It's a once in a lifetime event: the June 5th Transit of Venus across the sun. Watch the world wide webcast sponsored by the Coca-Cola Science Center and NASA. |
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THE
MYSTERIOUS ARC OF VENUS: Astronomers
hope to glimpse a "ring of fire" around
Venus during its historic transit across the sun
on June 5-6. The apparition, if it is seen, could
help crack some of the deepest mysteries of the
second planet. Get the full
story from Science@NASA.
LUNAR
ECLIPSE: This morning, June 4th,
the Moon glided through the shadow of Earth, producing
a 38% lunar eclipse visible across the Pacific from
east Asia to North America. Coyote songs filled
the air outside Borrego Springs, California, when
Dennis Mammana took this picture of the full Moon
cut almost in half:
"The desert night air was cool,
the moonlight glorious and the coyotes were yipping
away merrily in the distance. What a great night
for an eclipse! This shot of mid-eclipse was captured
with a University Optics 80mm refractor telescope
and a Nikon D700 digital camera."
Browse the real time photo gallery
for more moonshots:
Space
Weather Real Time Image Gallery
[Submit your
photos] [NASA videos: Partial
Eclipse of the Strawbery Moon]
Watch the eclipse
unfold in SpaceWeather.com's Realtime
Photo Gallery.
SOLAR
TSUNAMI: New sunspot 1496 unleashed
an impulsive M3-class
solar flare on June 3rd at 1755 UT. In New Mexico,
amateur astronomer Thomas Ashcraft was monitoring
the sun when the explosion occurred, and he video-recorded
a powerful solar
tsunami issuing from the blast site:
"This was a great solar event!"
says Ashcraft. "The blast wave sparked powerful
radio emissions as it plowed through the sun's atmosphere,
and I recorded the
sounds using my shortwave radio telescope."
The explosion also hurled a coronal
mass ejection (CME) into space: SOHO
movie. The cloud does not appear to be heading
for Earth, although this conclusion could be revised
by further analysis. Stay tuned. Solar
Flare alerts: text,
voice.
'CH'
STANDS FOR ... CHICKEN? A big dark
hole in the sun's atmosphere, a 'coronal hole',
is turning toward Earth spewing solar wind. According
to NASA's official
rubber chicken, it looks an awful lot like
a bird:
Coronal holes are places where the
sun's magnetic field opens up and allows the solar
wind to escape. A chicken-shaped stream of solar
wind flowing from this coronal hole will reach Earth
on June 5th - 7th, possibly stirring geomagnetic
storms. High-latitude sky watchers should be alert
for auroras. Aurora
alerts: text,
voice.
VENUS
PASSES MERCURY, APPROACHES THE SUN:
Venus is approaching the sun in advance of the June
5th Transit of Venus. From here on Earth, the second
planet has become difficult to see wrapped in bright
sunlight. The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory,
however, has no such trouble. SOHO's onboard coronagrah
blocks the glare to reveal planets otherwise invisible:
A 24-hour
movie shows that Mercury is exiting stage left
as Venus plunges deeper into sunlight. Updated images
may be found here.
Amateur astronomers who manage to
locate Venus in broad daylight will find that the
planet has turned into a delightfully
slender
crescent.
This is happening because Venus is turning its nightside
to Earth, with only a sliver of reflected sunlight
still shining over the planet's limb.
The crescent could soon become a
ring. When Venus is less than few degrees away
from the sun, the horns of the crescent sometimes
reach around and touch, producing a complete annulus.
The effect is caused by particles in upper layers
of Venus's atmosphere which scatter sunlight around
the circumference of the planet. The ring is very
difficult to observe, and often only black-belt
astrophotographers are able to record the phenomenon.
Keep an eye on SpaceWeather's realtime photo gallery
to see how Venus shape-shifts in the days ahead:
Space
Weather Real Time Image Gallery
[Submit your
photos] [NASA videos: 2012
Transit of Venus, ISS
Transit of Venus]
