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Sky This Month: December 2023
Winter nights offer excellent views of the solar system. Here, a setting Venus blazes low in the sky. Credit: Alan Dyer Catch a glimpse of innermost planet Mercury soon after sunset in early December. Once darkness falls, you’ll find Saturn descending in the south and Jupiter high in the east. Both are ideally located for…
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Sky This Month: December 2023
Winter nights offer excellent views of the solar system. Here, a setting Venus blazes low in the sky. Credit: Alan Dyer Catch a glimpse of innermost planet Mercury soon after sunset in early December. Once darkness falls, you’ll find Saturn descending in the south and Jupiter high in the east. Both are ideally located for…
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Vera Rubin telescope will generate a mind-boggling amount of data, say astronomers
The LSST, or Vera Rubin Survey Telescope, under construction at Cerro Pachon, Chile. Image Credit: LSST When the Vera C. Rubin Observatory comes online in 2025, it will be one of the most powerful tools available to astronomers, capturing huge portions of the sky every night with its 8.4-meter mirror and 3.2-gigapixel camera. Each image…
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Watch SpaceX launch Irish, South Korean satellites on Falcon 9 rocket today (video)
SpaceX will launch Ireland’s first satellite and a South Korean reconnaissance satellite Thursday (Nov. 29), and you can watch the broadcast live. A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket will fly to orbit at 1:19 p.m. EST (1819 GMT or 10:10 a.m. PST) from Vandenberg Space Force Base on the California coast. Space.com will carry the broadcast…
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Watch SpaceX launch Irish, South Korean satellites on Falcon 9 rocket today (video)
SpaceX will launch Ireland’s first satellite and a South Korean reconnaissance satellite Thursday (Nov. 29), and you can watch the broadcast live. A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket will fly to orbit at 1:19 p.m. EST (1819 GMT or 10:10 a.m. PST) from Vandenberg Space Force Base on the California coast. Space.com will carry the broadcast…
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Scientists search for the soundtrack of the universe
Dishes of the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array in New Mexico line up beneath the starry sky. Radio waves are just one of the numerous signals from space that comprise the soundtrack of the cosmos. Credit: NRAO/AUI/NSF, Jeff Hellerman I have just replaced Albert Einstein (a.d. 1879–1955) with Pythagoras (570–490 b.c.) as the one…
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Scientists search for the soundtrack of the universe
Dishes of the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array in New Mexico line up beneath the starry sky. Radio waves are just one of the numerous signals from space that comprise the soundtrack of the cosmos. Credit: NRAO/AUI/NSF, Jeff Hellerman I have just replaced Albert Einstein (a.d. 1879–1955) with Pythagoras (570–490 b.c.) as the one…
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A Strong Solar Storm Is Inbound With a Full Halo CME
The Space Weather Prediction Center is closely watching the arrival of a super-hot plasma eruption, known as a coronal mass ejection (CME), that will slam into Earth tonight, writes longtime Slashdot reader StyleChief. Images of the huge sunspot “rotating to face the earth” can be viewed here. The Space Weather Prediction Center reports: With 3…
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Scientists are devising ways to gaze past Earth’s radio haze
Earth’s atmosphere is filled with an intensifying blizzard of radio waves — media broadcasts, mobile phone signals, radar pings, you name it. It’s a torrent that’s critical for sustaining our world’s civilization — but unfortunately, it’s also an impediment for ground-based radio telescopes. Astronomers who want to catch radio signals from much farther away in…
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Scientists are devising ways to gaze past Earth’s radio haze
Earth’s atmosphere is filled with an intensifying blizzard of radio waves — media broadcasts, mobile phone signals, radar pings, you name it. It’s a torrent that’s critical for sustaining our world’s civilization — but unfortunately, it’s also an impediment for ground-based radio telescopes. Astronomers who want to catch radio signals from much farther away in…