Look Out Of Your Window Now! Astronomical events.

BobClay

Well-Known Forumite
NASA will arrive at an asteroid today (if you must, get the Anusol jokes out of your system now :o) with the intention of picking up a bit of it, and bringing it back to Earth by 2023. It's sort of scary when you start to think you're old enough so that you might not be around when one of these missions completes … :lorks:

https://www.nasa.gov/osiris-rex
 

The Hawk

Well-Known Forumite
NASA will arrive at an asteroid today (if you must, get the Anusol jokes out of your system now :o) with the intention of picking up a bit of it, and bringing it back to Earth by 2023. It's sort of scary when you start to think you're old enough so that you might not be around when one of these missions completes … :lorks:

https://www.nasa.gov/osiris-rex
I doubt we'll get as good a reaction as when the Philae probe (from the Rosetta Mission) landed on Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko. I've been lucky enough to meet Monica Grady, and hear her speak on many occasions, and her passion for planetary and space science is immense. She is also an excellent speaker.
 

BobClay

Well-Known Forumite
Now that the comet Wirtanen is visible in the Northern Hemisphere skies I've been out the last couple of nights with the binocs looking for it. Alas …. although they're a decent pair, they seem unable to penetrate thousands of feet of cloud and rain.
In a weeks time it will be at its closest to Earth, and situated between Orion and the Pleiades (The Seven Sisters) so should be easy to find. A big green blob. But December weather in the UK ? ….. don't hold your breath. :(
http://spaceweathergallery.com/indi...d=149660&PHPSESSID=t02u3casbv1jb8u63p1f705q60
 

The Hawk

Well-Known Forumite
An hour about Apollo 8 - https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0001lw3 - on Saturday evening.
I see your Apollo 8 and raise you 10:
4ad6d5e77b1f7edc0a6ee89c38e9a3c6.jpg
 

YorkshirePud

Well-Known Forumite
I managed to spot 46P/Wiertanen (from Stafford!) last night through 8x42 binoculars. The sky was suddenly clear at about 11:20pm and after checking its current position on Stellarium, and with a bit of star hopping, I found it. It was very diffuse, not green, without a real edge to it, and the best way to see it through the binoculars was with averted vision, i.e. look somewhere else and see it in your peripheral vision. It was about the size of the moon, but not visible to the naked eye, although I hadn't really been out long enough to let my eyes adjust.

And then a minute later, the clouds formed, and the sky was covered . .
 

BobClay

Well-Known Forumite
On New Years day the space craft New Horizons will make a flyby of Kuiper Belt object MU69 (UltimaThule.) This is the ship that took those incredible pictures of Pluto a few years back. It is now (about) 4,110,506,000 miles from the Earth. To give you an idea of just how far that is, imagine driving at 100 mph for ten hours every day, day in day out. Pretty hard driving, but you would cover 1000 miles per day. Even so not worth contemplating the journey unless you're going to be around for over 11,000 years. (Unlikely.)
It'll take more than six hours for the data from the flyby to reach us. Kuiper Belt objects are as yet mysterious leftovers from the formation of the Solar System.

http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/#page-top
 
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