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04/23/2015 – Ephemeris – New Horizons’ first glimpse of Pluto and Charon in color
Ephemeris for Thursday, April 23rd. Today the Sun will be up for 13 hours and 52 minutes, setting at 8:37. The Moon, 2 days before first quarter, will set at 1:44 tomorrow morning. Tomorrow the Sun will rise at 6:43.
Last week NASA’s New Horizons team running the spacecraft that’s been in flight to the dwarf planet Pluto released their first color of Pluto and it’s moon Charon. The photo doesn’t show any surface features. That’s to come in the next month or two. However, Pluto shows kind of a pale orange-pink color, hinting of the colorful images to come. Charon is a dull gray like the dwarf planet Ceres, which Dawn is approaching, and our own Moon. How could two bodies with a common origin appear so different? Stay tuned. New Horizons will pass through the Pluto system in a couple of hours on July 14th, but will send back the mother lode of its data over the next 16 months.
Times are for the Traverse City/Interlochen area of Michigan. They may be different for your location.
Addendum
First color picture of Pluto and its moon Charon taken by the New Horizons spacecraft. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute. Click to enlarge.
From the NASA website:
“This image of Pluto and its largest moon, Charon, was taken by the Ralph color imager aboard NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft on April 9 and downlinked to Earth the following day. It is the first color image ever made of the Pluto system by a spacecraft on approach. The image is a preliminary reconstruction, which will be refined later by the New Horizons science team. Clearly visible are both Pluto and the Texas-sized Charon. The image was made from a distance of about 71 million miles (115 million kilometers)—roughly the distance from the Sun to Venus. At this distance, neither Pluto nor Charon is well resolved by the color imager, but their distinctly different appearances can be seen. As New Horizons approaches its flyby of Pluto on July 14, it will deliver color images that eventually show surface features as small as a few miles across.”
Stupid Internet posts: No, gravity won’t be canceled January 4th.
Looks like the hoaxsters are at it again. Seems someone dusted off Sir. Patrick Moore’s April Fool’s joke from long ago and dressed it up as a phony NASA tweet and sent it out 9 days ago. Supposedly on January 4th, 2015 an alignment of Jupiter and Pluto will cancel gravity on the Earth for a few minutes that day. Both Newton and Einstein would be ticked off at that. Neither of their theories of gravity would predict anything so stupid. Besides Jupiter and Pluto are at nearly opposite parts of the sky. They don’t align with anything.
Don’t take my word for it as a lowly amateur astronomer. Check out the (A real astrophysics PhD) Bad Astronomer Phil Plait’s post: http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2014/12/24/zero_g_day_nope.html.
Here’s a post from EarthSky with the same sentiments.
However January 4th, 2014 is special. It’s Perihelion Day, the day of the year the Earth is closest to the Sun. So break out the sunscreen, especially if you live in the southern hemisphere, where it’s summer now. The biggest effect we’ll see is that winter is the shortest season for us by a couple of days compared to summer, the longest season. The Earth moves its fastest in it’s orbit of the Sun at perihelion.
11/06/2014 – Ephemeris – New Horizons headed toward the 9th planet will pass a dwarf planet instead
Ephemeris for Thursday, November 6th. The sun will rise at 7:26. It’ll be up for 9 hours and 57 minutes, setting at 5:24. The moon, at full today, will rise at 5:32 this evening.
The New Horizons spacecraft is 9 months from reaching the dwarf planet Pluto. After a 9 and a half years journey it will zip past Pluto and its moons in a day. At launch Pluto was designated as planet number 9. In less than a year later Pluto was demoted to a dwarf planet. The authority was the International Astronomical Union. It was a vote taken at the end of the last day of the meeting that year after most members have left. The definitions only pertain to the solar system, and not exoplanets orbiting other stars. Besides we cannot detect anything as small as Pluto orbiting another star…yet. The asteroid Ceres was once a planet too, it was demoted to asteroid 75 years after discovery. It was promoted to a dwarf planet with Pluto.
Times are for the Traverse City/Interlochen area of Michigan. They may be different for your location.
Addendum
New Horizon’s trajectory through the solar system. Credit: NASA/JHAPL.
Where is New Horizons on November 6, 2014? Credit NASA/JHAPL.
New Horizons Encounter Timeline. Credit: NASA/JHAPL.
New Horizons at closest approach to Pluto. Credit: NASA/JHAPL.
Bob Moler's Ephemeris Blog 