Bob Moler's Ephemeris Blog

Tuesday, May 17th.  Today the sun will be up for 14 hours and 52 minutes, setting at 9:05.   The moon, at full today, will rise at 9:51 this evening.  Tomorrow the sun will rise at 6:11.

The Dawn spacecraft is about to make news.  Never heard of it?  Well, it’s been slowly building up speed for the last nearly four years, spiraling its way out into the asteroid belt with its ion engines and one gravity assist from the red planet Mars, on which it tested its cameras.  Its first target is coming up, the asteroid Vesta, the brightest of asteroids, though not the largest.  There won’t be a time of engine firing to drop the spacecraft into orbit, but Dawn will slowly spiral into lower and lower orbits of this asteroid starting in July.  It will spend a year at Vesta before heading to the largest asteroid, now dubbed dwarf planet Ceres.  Last week dawn took its first image of Vesta, which covered 5 pixels in its camera, and shows Dawn to be right on target.

* Times are for the Traverse City/Interlochen area of Michigan.  They may be different for your location.