look at the stars more often

November 14, 2007
Comet 17P/Holmes remains a striking target for binoculars, small telescopes, and even the unaided eye. Take the time to see this unusual visitor, which
leapt from obscurity to celebrity October 23.
-astronomy dot cam

photo:By Jamil Bittar, Reuters

Mar 02, 2007 12:43 PM
Associated Press
LONDON The moon will turn shades of amber and crimson Saturday night as it passes behind the Earth’s shadow in the first total lunar eclipse in three years.

The eclipse will be at least partly visible from Asia to the Americas, although those in Europe, Africa and the Middle East will have the best view.

Lunar eclipses occur when Earth passes between the sun and the moon, blocking the sun’s light. The event is rare because the moon spends most of its time either above or below the plane of Earth’s orbit.

Although it will pass completely under Earth’s shadow, light from the sun will still reach the moon after being refracted through Earth’s atmosphere, giving the moon an eerie dark reddish tinge.

“It’s not an event that has any scientific value, but it’s something everybody can enjoy,” said Robert Massey of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Earth’s shadow will begin moving across the moon at 3:18 p.m. EST Saturday, with the total eclipse occurring at 5:44 p.m. EST and lasting more than an hour.

Observers in eastern North America and South America will find the moon already partially or totally eclipsed by the time it rises over the horizon Saturday evening.

The next total lunar eclipse will occur Aug. 28.

Japan’s late noodle king to be blasted into space
TOKYO, Feb 23 (AFP) Feb 23, 2007
The Japanese inventor of instant noodles will symbolically blast off into space next week at his funeral at a baseball stadium officiated by three dozen monks, his company said Friday.
The funeral for Momofuku Ando, who died on January 5 at age 96, will take place on Tuesday at the Kyocera Dome in Osaka, which can hold as many as 55,000 people, said Nissin Food Products, which Ando founded.

Because Ando tried to reproduce the dangling delicacy for astronauts, the funeral at the closed-dome stadium will feature projections of images from space along with chanting and synthesizer music, said Nissin Food.

In a sign of his instant noodles’ success, top business leaders and a major former prime minister, Yasuhiro Nakasone, will deliver eulogies at the funeral, to be officiated by 34 monks.

“Momofuku Ando invented ‘Chicken Ramen’ and ‘Cup Noodle.’ Before his death, he devoted his efforts to inventing space noodles,” a Nissin statement said.

“So our company has decided to use the space theme to conduct the corporate funeral to see off the late Momofuku Ando into space,” it said.

Born in Taiwan under Japanese occupation, Ando created a multibillion-dollar industry in 1958 when he invented a dried noodle cake that could be served in minutes by pouring water over it in a bowl.

In his biography, Ando said he was inspired to develop the product when he saw a long line of people in war-ravaged Osaka waiting to buy steaming noodles at a black market stall.

“Peace prevails when food suffices,” he said.

There hasn’t been a lot of buzz about
Comet McNaught, which was discovered
August 7,2006, but supossedly it is
the brightest comet in decades….

http://208.56.96.178/cgi-bin/photo/imageSearch.cgi?img=0&search=comet

...... The Orion Trapezium cluster is a subgroup of very young stars concentrated in a region only 3 light years across at the core of the Orion Nebula star cluster. The Trapezium cluster offers a prime view into a stellar nursery. It is composed of stars with a median age of around 300,000 years, and at a distance of 1400 light years, is one of the nearest star-forming regions to Earth. The Chandra X-ray Observatory identified X-ray emission from individual stars in the Trapezium for the first time and found that almost all of their upper atmospheres, or coronas, are much hotter than expected.
from:
http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2000/orion_trap/orion_trap_hand.html

......now we just need a photo :)

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Star gazers will get a rare triple planetary treat this weekend with Jupiter, Mercury and Mars appearing to nestle together in the predawn skies.

About 45 minutes before dawn on Sunday those three planets will be so close that the average person’s thumb can obscure all three from view.

They will be almost as close together on Saturday and Monday, but Sunday they will be within one degree of each other in the sky. Three planets haven’t been that close since 1925, said Miami Space Transit Planetarium director Jack Horkheimer.

And it won’t happen again until 2053, he said.

Rare display of Mercury

The tiny, scorching planet of Mercury has made its brief trip between Earth and the Sun in a rare transit.

The event lasted about five hours.

It occurs only about 13 times every century but can only be seen from Earth about half of those times.

In New Zealand astronomers at the Mt John Observatory, Lake Tekapo in the South Island had a clear view of the transit from around 8am. Bad weather and rain blocked views in the North Island.

The planet is the smallest in the solar system and so close to the Sun that it orbits it every 88 days. It looks like the Moon as it is covered with craters.

The mean surface temperature is 178.9 degrees Celsius and the sunlight is six times as intense as it is on Earth.

Today the tiny planet appeared to viewers as a tiny dot passing from left to right across the face of the sun.

Nasa said the transit last occurred in 2003 and will not happen again until 2016.

The transit was visible in parts of North and South America, Australia and Asia but it was night-time in Europe, Africa and India.

This weekend, a mild but pretty flurry of meteors will shoot out of the constellation Orion. The source is Halley’s Comet.

http://www.yubanet.com/artman/publish/article_44219.shtml