Space at
your fingertips.
"I want to know why the universe exist, why there is something greater than nothing."
Steven Hawking
Scientist, Space Lover
Yes, but have you ever seen all of the planets at once? A rare roll-call of planets has been occurring in the morning sky for much of June. The featured fisheye all-sky image, taken a few mornings ago near the town of San Pedro de Atacama in Chile, caught not only the entire planet parade, but the Moon between Mars and Venus. In order, left to right along the ecliptic plane, members of this Solar System family portrait are Earth, Saturn, Neptune, Jupiter, Mars, Uranus, Venus, Mercury, and Earth. To emphasize their locations, Neptune and Uranus have been artificially enhanced. The volcano just below Mercury is Licancabur. In July, Mercury will move into the Sun's glare but reappear a few days later on the evening side. Then, in August, Saturn will drift past the direction opposite the Sun and so become visible at dusk instead of dawn. The next time that all eight planets will be simultaneously visible in the evening sky will be in 2122. Notable Submissions to APOD: Morning Planet Parade 2022 June
On Mars, sunsets can appear salmon pink. The unusual color is partly due to rust: oxidized iron from Martian dust circulating in the Martian atmosphere. Clouds appear in the morning and evening, but usually evaporate in the midday Sun. A day on Mars lasts 24.6 hours - very similar to Earth's, but a Martian year lasts almost twice as long as an Earth year. The above panorama by Mars Pathfinder, shown mirror-inverted, was released last Friday by the Imager team. Mars Pathfinder has now successfully completed all the goals of its planned mission. Nevertheless, the Sagan Memorial Station spent the weekend recharging its batteries, anticipating the possibility of still more productive weeks of exploration ahead.
How do binary stars form? To help find out, the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) recently captured one of the highest resolution images yet taken of a binary star system in formation. Most stars are not alone -- they typically form as part of a multiple star systems where star each orbits a common center of gravity. The two bright spots in the featured image are small disks that surround the forming proto-stars in [BHB2007] 11, while the surrounding pretzel-shaped filaments are gas and dust that have been gravitationally pulled from a larger disk. The circumstellar filaments span roughly the radius of the orbit of Neptune. The BHB2007 system is a small part of the Pipe Nebula (also known as Barnard 59), a photogenic network of dust and gas that protrudes from Milky Way's spiral disk in the constellation of Ophiuchus. The binary star formation process should be complete within a few million years.
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