NIGHT LAUNCH: Space shuttle Discovery is set to lift off tonight, Friday, Aug. 28th at 11:59 p.m. EDT. The minute-before-midnight launch will propel the shuttle and its comedic cargo across the starry Florida sky on a two-week supply mission to the International Space Station. Check the launch blog for updates. BLANK SUNS: Inspect the image below. It is a photo of the sun taken by the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO). Can you guess what day it was taken? Scroll down for the answer. August 28th, today. But it could have been taken on any day of the past seven weeks. For all that time, the face of the sun has looked exactly the same--utterly blank. According to NOAA sunspot counts, the longest string of blank suns during the current solar minimum was 52 days back in July, Aug. and Sept. of 2008. If the current trend continues for only four more days, the record will shift to 2009. It's likely to happen; the sun remains eerily quiet and there are no sunspots in the offing. Solar minimum is shaping up to be a big event indeed. BLUE-SKY OCCULTATION: Yesterday in the blue afternoon skies of New England, the quarter Moon had a close encounter with Antares. "The first-magnitude star was only 15 arcseconds from the Moon," says John Stetson, who photographed the event from Portland, Maine: Assisted by students D. Booth and T. Emerson, Stetson turned the photo-shoot into a teachable moment. "The encounter put Antares in the company of some interesting Greek philosophers," he points out. A schedule of future lunar occultations may be found here. more images: from Dr. Fritz Helmut Hemmerich of Tenerife, Canary Islands; from Valmir Martins de Morais of Estação Astronômica PieGise Juazeiro do Norte, Ceará, Brazil; from Francisco A. Rodriguez of Cabreja Mountain, Vega de San Mateo, Gran Canaria, Canary Islands; from Michael Boschat of Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada August 2009 Aurora Gallery [previous Augusts: 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003, 2002, 2001] Explore the Sunspot Cycle |