Special to CosmicTribune.com, December 30, 2024 Excerpts from weekly Sky&Telescope report. SUNDAY, DECEMBER 29 ■ As the year nears its end, Orion fully comes into his own. He’s striding up the east-southeastern sky as soon as it gets dark, with his three-star Belt nearly vertical. Left of the Belt is orange Betelgeuse and right of the Belt […]
Special to CosmicTribune.com, December 26, 2023, 2023 Excerpts from weekly Sky&Telescope report. TUESDAY, DECEMBER 26 ■ Full Moon tonight (exact at 7:33 p.m. EST). Now shining above the feet of Gemini in the evening, the Moon forms a deeper triangle with Capella and Aldebaran than it did last night. WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 27 ■ As the stars come out, face due […]
Special to CosmicTribune.com, Decemer 11, 2023, 2023 Excerpts from weekly Sky&Telescope report. MONDAY, DECEMBER 11 ■ Tonight, the brilliant orange-red supergiant Betelgeuse will be covered by a faint little asteroid, 319 Leona, for up to a second or two. But only if you’re located near the middle of the narrow occultation track. It runs from central Asia across the […]
Special to CosmicTribune.com, September 13, 2023 Geostrategy-Direct By Richard Fisher In 2019 China’s leading space corporation, the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC), was behind a proposal to create “an Earth-Moon economic zone by 2050” that could generate $10 trillion. But according to a report in the Chinese publication China Space News, in late […]
Special to CosmicTribune.com, March 28, 2023 Tiny spherical beads of silicate glass on the moon’s surface, formed when asteroids slammed into the moon and by ancient volcanic activity, contain water, claim researchers. A Chinese Chang’e 5 rover that spent two weeks on the moon in 2020 drilled into the lunar surface and returned 3.7 pounds […]
Special to CosmicTribune.com, June 9, 2022 NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope was struck by a larger than expected micrometeoroid in late May, slightly damaging one of the spacecraft’s 18 primary mirror segments. NASA said that the telescope is “still performing at a level that exceeds all mission requirements.” The telescope cost NASA nearly $10 billion […]
May 21, 2017 Utah amateur Patrick Wiggins discovered a possible bright supernova in the spiral galaxy NGC 6946 in Cygnus on May 13. If confirmed, 2017 eaw will become the 10th supernova found in this explosion-rich galaxy in the past century, reaffirming its reputation for fireworks of the grandest kind. It was Wiggins’s third supernova, […]
September 11, 2016 David Dickinson, Sky and Telescope The dusk skies lit up over Cape Canaveral on September 8th, as NASA’s ambitious Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security and Regolith Explorer (Osiris-REX) mission started its long round trip journey. Its mission: meet up and explore Earth-crossing Apollo asteroid 101955 Bennu and bring samples of it […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION, Ivo Scheggia] A few days ago, a bright fireball was photographed from the Alps mountain range in Switzerland as it blazed across the sky. The fireball, likely from the Taurids meteor shower, was notable not only for how bright it was, but for the rare orange light it created […]
With the “blood moon” or total lunar eclipse expected to occur on Sept 28, the debate if the apocalyptic predictions that it is the end of the world would happen is once more resurrected barely three years after the Mayan calendar did. On one hand, NASA had issued a statement that the blood moon would […]
