Tonight, the moon, Mars and the constellation Leo the Lion are seen together over the eastern horizon about two hours after sunset. However, Leo’s stars rise four minutes earlier each day, or two hours earlier with each passing month. Sometime in March, watch for Leo to light up the eastern sky as soon as darkness falls – a sure sign that spring is about to return to the Northern Hemisphere.
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Saturn eclipsing the sun, as seen by Cassini spacecraft in 2006. More about this image. Credit: CICLOPS, JPL, ESA, NASA
The planet Saturn is relatively easy to find in 2012, because it’s near a bright star, Spica in the constellation Virgo. This star always returns to the early evening sky in April – spring for the Northern Hemisphere, autumn for the Southern Hemisphere. Spica stays out all night – or nearly all night long – on April and May nights. Likewise, April or May of 2012 will also be the best time this year to see the ringed planet Saturn in all its glory. But you can see it tonight, too.
Saturn in February-March 2012
In early February 2012, Saturn and Spica are rising around midnight for all of us on Earth.
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You can see the planet Saturn now from very late evening until dawn. It’s highest in the southern sky near 5 a.m. It’s rising earlier in the evening every day. As a general rule, Saturn travels eastward in front of the stars. But in 2012 – from February 8 to June 26 – Saturn will be moving in retrograde (westward) in front of the constellation Virgo the Maiden. Note Saturn’s position relative to Spica, Virgo’s brightest star. At the end of Saturn’s retrograde, you’ll see Saturn in a different position in front of the backdrop stars.
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Image Credit: NASA/JPL–Caltech/Space Science Institute
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As we on Earth prepare for the best time in 2012 to view Saturn, the Cassini spacecraft – cruising in orbit around Saturn since 2004, studying its rings and moons – has returned this beautiful image. It’s Saturn’s moon Enceladus in a crescent phase, with Saturn’s rings in the bckground. The image was taken with Cassini’s narrow-angle camera on January 4, 2012 at a distance of 181,000 miles (291,000 km) from Enceladus.
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One of the most fascinating pursuits in 21st century science is the study of whale songs in Earth’s mighty global ocean. A couple of months ago, we ran a story about sperm whales using clicks to communicate that seem to vary due to culture, for example, not genetics as you might expect. You might also expect whales of the same species in a single part of the ocean to sing songs that are similar. But study from the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) – appearing in the January 2012 edition of Marine Mammal Science – now reveals that while the songs of humpback whales on both sides of the southern Indian Ocean share one similar part or theme, the rest of the themes in the whales’ songs are “almost completely different.”
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Pilot whale. Image credit: Barney Moss via Wkimedia Commons
For decades, scientists have been listening to whales and dolphins, trying to understand what they’re saying. Now, the public — people like you and I — are being invited to work with them in a unique new research project called Whale FM.
Volunteers are needed to listen to whale call audio segments, to identify similar-sounding calls from different individuals. This work will help scientists characterize different types of calls, taking us a few steps closer to understanding whale conversations.
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Image Credit: KellyB
Researchers at Princeton University conducted research among college students that suggests a link between neuropsychiatric disorders among family members and intellectual pursuits. Students with technical majors (such as science, mathematics or engineering) were more likely than other students to report a sibling with an autism spectrum disorder. Conversely, students interested in the humanities were more likely to report a family member with major depressive disorder, bipolar disorder, or substance abuse problems.
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Image Credit: NASA
Satellite researcher Alan Belward works for the Institute for Environment and Sustainability, part of the European Commission’s Joint Research Center in Ispra, Italy. Dr. Belward heads the Land Resource Management Unit, which looks at changes to land cover and land use on a global scale. In 2011, Dr. Belward was part of the most comprehensive forest survey ever, which involved 190 countries. An essential tool for his research is data from the Landsat satellite program, which has taken detailed pictures of forest canopies for over 40 years. Dr. Belward spoke with EarthSky’s Jorge Salazar about tracking Earth’s forests from space.
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Image Credit: Dan Bush
The moon turns full today (Tuesday, February 7) at 21:54 Universal Time. That’s 4:54 p.m. EST, 3:54 p.m. CST, 2:54 p.m. MST or 1:54 p.m. PST.
The February full moon goes by many different names. It was called the Snow-blinding Moon by the Micmac people in eastern Canada. It was the Wind Moon to the San Ildefonso of the Southwest. And it was the Blackbear Moon to the Kutenai of the Northwest. Today, we call the February full moon the Snow Moon or Hunger Moon.
Here are the names of all the full moons
Every full moon stands opposite – or nearly opposite – the sun. Try noticing how high above the horizon you see the moon tonight. Its distance above the horizon indicates approximately how far below the opposite horizon the sun is at that time.
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Photo Credit: Yourdon
Full moon tonight!
At full moon, we are seeing all of the moon’s day side.
The moon and sun are on a line, with Earth in between. It’s as though Earth is the fulcrum of a seesaw, and the moon and sun are sitting on either end of the seesaw. Thus as the sun sets in the west, the full moon rises. When the sun is below our feet at midnight, the full moon is highest in the sky. When the sun rises again at dawn, the full moon is setting.
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Kristin O’Brien is an Associate Professor of Biology University of Alaska Institute of Arctic Biology. She is interested in the unique biochemical and physiological characteristics that have evolved in fishes living in the chronically cold environment of Antarctica’s Southern Ocean. One of the most striking characteristics among the Antarctic fishes of the family Channichthyidae, known…read more »
Kristin O’Brien: Antarctic icefishes have translucent bodies and blood
Sukanya Chakarbarti is faculty member in the physics department at Florida Atlantic University. She researches the dynamical evolution of galaxies, with the goal of developing astrophysical probes of fundamental physics. Chakrabarti works on understanding galaxy evolution by performing hydrodynamical and magnetohydrodynamical simulations of galaxies combined with radiative transfer calculations. Dr. Chakrabarti has co-authored over 30…read more »
Sukanya Chakrabarti maps dark matter from ripples of passing satellites
Judy Cheng works to learn to about galaxy formation by looking at our own Milky Way. She says that “detailed observations of our galaxy can be used to test predictions made by models of disk formation and evolution, and they complement the large surveys that study galaxies at high redshift. For the Milky Way in…read more »
Gavin A. Schmidt is a climatologist and climate modeler at the NASA GISS. He works on the variability of the ocean circulation and climate, using general circulation models (GCMs). He has also worked on ways to reconcile paleo-data with models. He helped develop the GISS ocean and coupled GCMs to improve the representation of the…read more »
Pamela A. Silver is a Professor in the Department of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School and a founding core faculty member of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering of Harvard University. Dr. Silver’s research focus is on building cell-based machines, designing novel therapeutics, and reengineering photosynthetic bacteria to produce hydrogen and other fuels….read more »
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