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By Amazing Space
Winter Sky Guide: Orion, Pleiades & Jupiter Alignment | Meteor Shower Captured! Stargazing
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By NASA
3 min read
January’s Night Sky Notes: The Red Planet
by Kat Troche of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific
Have you looked up at the night sky this season and noticed a bright object sporting a reddish hue to the left of Orion? This is none other than the planet Mars! January will be an excellent opportunity to spot this planet and some of its details with a medium-sized telescope. Be sure to catch these three events this month.
Martian Retrograde
Mars entered retrograde (or backward movement relative to its usual direction) on December 7, 2024, and will continue throughout January into February 23, 2025. You can track the planet’s progress by sketching or photographing Mars’ position relative to nearby stars. Be consistent with your observations, taking them every few nights or so as the weather permits. You can use free software like Stellarium or Stellarium Web (the browser version) to help you navigate the night as Mars treks around the sky. You can find Mars above the eastern horizon after 8:00 PM local time.
This mid-January chart shows the path of Mars from September 2024 to June 2025 as it enters and then exits in retrograde motion. Mars appears to change its direction of motion in the sky because Earth is passing the slower-moving Mars in its orbit. Stellarium Hide and Seek
On the night of January 13th, you can watch Mars ‘disappear’ behind the Moon during an occultation. An occultation is when one celestial object passes directly in front of another, hiding the background object from view. This can happen with planets and stars in our night sky, depending on the orbit of an object and where you are on Earth, similar to eclipses.
A simulated view of the Moon as Mars begins its occultation on January 13, 2025. Stellarium Depending on where you are within the contiguous United States, you can watch this event with the naked eye, binoculars, or a small telescope. The occultation will happen for over an hour in some parts of the US. You can use websites like Stellarium Web or the Astronomical League’s ‘Moon Occults Mars’ chart to calculate the best time to see this event.
Closer and Closer
As you observe Mars this month to track its retrograde movement, you will notice that it will increase in brightness. This is because Mars will reach opposition by the evening of January 16th. Opposition happens when a planet is directly opposite the Sun, as seen from Earth. You don’t need to be in any specific city to observe this event; you only need clear skies to observe that it gets brighter. It’s also when Mars is closest to Earth, so you’ll see more details in a telescope.
Want a quick and easy way to illustrate what opposition is for Jupiter, Saturn, Mars, or other outer worlds? Follow the instructions on our Toolkit Hack: Illustrating Opposition with Exploring the Solar System page using our Exploring Our Solar System activity!
A mosaic of the Valles Marineris hemisphere of Mars projected into point perspective, a view similar to that which one would see from a spacecraft. The mosaic is composed of 102 Viking Orbiter images of Mars. NASA/JPL-Caltech Mars has fascinated humanity for centuries, with its earliest recorded observations dating back to the Bronze Age. By the 17th century, astronomers were able to identify features of the Martian surface, such as its ice caps and darker regions. Since the 1960s, exploration of the Red Planet has intensified with robotic missions from various space organizations. Currently, NASA has five active missions, including rovers and orbiters, with the future focused on human exploration and habitation. Mars will always fill us with a sense of wonder and adventure as we reach for its soil through initiatives such as the Moon to Mars Architecture and the Mars Sample Return campaign.
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By NASA
4 Min Read Celebrating 20 Years: Night Sky Network
2023 Partial Solar Eclipse Viewing at Camino Real Marketplace with the View the Santa Barbara Astronomical Unit. Credits:
Photo by Chuck McPartlin by Vivan White & Kat Troche of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific
NASA’s Night Sky Network is one of the most successful and longstanding grassroots initiatives for public engagement in astronomy education. Started in 2004 with the PlanetQuest program out of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and currently supported by NASA’s Science Activation, the Night Sky Network (NSN) plays a critical role in fostering science literacy through astronomy. By connecting NASA science and missions to support amateur astronomy clubs, NSN leverages the expertise and enthusiasm of club members, who bring this knowledge to schools, museums, observatories, and other organizations, bridging the gap between NASA science and the public. Now in its 20th year, NSN supports over 400 astronomy clubs dedicated to bringing the wonder of the night sky to their communities across the US, connecting with 7.4 million people across the United States and its territories since its inception.
International Observe the Moon Night, September 2024 Credit: Oklahoma City Astronomy Club Humble Beginnings
It all started with an idea – astronomy clubs already do great outreach, and club members know a lot of astronomy (shown definitively by founder Marni Berendsen’s research), and they love to talk with the public – how could NASA support these astronomy clubs in sharing current research and ideas using informal activities designed for use in the places that amateur astronomers do outreach. Thanks to funding through NASA JPL’s PlanetQuest public engagement program, the Night Sky Network was born in 2004, with more than 100 clubs joining the first year.
Raynham Public Observing Night, February 2004 Credit: Astronomical Society of Southern New England/Mark Gibson As quoted from the first NSN news article, “NASA is very excited to be working closely with the amateur astronomy community,” said Michael Greene, current Director for Communications and Education and former head of public engagement for JPL’s Navigator Program and PlanetQuest initiatives, “Amateurs want more people to look at the sky and understand astronomy, and so do we. Connecting what we do with our missions to the sense of wonder that comes when you look up at the stars and the planets is one of our long-term objectives. We have a strong commitment to inspiring the next generation of explorers. Lending support to the energy that the amateur astronomy community brings to students and the public will allow NASA to reach many more people.”
Taking off like a rocket, Night Sky Network had over 100 clubs registered on their website within the first year.
The Toolkits
Outreach Toolkits were developed to assist clubs with their endeavors. These kits included educational materials, hands-on activities, and guides to explaining topics in an accessible way. So far, 13 toolkits have been created with topics ranging from the scale of the universe to how telescopes work. To qualify for these free Toolkits, clubs must be active in their communities, hosting two outreach events every three months or five outreach events within a calendar year. Supplemental toolkits were also created based on special events, such as the solar eclipses and the 50th anniversary of Apollo’s Moon landing. A new toolkit is in development to teach audiences about solar science, and NSN is on track to support clubs well into the future.
Rye Science Day, October 2014 Credit: Southern Colorado Astronomical Society/Malissa Pacheco NSN also hosts archived video trainings on these toolkits and other topics via its YouTube channel and a monthly webinar series with scientists from various institutions worldwide. Lastly, a monthly segment called Night Sky Notes is produced for clubs to share with their audiences via newsletters and mailing lists.
Sharing the Universe
In 2007, a National Science Foundation grant provided funding for further research into astronomy club needs. From that came three resources for clubs – the Growing Your Astronomy Club and Getting Started with Outreach video series, as well as an updated website with a national calendar and club and event coordination. Now you can find hundreds of events each month across the country, including virtual events that you can join from anywhere.
Night Sky Network: Current and Future
Map of Night Sky Network clubs within the United States, as of November 2024 Credit: Night Sky Network/Google Maps View the full article
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By NASA
Earth Observer Earth Home Earth Observer Home Editor’s Corner Feature Articles Meeting Summaries News Science in the News Calendars In Memoriam More Archives 4 min read
2024 AGU Fall Meeting Hyperwall Schedule
NASA Science at AGU Fall Meeting Hyperwall Schedule, December 9-12, 2024
Join NASA in the Exhibit Hall (Booth #719) for Hyperwall Storytelling by NASA experts. Full Hyperwall Agenda below.
***Copies of the 2025 NASA Science Calendar will be distributed at the NASA Exhibit at the start of each day.***
MONDAY, DECEMBER 9
3:20 – 3:40 PM From Stars to Life: The Power of NASA Science Dr. Nicola Fox 3:40 – 4:00 PM NASA Planetary Science Division: 2024 Highlights Eric Ianson (PSD Deputy Director) 4:00 – 4:20 PM NASA Earth Science Overview Dr. Karen St. Germain 4:20 – 4:40 PM NASA Astrophysics: Looking Forward Dr. Mark Clampin 4:40 – 5:00 PM Helio Big Year Wind-Down and a Look Ahead Dr. Joseph Westlake 5:00 – 5:20 PM NASA Biological & Physical Sciences Overview Dr. Lisa Carnell 5:20 – 5:40 PM Astrobiology: The Science, The Program, and The Work Dr. Becky McCauley Rench TUESDAY, DECEMBER 10
10:15 – 10:30 AM Integration of Vantage Points and Approaches by NASA Earth Science Division Dr. Jack Kaye 10:30 – 10:45 AM Life after launch: A Snapshot of the First 9 Months of NASA’s PACE Mission Jeremy Werdell 10:45 – 11:00 AM Foundation Model in Earth Science: Towards Earth Science to Action Tsengdar Lee 11:15 – 11:30 AM NASA’s Office of the Chief Science Data Officer: Supporting a More Equitable, Impactful, and Efficient Scientific Future Kevin Murphy 11:30- 11:45 AM 30 Years of GLOBE: Advancing Earth System Science, Education, and Public Engagement Amy P. Chen 11:45 – 12:00 PM 2024 NASA Visualization Highlights Mark Subbarao 12:30 – 1:45 PM Grand Prize Winners of 2024 AGU Michael H. Freilich Student Visualization Competition Introductory Remarks from AGU & NASA Steve Platnick Thawing History: Retracing Arctic Expeditions in a Warming World Dylan Wootton Monitoring the Weather in Near Real-Time with Open-Access GOES-R Data Jorge Bravo Mitigating Agricultural Runoff with Tangible Landscape Caitlin Haedrich Earth Observation for Disaster Response: Highlighting Applied Products Patrick Kerwin 2:15 – 2:30 PM Water Science to Water Action John Bolten 2:30 – 2:45 PM Analyzing Space Weather at Mars Gina DiBraccio, Jamie Favors 2:45 – 3:00 PM NASA Airborne in the Arctic: An overview of the NASA Arctic Radiation-Cloud-aerosol-Surface-Interaction eXperiment (ARCSIX) Patrick Taylor 3:00 – 3:15 PM Science Activation and the 2023-24 Eclipses Lin Chambers 3:30 – 3:45 PM Tracking Extreme Fires in 2024 Douglas Morton 3:45 – 4:00 PM BioSCape: A Biodiversity Airborne Campaign in South Africa Anabelle Cardoso 4:00 – 4:15 PM U.S. Greenhouse Gas Center Lesley Ott 4:15 – 4:30 PM Data Governance and Space Data Ethics in the Era of AI: NASA Acres at the Leading Edge Alyssa Whitcraft, Todd Janzen 5:00 – 5:15 PM Global GEOS Forecasts of Severe Storms and Tornado Activity Across the United States William Putman 5:15 – 5:30 PM NASA Earth Action Empowering Health and Air Quality Communities John Haynes 5:30 – 5:45 PM The Habitable Worlds Observatory Megan Ansdell WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 11
10:15 – 10:30 AM From Orbit to Earth: Exploring the LEO Science Digest Jeremy Goldstein 10:30 – 10:45 AM Hello, Hello Again: How Lunar Samples Introduced Us to the Solar System, and What We’ll Learn When We Meet Again Dr. Barbara Cohen 10:45 – 11:00 AM Planetary Defenders: How NASA Safeguards Earth from Asteroids Kelly Fast 11:15 – 11:30 AM Bringing Science Data Home Philip Baldwin 11:30 – 11:45 AM Fast-Tracking Earth System Science into Action: The Vision for the Integrated Earth System Observatory Cecile Rousseaux 11:45 – 12:00 PM A Decade of Monitoring Atmospheric CO2 from Space Junjie Liu 12:30 – 1:45 PM Grand Prize Winners of 2024 AGU Michael H. Freilich Student Visualization Competition Introductory Remarks from AGU & NASA Dr. Jack Kaye Photogrammetric Modeling and Remote Identification of Small Lava Tubes in the 1961 Lava Flow at Askja, Iceland Mya Thomas Monitoring Air Quality Using MODIS and CALIPSO Data in Conjunction with Socioeconomic Data to Map Air Pollution in Hampton Roads Virginia Marilee Karinshak Visualizing UAV-Based Detection and Severity Assessment of Brown Spot Needle Blight in Pine Forests Swati Singh Different Temperatures of a Solar Flare Crisel Suarez 2:15 – 2:30 PM Ancient and Modern Sun Gazing: New view of our star as seen by CODEX and upcoming missions MUSE, PUNCH and SunRISE Dr. Nicholeen Viall, Dr. Jeff Newmark 2:30 – 2:45 PM A Stroll Through The Universe of NASA Citizen Science Sarah Kirn 2:45 – 3:00 PM OSIRIS-REx Returned Samples from the Early Solar System Jason Dworkin 3:00 – 3:15 PM To the Moon, Together: Ensuring Mission Success in an Increasingly Busy Lunar Environment Therese Jones 3:30 – 3:45 PM What Goes Around Comes Around – Repeating Patterns in Global Precipitation George Huffman 3:45 – 4:00 PM Parker Solar Probe: Thriving, Surviving, and Exploring our Sun to Make Paradigm Shifting Discoveries Nour Rawafi, Betsy Congdon 4:00 – 4:15 PM Europa Clipper Curt Niebur 4:15 – 4:30 PM Roman Space Telescope and Exoplanets Rob Zellem 5:00 – 5:15 PM Mars Exploration: Present and Future Dr. Lindsay Hays 5:15 – 5:30 PM Superstorm: The surprise entry into the Helio Big Year celebration of the Sun, and possibly a foreshadowing of what’s to come during Solar Maximum Kelly Korrek 5:30 – 5:45 PM From EARTHDATA to Action: Enabling Earth Science Data to Serve Society Katie Baynes THURSDAY, DECEMBER 12
10:15 – 10:30 AM Geospace Dynamics Constellation: The Space Weather Rosetta Stone Katherine Garcia-Sage, Doug Rowland 10:30 – 10:45 AM Future of Magnetosphere to Ionosphere Coupling Lara Waldrop, Skyler Kleinschmidt, Sam Yee 10:45 – 11:00 AM NASA ESTO: Launchpad for Novel Earth Science Technologies Michael Seablom 11:00 – 11:15 AM From Leaf to Orbit: NASA Research Reveals the Changing Northern Landscape Dr. Liz Hoy 11:30 – 11:45 PM OpenET: Filling a Critical Data Gap in Water Management Forrest Melton 11:45 – 12:00 PM Dragonfly: Flights of Exploration Across Saturn’s Moon Titan, an Organic Ocean World Zibi Turtle 12:00 – 12:15 PM Venus and DAVINCI Natasha Johnson 12:15 – 12:30 PM IMAP: The Modern-Day Celestial Cartographer Prof. David J. McComas Share
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Last Updated Dec 04, 2024 Related Terms
Earth Science View the full article
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By NASA
4 min read
December’s Night Sky Notes: Spot the King of Planets
by Kat Troche of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific
Jupiter is our solar system’s undisputed king of the planets! Jupiter is bright and easy to spot from our vantage point on Earth, helped by its massive size and banded, reflective cloud tops. Jupiter even possesses moons the size of planets: Ganymede, its largest, is bigger than the planet Mercury. What’s more, you can easily observe Jupiter and its moons with a modest instrument, just like Galileo did over 400 years ago.
This image taken on Feb. 7 by NASA’s Juno spacecraft, reveals swirling cloud formations in the northern area of Jupiter’s north temperate belt. Citizen scientist Kevin M. Gill processed the image using data from the JunoCam imager. NASA, JPL-Caltech, SwRI, MSSS | Image processing by Kevin M. Gill, © CC BY Jupiter’s position as our solar system’s largest planet is truly earned; you could fit 11 Earths along Jupiter’s diameter, and in case you were looking to fill up Jupiter with some Earth-size marbles, you would need over 1300 Earths to fill it up – and that would still not be quite enough! However, despite its formidable size, Jupiter’s true rule over the outer solar system comes from its enormous mass. If you took all of the planets in our solar system and put them together, they would still only be half as massive as Jupiter all by itself. Jupiter’s mighty mass has shaped the orbits of countless comets and asteroids. Its gravity can fling these tiny objects towards our inner solar system and also draw them into itself, as famously observed in 1994 when Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, drawn towards Jupiter in previous orbits, smashed into the gas giant’s atmosphere. Its multiple fragments slammed into Jupiter’s cloud tops with such violence that the fireballs and dark impact spots were not only seen by NASA’s orbiting Galileo probe but also by observers back on Earth!
Look for Jupiter near the Eye of the Bull, Aldebaran, in the Taurus constellation on the evening of December 15, 2024. Binoculars may help you spot Jupiter’s moons as small bright star-like objects on either side of the planet. A small telescope will show them easily, along with Jupiter’s famed cloud bands. How many can you count? Credit: Stellarium Web Jupiter is easy to observe at night with our unaided eyes, as well-documented by the ancient astronomers who carefully recorded its slow movements from night to night. It can be one of the brightest objects in our nighttime skies, bested only by the Moon, Venus, and occasionally Mars, when the red planet is at opposition. That’s impressive for a planet that, at its closest to Earth, is still over 365 million miles (587 million km) away. It’s even more impressive that the giant world remains very bright to Earthbound observers at its furthest distance: 600 million miles (968 million km)! While the King of Planets has a coterie of 95 known moons, only the four large moons that Galileo originally observed in 1610 – Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Calisto – can be easily observed by Earth-based observers with very modest equipment. These are called, appropriately enough, the Galilean moons. Most telescopes will show the moons as faint star-like objects neatly lined up close to bright Jupiter. Most binoculars will show at least one or two moons orbiting the planet. Small telescopes will show all four of the Galilean moons if they are all visible, but sometimes they can pass behind or in front of Jupiter or even each other. Telescopes will also show details like Jupiter’s cloud bands and, if powerful enough, large storms like its famous Great Red Spot, and the shadows of the Galilean moons passing between the Sun and Jupiter. Sketching the positions of Jupiter’s moons during the course of an evening – and night to night – can be a rewarding project! You can download an activity guide from the Astronomical Society of the Pacific at bit.ly/drawjupitermoons
Now in its eighth year, NASA’s Juno mission is one of just nine spacecraft to have visited this impressive world. Juno entered Jupiter’s orbit in 2016 to begin its initial mission to study this giant world’s mysterious interior. The years have proven Juno’s mission a success, with data from the probe revolutionizing our understanding of this gassy world’s guts. Juno’s mission has since been extended to include the study of its large moons, and since 2021 the plucky probe, increasingly battered by Jupiter’s powerful radiation belts, has made close flybys of the icy moons Ganymede and Europa, along with volcanic Io. What else will we potentially learn in 2030 with the Europa Clipper mission?
Find the latest discoveries from Juno and NASA’s missions to Jupiter at science.nasa.gov/jupiter/
Originally posted by Dave Prosper: February 2023
Last Updated by Kat Troche: November 2024
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