Super Blood Moon, Sept. 27, 2015

Super Blood Moon, Sept. 27, 2015

[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION] On a hunch, photographer Laurene Morton drove to Dinosaur Hill Park in Pleasant Hill, California Sunday evening. Sure enough, “a huge crowd was waiting” for the clouds to clear and the total eclipse, on the moon’s closest pass to the Earth. “Everyone’s been talking about” the “Super Blood Moon,” […]

Life on Mars? No, but there’s Curiosity

Life on Mars? No, but there’s Curiosity

[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION / NASA, JPL-Caltech; Mosaic Processing: Marco Di Lorenzo, Kenneth Kremer] Shortly before Mars’ June 2015 conjunction, the Curiosity Rover celebrated 1000 sols on the red planet. After its Aug. 5, 2012 landing, Curiosity’s 1000th sol or martian day on the surface corresponded to planet Earth’s calendar date May 31, […]

Red sunset from green Earth, blue sunset from red Mars

Red sunset from green Earth, blue sunset from red Mars

[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION, Left Image: Damia Bouic; Right Image: NASA, JPL-Caltech] How different does sunset appear from Mars than from Earth? For comparison, two images of our common star were taken at sunset, one from Earth and one from Mars. These images were scaled to have same angular width and featured here […]

Blood moon judgment: Israeli rabbi calls for prayer and repentance

Blood moon judgment: Israeli rabbi calls for prayer and repentance

JERUSALEM, Israel — A mystic Israeli rabbi from southern Israel has called on all Jews to repent and pray with the approach of the third blood moon of a tetrad cycle, to appear in the skies during Passover and Good Friday. The website Breaking Israel News reports that Rabbi Amram Vankin predicted years ago that […]

Moon over Saturn

Moon over Saturn

[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION, Carlos Di Nallo] What happened to half of Saturn? Nothing other than Earth’s Moon getting in the way. As pictured above on the far right, Saturn is partly eclipsed by a dark edge of a Moon itself only partly illuminated by the Sun. This year the orbits of the […]

NASA: Astronomers think every star in Milky Way ‘has at least one planet’

NASA: Astronomers think every star in Milky Way ‘has at least one planet’

Cambridge, Mass – NASA predicts that 100 million worlds in our own Milky Way galaxy may host alien life, and space program scientists estimate that humans will be able to find life within two decades. Speaking at NASA’s Washington headquarters on Monday, the space agency outlined a plan to search for alien life using current […]

Dying, nearby dwarf star is 12 time hotter than our sun

Dying, nearby dwarf star is 12 time hotter than our sun

[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION, Adam Block, Mt. Lemmon SkyCenter, Univ. Arizona] The gorgeous, gaseous shroud of a dying sun-like star, planetary nebula Abell 36 lies a mere 800 light-years away in the constellation of Virgo. Shrugging off its outer layers, the nebula’s central star is contracting and becoming hotter, evolving towards a final […]