Archive
04/21/2016 – Ephemeris – Up up and a way my beautiful balloon*
Ephemeris for Thursday, April 21st. The Sun rises at 6:47. It’ll be up for 13 hours and 48 minutes, setting at 8:36. The Moon, 1 day before full, will set at 7:16 tomorrow morning.
The successful launch of the SpaceX Falcon 9 spacecraft and the Dragon module marked the returned SpaceX to supplying the International Space Station after its failure last June. Besides the great achievement of landing the first stage of the Falcon on a barge, it delivered the Bigelow Aerospace BEAM inflatable module to the ISS. It’s already been attached to the station and will be inflated next month. Bigelow already has two inflatable satellites in orbit: Genesis I and II launched in 2006 and 2007 and though retired, are still in orbit. Inflatable spacecraft offer maximum volume for minimum weight. If the tests on the space station prove the concept, the Mars manned spacecraft may feature an inflatable living module.
Times are for the Traverse City/Interlochen area of Michigan. They may be different for your location.
*Apologies to the 5th Dimension and Bigelow Aerospace.
Addendum
The BEAM module being loaded in the Dragon Trunk. Credit NASA / SpaceX.
Dragon separating from the Falcon second stage with the BEAM module seen in the Dragon trunk. From a SpaceX/NASA video.
What the BEAM module will look like when attached to the ISS and inflated. Credit NASA.
Cutaway view of the Bigelow Aerospace B330 Expandable Space Habitat. They are contracting with United Launch Alliance to send it into orbit. It will have 330 cubic meters of volume. Credit Bigelow Aerospace.
02/23/2016 – Ephemeris – The king of the planets is planning to conquer the evening sky. Tonight its enlisting help from the Moon.
Ephemeris for Tuesday, February 23rd. The Sun will rise at 7:31. It’ll be up for 10 hours and 50 minutes, setting at 6:21. The Moon, 1 day past full, will rise at 7:32 this evening.
Rising with the Moon tonight will be the planet Jupiter which will appear to the left of the Moon as they rise, to the upper left of the Moon at 10 p.m. and above the Moon at midnight. NASA’s Juno spacecraft, launched in 2011, is planned to arrive at Jupiter on July 4th this year. No, it’s not a coincidence. It will orbit the planet for nearly two years. It’s the only solar-powered spacecraft that can operate as far from the Sun as Jupiter, which is 5 times farther from the Sun as the Earth, which gets one 5th squared or one twenty-fifth the intensity of sunlight. It has 3 huge solar panels making the spacecraft 66 feet wide. It’s mission is about Jupiter, its internal structure, atmosphere and magnetic and radiation fields.
Times are for the Traverse City/Interlochen area of Michigan. They may be different for your location.
Addendum
Jupiter and the Moon animation. Note their change in position relative to each other at 8 p.m., 10 p.m. and midnight. Created using Cartes du Ciel (Sky Chart) and GIMP.
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Closeup of Jupiter and the Moon at 10 p.m., February 23, 2016. The Moon is a whole lot brighter, and Jupiter dimmer than what’s shown here. Created using Stellarium.
The Juno spacecraft. Credit: NASA.
12/29/2015 – Ephemeris – Some space triumphs of 2015
Ephemeris for Tuesday, December 29th. The Sun will rise at 8:19. It’ll be up for 8 hours and 50 minutes, setting at 5:10. The Moon, half way from full to last quarter, will rise at 9:58 this evening.
This past year had several important events. Perhaps the biggest was the flyby of Pluto and its moons July 14th By the New Horizons spacecraft. The transmission of data and images will continue for most of 2016, but what has been revealed has been spectacular if puzzling. In other space news Blue Origin landed their New Shepard rocket vertically after sending it straight up 60 miles. In June the SpaceX Falcon 9 blew up while attempting to send its 7th resupply Dragon capsule to the International Space Station. Eight days ago The Falcon 9 returned to flight orbiting 11 satellites for Orbocomm, and flew the booster from over 100 miles up and 100 miles out over the Atlantic to land upright on its designated landing pad back at the cape.
Times are for the Traverse City/Interlochen area of Michigan. They may be different for your location.
Addendum
Enhanced color portrait of Pluto by the New Horizons spacecraft. Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI.
Blue Origin New Shepard rocket, with landing legs expended about to land. Credit: Blue Origin.
First stage of the SpaceX Falcon 9 descending on its center rocket engine to the center of the main landing pad at Cape Canaveral. Credit: SpaceX.
These weren’t the only highlights of 2015. Having only 45 seconds to devote to the story, I picked the three most important events. I consider the reuseability of rockets to be the Holy Grail of reducing the cost to access to space. The Space Shuttle was a partial, but ultimately failed solution. SpaceX had the most difficult task in refurbishment and reuse because the first stage had to endure a supersonic reentry, though it didn’t need a heat shield. We’ll have to see if the cost of recycling rocket boosters is cheaper than building one from scratch.
10/29/2015 – Ephemeris – The blue skies of Pluto
Ephemeris for Thursday, October 29th. The Sun will rise at 8:16. It’ll be up for 10 hours and 19 minutes, setting at 6:36. The Moon, 2 days past full, will rise at 8:40 this evening.
Images from the New Horizons spacecraft are streaming back slowly. It’s like trying to download a modern megapixel camera image using a thousand to two thousand bits per second telephone modem back in the ’90s. That’s why the images are dribbling out. They are released each Thursday or Friday. One of the last images was a colored image of the ring of atmosphere of Pluto backlit by the Sun, showing that the dwarf planet had a blue sky. The reason is still debated because there appear to be minute particles thought to be tholins in Pluto’s atmosphere. These would be colored brown or red. However they seen to preferentially scatter blue light like the nitrogen molecules in our atmosphere.
Times are for the Traverse City/Interlochen area of Michigan. They may be different for your location.
Addendum
Pluto seen in silhouette, backlit by the Sun in color. Released October 10, 2015 by NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI
10/26/2015 – Ephemeris – RIP Robert Farquhar interplanetary navigator extraordinaire
Ephemeris for Monday, October 26th. The Sun will rise at 8:12. It’ll be up for 10 hours and 28 minutes, setting at 6:40. The Moon, 1 day before full, will set at 8:10 tomorrow morning.
This morning Jupiter and Venus appear close together in the morning sky. They are said to be in conjunction. Also Venus is at its greatest separation from the Sun today. It will slowly begin to fall back toward the Sun. Last week Sunday Robert Farquhar died. He developed the technique of orbiting the L1 point between the Sun and the earth where the Earth nullifies the Sun’s gravity, so a spacecraft can stay there between the Earth and the Sun. He designed the trajectory for the ISEE-3 spacecraft that acted as an early warning for particles coming from the Sun. He also liberated it in 1982 and through a series of ingenious maneuvers worked it into a solar orbit that flew it through the tail of Comet Giacobini-Zinner.
Times are for the Traverse City/Interlochen area of Michigan. They may be different for your location.
Addendum
ISEE-3’s orbital path to the halo orbit at the Earth-Sun Lagrangian L1 point and out to cross the path of Comet Ziacobini-Zinner ahead of the fleet heading to Comet Halley. It was renamed ICE (International Comet Explorer). Credit: NASA/GSFC
Here’s a link to a page that recounts the quest to return the spacecraft to its L1 position by Farquhar and his band of “rouges” last year.
09/29/2015 – Ephemeris – New Horizons is now downloading some really cool pictures to Earth
Ephemeris for Tuesday, September 29th. The Sun will rise at 7:38. It’ll be up for 11 hours and 49 minutes, setting at 7:27. The Moon, 2 days past full, will rise at 8:38 this evening.
Two and a half months ago the New Horizons spacecraft flew past Pluto, spending the day incommunicado, not wasting any time sending anything back to the Earth. Starting the next day came the flood of data including some highly compressed images. Starting Labor Day weekend the high-resolution, uncompressed images started to come down at one to two thousand bits per second. At that rate a 4 megapixel monochromatic image might take 36 hours to download. Now every Thursday or Friday the New Horizons Team puts several new processed images on the NASA and Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory websites, along with explanations of what is in the images and the questions they raise.
Times are for the Traverse City/Interlochen area of Michigan. They may be different for your location.
Addendum
This image, taken just 15 minutes after the New Horizons spacecraft flew its closest to Pluto shows a low angle shot of the lands the spacecraft saw really close up. Check out too the many layers of the atmosphere. Credit: NASA/JHUAPL. Click on the image to enlarge.
I’ll be exploring this and the other amazing photos and other results from New Horizons this Friday at the Grand Traverse Astronomical Society meeting at 8 p.m. at Northwestern Michigan College’s Rogers Observatory south of Traverse City on Birmley Road.
07/30/2015 – Ephemeris – Pluto’s enigmatic atmosphere
Ephemeris for Thursday, July 30th. The Sun rises at 6:26. It’ll be up for 14 hours and 44 minutes, setting at 9:11. The Moon, 1 day before full, will set at 6:45 tomorrow morning.
The last image released last week from the New Horizons spacecraft was a stunning one. It was Pluto backlit, showing a glow completely around the planet, the atmosphere, showing layers. Also when New Horizons went behind the planet and again went behind Charon from the Earth’s point of view. Beams of radio waves from seven of the antennas of NASA’s Deep Space Network were sent toward Pluto and New Horizons four and a half hours earlier. The spacecraft turned its antenna toward Earth and listened. As the radio waves passed through the atmosphere of Pluto they were refracted and distorted giving clues to the state of the atmosphere. First takeaway is that Pluto’s atmosphere appears to be collapsing with its increasing distance from the Sun.
Times are for the Traverse City/Interlochen area of Michigan. They may be different for your location.
Addendum
Looking back at Pluto backlit by the Sun from 1.25 million miles. Credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI.
Click here for more information on the above image.
Data from the Alice ultraviolet instrument when Pluto occulted the Sun. Credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI.
Click here for more information on this Alice observation.
07/28/2015 – Ephemeris – The first close up images of Pluto
Ephemeris for Tuesday, July 28th. The Sun rises at 6:24. It’ll be up for 14 hours and 49 minutes, setting at 9:13. The Moon, 3 days before full, will set at 4:32 tomorrow morning.
Two weeks ago the New Horizons spacecraft zipped through the Pluto system gathering a wealth of information including a whole host of images. Due to their large size the images will take some time to be sent back, however some highly compressed images have been returned and yield a tantalizing look at the dwarf planet Pluto and its large moon Charon. Rather than an apparently dead heavily cratered body, the first images presented a young surface with plains and mountains with nary a crater to be found. Young is relative, perhaps 100 million years old or so and implied heating where there appears no source to be found… yet. The first of many mysteries. And we have 16 months more of data and images to be returned.
Times are for the Traverse City/Interlochen area of Michigan. They may be different for your location.
Addendum
First closeup picture the New Horizon Team showed. Two mile high ice mountains, plains, and interesting terrain, but no craters. A young surface. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute. Click on image to enlarge.
Sputnik Planum (Plain) next to the ice mountains showing polygons and troughs, some with hills. This is part of Pluto’s “Heath”. Note the rectangular lossy compression artifacts in the image. An uncompressed version will be downlinked later. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute. Click on image to enlarge.
07/20/2015 – Ephemeris – July 20th anniversaries
Ephemeris for Monday, July 20th. Today the Sun will be up for 15 hours and 5 minutes, setting at 9:21. The Moon, 4 days before first quarter, will set at 11:34 this evening, and tomorrow the Sun will rise at 6:16.
July 20th is a special date for this country’s space program and a personal one. On July 20, 1969 Apollo 11 landed on the Moon, the greatest achievement in the history of space flight. Seven years later the robot lander Viking 1 landed on Mars. NASA wanted it to be July 4th, 1976, the Bicentennial, but couldn’t find a smooth landing site in time. My own connection to the date came in 1963, my first total solar eclipse. We traveled to Quebec province along side the St. Maurice River. To view 60 seconds of totality. It was the first of four successful total solar eclipse trips I’ve been on.. I’m looking forward to my 5th on August 21st 2017, two years from now which is related to my first, I’ll tell you about that in my blog.
Times are for the Traverse City/Interlochen area of Michigan. They may be different for your location.
Addendum
Neil Armstrong about to step off the LM onto the surface of the moon, July 20, 1969. Credit: NASA.
First image sent back from Viking 1 after landing on Mars, July 20, 1976. Credit: NASA/JPL. Click on image to enlarge.
Video of July 20, 1963 eclipse from the air. I got only one picture of the eclipse and it wasn’t very good. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OT3EW0KIjCc.
The date on the YouTube page is incorrect. It is July 20, 1963. I remember the corona being somewhat wedge-shaped, wider to one side than the other. Other than that it was a typical quiet sun corona.
In the program above I mentioned that the August 21, 2017 solar eclipse was related to my first total solar eclipse. This is the relationship: A couple of centuries BC the Chaldean astronomers of ancient Babylonia discovered that eclipses repeated in a cycle lasting 6,585 1/3 days. That’s 18 years 10 or 11 and 1/3 days depending on the number of leap years spanned. That period was called the Saros by Sir Edmund Halley or comet fame. So each eclipse would be visible 1/3 of the Earth farther west. Note that there are many Saros cycles occurring at the same time, and that eclipses of a particular Saros gradually move northward or southward. So to have an eclipse recur at the approximate same longitude one must wait 3 Saros cycles. or 54 years and one month approximately. Thus the third Saros of the July 20, 1963 total solar eclipse will be August 21, 2017. This Saros series (145) is moving southward. In 1963 it crosses the US at Alaska and Maine. Quebec was closer for us, s we went there. Good thing too. Maine was clouded and rained out. For us the clouds parted at the beginning of the eclipse. The 2015 eclipse will cross the continental US from Oregon to South Carolina.
A squished image of the July 20, 1963 eclipse path. Right click on the image and select view image to get a correct image. (works in Firefox).
A squished image of the August 21, 2017 eclipse path. Right click on the image and select view image to get a correct image. (works in Firefox).
07/07/2015 – Ephemeris – New Horizons will resume science gathering after glitch July 4th.
Ephemeris for Tuesday, July 7th. Today the Sun will be up for 15 hours and 25 minutes, setting at 9:30. The Moon, 1 day before last quarter, will rise at 12:56 tomorrow morning. Tomorrow the Sun will rise at 6:05.
On July 4th, the New Horizons spacecraft, now one week from is flyby of Pluto, suffered a glitch and went into safe mode. It, however switched to its backup computer, and is now in contact with the Earth. Sunday night it was determined that the problem was a timing flaw in a command sequence preparing for Pluto encounter. Normal spacecraft operations will resume today. Two way communication time is now nearly 9 hours, almost half a day. Earth day that is. New Horizons is approaching Pluto at 31,000 miles an hour. The spacecraft will have only a few hours to observe Pluto and its moons at their closest next Tuesday. It’s getting down to crunch time for the little spacecraft.
Times are for the Traverse City/Interlochen area of Michigan. They may be different for your location.
Addendum
I wrote Tuesday’s program Sunday night before the announcement that the problem with New Horizons was found and the spacecraft would back to normal on Tuesday. I found that out just before recording the programs, and had to do a quick fix. With New Horizons problems found, I could write the July 13th program I had planned. I write and record 5 programs at a time – Tuesday through Monday.
Artist’s rendition credit NASA.
Bob Moler's Ephemeris Blog 