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OMG! Is that a tightly packed cluster of alien ships invading our atmosphere? Relax, it’s just one of nature’s astronomical treats for those who take the time to look up into the evening sky. The Dance of the Planets is when Jupiter, Venus, and Mercury will all appear to be very close to each other and change positions every day, as if dancing.
2013 has been unofficially dubbed “The year of the comets”. The first of those comets has been putting on a show in the Southern Hemisphere recently, and is not making it’s debut in the Northern Hemisphere. The new comet was expected to be dimming in brightness in late February, but as it swings nearer to the sun it is luckily brightening again!
Remember that asteroid that entered Earth’s atmosphere and exploded over Russia two and a half weeks ago? An asteroid around that same size passed just inside the moon’s orbit of Earth earlier this morning — and astronomers only discovered it two days ago. Yikes. The Asteroid, creatively named “2013 EC”, is between 10 and 17 […]
Just in case you forgot, the cosmos can take us out any time it wants. On August 31st, a long section of solar material that had been hovering in the sun’s atmosphere, the “corona,” erupted out into space. This “coronal mass ejection” traveled at 900 miles per second. Yikes. Maybe the sun was mad that the blue moon was getting all the attention.
Wonderful and amazing things seem to happen “once in a blue moon”. Fortunately, that is actually about every two and half years. And the next one is Friday, August 31st. A blue moon, at least in modern days, is the term given to the second full moon in calendar month. This lunar timing only occurs once every two and a half years or so.
Our little blue orb suspended in the expanse of the cosmos is truly a unique – and beautiful – celestial entity. Check out this entrancing time lapse video of the Earth as shot from the International Space Station. The sequences of photographs were taken by Ron Garan, Satoshi Furukawa and the crew of expeditions 28 […]
