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The biggest dog bone I’ve ever seen.
On November 4th the Deep Impact spacecraft passed inside of 500 miles from the nucleus of Comet Hartley 2. The image below is the first of 5 images released by NASA after the close pass. There are more images to come including some high resolution images. Thanks to Arecibo radio telescope radar images last week we knew this comet had a nucleus with an odd shape. That wasn’t the half of it.
Comet Hartley 2 Medium resolution image. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UMD
Emily Lakdawalla of the Planetary Society Blog has some more images and some thoughts on the origin of this celestial “dog bone” Here, here and here.
11/05/10 -Ephemeris – GTAS Meeting
Ephemeris for Friday, November 5th.* The sun will rise at 8:25. It’ll be up for 10 hours and 0 minutes, setting at 6:26. The moon, 1 day before new, will rise at 9:09 tomorrow morning.
A star Bowl quiz will be held this evening between the NMC astronomy club and the Grand Traverse Astronomical Society at this evening’s meeting of the society at 8 p.m. at Northwestern Michigan College’s Rogers Observatory. This will be an attempt to avenge the loss suffered by the GTAS to the college kids in June. The form of the quiz last time was like the Jeopardy game show. The quiz master was NMC astronomy professor Jerry Dobek, who soon found that the number of questions were too few and the quiz went very fast. I expect that this time there will be more questions, or is that answers. Just a heads up: This is the weekend of the time change. Before you go to bed Saturday night set your clock back one hour.
* Times, as always are for the Traverse City/Interlochen area of Michigan.
Bob Moler's Ephemeris Blog 