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Supermoon – and slight penumbral eclipse – for full moon on May 24-25

By in Tonight | 4 hours ago

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In 2013, the May full moon presents the third full moon after the March equinox. In North America we often call this particular full moon the Flower Moon, Rose Moon or Strawberry Moon. That star by tonight’s full moon is Antares, the brightest star in the constellation Scorpius the Scorpion. Plus the moon is one day away from lunar perigee – the moon’s closest point to Earth for this month. By a newly coined popular definition, that makes this May 24-25 full moon a supermoon. And the moon will undergo an extremely minor penumbral lunar eclipse tonight.

Amazing photos of mammatus clouds this week

By in Earth | 16 hours ago
View larger. | Pam Rice Phillips caught the same mammatus clouds as in the first image, above, on May 20, 2013. She's in Granbury, Texas, which is southwest of Ft. Worth. Thank you, Pam.

View larger. | Pam Rice Phillips caught these mammatus clouds on May 20, 2013. Thank you, Pam.

Mammatus clouds are pouch-like protrusions hanging from the undersides of clouds, usually thunderstorm anvil clouds but other types of clouds as well. Contrary to myth, they don’t continue extending downward to form tornados. We received several photos of dramatic mammatus clouds this week. The first and last one on the post inside both were snapped in northern Texas on May 20, 2013, the same day the tornado struck in Moore, near Oklahoma City. These clouds can appear ominous. But, in a way that’s so common in nature, their dangerous aspect goes hand in hand with a magnificent beauty.

A hidden population of exotic neutron stars

By in Science Wire | Space | 18 hours ago
magnetar

A magnetar called SGR 0418+5729 (SGR 0418 for short) has been shown to have the lowest surface magnetic field ever found for this type of neutron star.

Magnetars – the dense remains of dead stars that erupt sporadically with bursts of high-energy radiation – are some of the most extreme objects known in the Universe

May 23 moon over northern Norway

By in Today's Image | 18 hours ago
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See larger images Photo credit: Børge Solberg

EarthSky Facebook friend Børge Solberg took this photo on May 23 at 1:50 a.m. of the moon over northern Norway. The full moon on May 24-25 is a supermoon. (By the way, what is a supermoon?)

The Ring Nebula’s true shape

By in Space | 20 hours ago
View larger. | Composite image of Ring Nebula. Visible-light observations by Hubble Space Telescope combined with infrared data from the ground-based Large Binocular Telescope in Arizona.

View larger. | Composite image of Ring Nebula. Visible-light observations by Hubble Space Telescope combined with infrared data from the ground-based Large Binocular Telescope in Arizona.

NASA released a new image of the famous Ring Nebula this morning (May 23, 2013). This object – aka (M57), located some 2,000 light-years away in the direction of our constellation Lyra the Harp – is beloved by amateur astronomers. They love it because they’re able to pick it out and gaze at it through small telescopes, in which it appears as a pale white smoke ring in space. But now we know more about what the Ring Nebula really looks like.

ESO’s Very Large Telescope celebrates 15 years of success

By in Science Wire | Space | 21 hours ago
15 years VLT

View Larger | This selection of images — one per year in the life of the VLT — gives a taste of its huge scope and scientific productivity since first light in May 1998. The images are as follows: 1998: NGC 1232 (eso9845), 1999: NGC 3603 (eso9946), 2000: Messier 104, the Sombrero Galaxy (eso0007), 2001: Messier 16 in the infrared (eso0142), 2002: the Horsehead Nebula (eso0202), 2003: NGC 613 (eso0338), 2004: first candidate exoplanet image (eso0428), 2005: NGC 1097 centre (eso0534), 2006: NGC 1313 (eso0643), 2007: ESO 593-IG 008 (eso0755), 2008: centre of the Milky Way (eso0846), 2009: the Jewel Box cluster (eso0940), 2010: Messier 17 in the infrared (potw1044a), 2011: the Eyes galaxies (eso1131), 2012: the Carina Nebula in the infrared (eso1208) and 2013: IC 2944 (eso1322).

This new picture celebrates an important anniversary for the Very Large Telescope – it is fifteen years since the first light on the first of its four Unit Telescopes, on 25 May 1998.

Three planets close in west last week of May

By and in Tonight | 1 day ago
The planets Mercury, Venus and Jupiter as they appear after sunset on May 23.

The planets Mercury, Venus and Jupiter as they appear after sunset on May 23.

Be sure to catch a trio of planets – Mercury, Venus and Jupiter – in the deepening western twilight during the final week of May, 2013. The sky chart above is for tonight (May 23). And notice that these objects are low in the sky: the planets will follow the sun beneath the horizon around nightfall. So go outside early to look for them. Find an unobstructed horizon in the direction of sunset. All three planets will appear near the sunset point on the horizon at dusk.

Rare, massive merging of two faraway galaxies

By in Science Wire | Space | 1 day ago
faraway galaxy

The galaxies, collectively called HXMM01, are churning out the equivalent of 2,000 suns a year. By comparison, our Milky Way hatches about two to three suns a year. The total number of stars in both colliding galaxies averages out to about 400 billion suns. Image credit: ESA/NASA/JPL-Caltech/UC Irvine/STScI/Keck/NRAO/SAO

A massive and rare merging of two galaxies has been spotted in images taken by the Herschel space observatory.

M5-class solar flare on May 22

By in Space | 2 days ago
M5-class explosion from sunspot AR1745, which was about to disappear behind the sun's western limb. The flare peaked at 1332 UTC (8:32 CDT) on May 22, 2013.

M5-class explosion from sunspot AR1745, which was about to disappear behind the sun’s western limb. The flare peaked at 1332 UTC (8:32 CDT) on May 22, 2013. The sun is behind the occulting disk at the center of the image, which is from from NASA’s Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, or SOHO, space observatory.

The sun produced an M5-class flare earlier today (May 22, 2013), which peaked at peaked at 1332 UTC (8:32 CDT). In the image below – from NASA SOHO, you can see the beautiful coronal mass ejection produced in the flare. The CME was not Earth-directed but could deliver a glancing blow in the next few days.

Small, speedy plant-eater extends knowledge of dinosaur ecosystems

By in Earth | Science Wire | 2 days ago
dinosaur

Life reconstruction of the new small-bodied, plant eating dinosaur Albertadromeus syntarsus. Art by Julius T. Csotonyi.

A team of paleontologists have described a new dinosaur, the smallest plant-eating dinosaur species known from Canada.