Picture Of The Day!

Dusty regions like these are often the places where stars form. In fact, there are two notable stars—V633 (top left of center) and V376 Cassiopeiae (bottom left)—in this image from the Hubble Space Telescope.

These stars have yet to start fusing hydrogen in their cores, and continue to accumulate mass. As they do this, much of the material they ingest gets shot back out as energetic jets. For these young stars, these jets can contain as much mass as Earth has.

Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA; Gilles Chapdelaine.

ALT TEXT: A protostar in the process of forming. Above the center, at 11 o’clock, is a bright, white star. To the bottom right of this star is a large cavity, surrounded by dark brown gas and dust. This surrounding dust fills the image with the exception of another small cavity toward the bottom left. At about 4 o’clock in this cavity, there is another bright, white star. Smaller white stars are spread throughout the image.

Today's word of the day is "earthshine" which is when the Earth reflects the Sun's light so that it makes the dark side of the moon glow! Super cool.

Image credit: Abhijit Juvekar

So far, we think the sky will cooperate enough for us to see tomorrow's eclipse! We'll be handing out eclipse glasses around DMF tomorrow, and some other locations on campus from 10:30 am - 2:45 pm. Check back one more time in the morning about the weather.

2023 October 23

Moon Io from Spacecraft Juno Image Credit: NASA, JPL-Caltech, SwRI, MSSS; Processing & Copyright: Ted Stryk & Fernando García Navarro

Explanation: There goes another one! Volcanoes on Jupiter’s moon Io keep erupting. To investigate, NASA’s robotic Juno spacecraft has begun a series of visits to this very strange moon. Io is about the size of Earth’s moon, but because of gravitational flexing by Jupiter and other moons, Io’s interior gets heated and its surface has become covered with volcanoes. The featured image is from last week’s flyby, passing within 12,000 kilometers above the dangerously active world. The surface of Io is covered with sulfur and frozen sulfur dioxide, making it appear yellow, orange and brown. As hoped, Juno flew by just as a volcano was erupting – with its faint plume visible near the top of the featured image. Studying Io’s volcanoes and plumes helps humanity better understand how Jupiter’s complex system of moons, rings, and auroras interact. Juno is scheduled to make two flybys of Io during the coming months that are almost 10 times closer: one in December and another in February 2024.

∞ Source: apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap231023.html

Wed. 11/20 - We'll be closed tonight due to clouds.

The 2023 Partial (Annular) Solar Eclipse as seen from Nevada // Brian Fulda

Please, forecast, be right about tomorrow night.

(For where we live, that's clear).

Reblog Vs. Repost

In short: reblogging is awesome. Reposting isn't.

Wow - the visible star at the center of the planetary nebula is an A-type giant star. It's the companion of the white dwarf which spawned the nebula itself. (Loved the pic so much I had to read about the object a little).

NGC 1514 // Marc Fischer

Astronomy Word of the Day

The Magellanic Clouds are two small, irregular dwarf galaxies outside of the Milky Way. These two galaxies are visible in the skies of the southern hemisphere, close to the South Celestial Pole, so they don't appear to set!

Image: https://aaa.org/.../01/southern-skies-the-magellanic-clouds/