the atmosphere.

All these cameras will be incorporated as the Mars 2020 rover is built at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. They represent a steady progression since Pathfinder: after that mission, the Spirit and Opportunity rovers were designed with 10 cameras each, including on their landers; Mars Science Laboratory's Curiosity rover has 17.

"Camera technology keeps improving," said Justin Maki of JPL, Mars 2020's imaging scientist and deputy principal investigator of the Mastcam-Z instrument. "Each successive mission is able to utilize these improvements, with better performance and lower cost."

That advantage represents a full circle of development, from NASA to the private sector and back. In the 1980s, JPL developed active-pixel sensors that used less power than earlier digital camera technology. These sensors were later commercialized by the Photobit Corporation, founded by former JPL researcher Eric Fossum, now at Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire.

20/20 Vision

The cameras on 2020 will include more color and 3-D imaging than on Curiosity, said Jim Bell of Arizona State University, Tempe, principal investigator for 2020's Mastcam-Z. The "Z" stands for "zoom," which will be added to an improved version of Curiosity's high-definition Mastcam, the rover's main eyes.

Mastcam-Z's stereoscopic cameras can support more 3-D images, which are ideal for examining geologic features and scouting potential samples from long distances away. Features like erosion and soil textures can be spotted at the length of a soccer field. Documenting details like these is important: They could reveal geologic clues and serve as "field notes" to contextualize samples for future scientists.

"Routinely using 3-D images at high resolution could pay off in a big way," Bell said. "They're useful for both long-range and near-field science targets."

Finally, in color

The Spirit, Opportunity and Curiosity rovers were all designed with engineering cameras for planning drives (Navcams) and avoiding hazards (Hazcams). These produced 1-megapixel images in black and white.

On the new rover, the engineering cameras have been upgraded to acquire high-resolution, 20-megapixel color images.

Their lenses will also have a wider field of view. That's critical for the 2020 mission, which will try to maximize the time spent doing science and collecting samples.

"Our previous Navcams would snap multiple pictures and stitch them together," said Colin McKinney of JPL, product delivery manager for the new engineering cameras. "With the wider field of view, we get the same perspective in one shot."

That means less time spent panning, snapping pictures and stitching. The cameras are also able to reduce motion blur, so they can take photos while the rover is on the move.

A Data Link to Mars

There's a challenge in all this upgrading: It means beaming more data through space.

"The limiting factor in most imaging systems is the telecommunications link," Maki said. "Cameras are capable of acquiring much more data than can be sent back to Earth."

To address that problem, rover cameras have gotten "smarter" over time -- especially regarding compression.

On Spirit and Opportunity, the compression was done using the onboard computer; on Curiosity, much of it was done using electronics built into the camera. That allows for more 3-D imaging, color, and even high-speed video.

NASA has also gotten better at using orbiting spacecraft as data relays. That concept was pioneered for rover missions with Spirit and Opportunity. The idea of using relays started as an experiment with NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter, Bell said.

"We were expecting to do that mission on just tens of megabits each Mars day, or sol," he said. "When we got that first Odyssey overflight, and we had about 100 megabits per sol, we realized it was a whole new ballgame."

NASA plans to use existing spacecraft already in orbit at Mars -- the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, MAVEN, and the European Space Agency's Trace Gas Orbiter -- as relays for the Mars 2020 mission, which will support the cameras during the rover's first two years.

More information about Mars 2020's cameras is at:

https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/mission/rover/cameras/

More information about the Mars 2020 mission is at:

https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/

News Media Contact

Andrew Good
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-393-2433
andrew.c.good@jpl.nasa.gov
2017-282

Near Miss by Asteroid A/2017 U1

NEAR MISS!!! Did you know we were just missed by an Asteroid named A/2017 U1. It was pretty close to Earth (astronomically speaking), at only about 15,000,000 miles away at closest approach on 2017 October 14. It's about 500 ft in diameter and is moving at about 58,500 mph. Another close call. Whew!! Had it hit Earth it would have had serious implications for our civilization. It wasn't dicovered until 2017 October 19, several days after its closest approach.To read more just click the following URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A/2017_U1

Orbital data (See image below): Extrapolating the orbit backwards, the asteroid is calculated to have gone through perihelion (closest approach to the Sun) on 2017 September 9, and to have passed approximately 0.161 AU  (24,100,000 km; 15,000,000 mi) from Earth on 2017 October 14. The object is small and faint, and has already faded to naked eye invisibility.



This post mostly courtesy of Wikipedia, see above link.

Jupiter/Venus Conjunction

For the past few weeks, Jupiter has been hiding behind the sun. In November, the giant planet will emerge from the glare and race into the pre-dawn sky for a spectacular conjunction with Venus. At closest approach on Nov. 13th, the two bright worlds will be a breathtaking 0.3 degrees apart--so close that you can hide them together behind an outstretched pinky finger. Mark your calendar for the 12th, 13th, and 14th. Star Charts available at: http://spaceweather.com/  This post courtesy of SpaceWeather.com, to go there just click the underlined link.  (JRJ)

Happy Halloween!

Our next meeting is on Tuesday, November 14, at the Lake House with doors opening at 6:30 PM and the meeting beginning at 7:00 PM. The subject will be The Grand Tour: Into Interstellar Space With Voyager I & II on their 40th Anniversary.

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html

The Great American Eclipse

Well some of us saw at least part of the eclipse. If you stayed in Sun City it was a cloud-out almost from the start. But, if you went with the Scotty Davis Tour Group you at least got to see it right up to the edge of totality. During our meeting on 10 October we will take a look at the sights of the event minus totality. We will also discuss the  astronomical events of the summer. See you there. Bring your thumb drive if you took pictures and we will take a look at some selected ones. You get to talk about your experience.

The Eclipse is Almost Here

August 15, 2017 The Eclipse is coming! Are you ready?

Got your glasses?
Sunscreen?
Bag chair?
Driving? Have you thought about the traffic?

Meeting date and venue

Our meeting location is the Lakehouse Ballroom!!!

Below is the rest of the 2017 schedule:

To improve our ability to host more of us and provide a more environment-friendly atmosphere the Sun City Community Association agreed to provide the Lakehouse Ballroom on the second Tuesday of the month beginning with our March 2017 meeting. Our schedule from September through December looks like this:

12 September 2017 - Hurricane Irma chased us away. Meeting delayed until October 10.

10 October 2017 - Doors open at 6:30 PM - Subject: Wrap-up The Great American Eclipse and discuss the summer's other astronomical events.

14 November 2017 - Doors open at 6:30 PM - Subject: TBD

12 December 2017 - Doors open at 6:30 PM - Subject: TBD