Contributor Posts

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Comet ATLAS is really bright now, but also really close to the Sun. Outside the glow of the Sun, Comet C/2024 G3 (ATLAS) would be one of the more remarkable comet sights of recent years, reflecting about as much sunlight to Earth as Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS did in October, and now rivaling even planet Venus. But the giant snowball is now so close to the Sun that it can only be seen through the light of the early morning dawn or the early evening dusk. Today, Comet ATLAS is at perihelion -- its closest ever to the Sun. Although the future brightness of comets is notoriously hard to predict, there is hope that Comet ATLAS will survive its close pass near the Sun and remain bright enough to be seen with the unaided eye over the next few days -- and possibly a good camera comet for weeks. The featured image was taken early yesterday morning near Tornaľa, Slovakia. Tomorrow: Zoom APOD Lecture hosted by the Amateur Astronomers of Association of New York

Photo by Petr Horalek / Institute of Physics in Opava

Heavy snowfall brought by Storm Filomena hit Spain in January 2021, and persisted on the ground for many days across much of the country, as this Copernicus Sentinel-3 satellite image shows.

European Space Agency, Attribution, via Wikimedia Commons. View source.

Albert Camus ~ (1913 – 1960) French philosopher, author, dramatist and journalist. He was the recipient of the 1957 Nobel Prize in Literature at the age of 44.  His works include The Stranger, The Plague, The Myth of Sisyphus, The Fall and The Rebel.

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Whatever hit Mimas nearly destroyed it. What remains is one of the largest impact craters on one of Saturn's smallest round moons. Analysis indicates that a slightly larger impact would have destroyed Mimas entirely. The huge crater, named Herschel after the 1789 discoverer of Mimas, Sir William Herschel, spans about 130 kilometers and is featured here. Mimas' low mass produces a surface gravity just strong enough to create a spherical body but weak enough to allow such relatively large surface features. Mimas is made of mostly water ice with a smattering of rock - so it is accurately described as a big dirty snowball. The featured image was taken during the closest-ever flyby of the robot spacecraft Cassini past Mimas in 2010 while in orbit around Saturn. Interactive: Take a trek across Mimas January 14: Zoom APOD Lecture hosted by the Amateur Astronomers of Association of New York

Olive-bellied sunbird (Cinnyris chloropygius) starting to fly at Kibale National Park, Uganda.

Giles Laurent, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. View source.

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Only Mercury is missing from a Solar System parade of planets in this early evening skyscape. Rising nearly opposite the Sun, bright Mars is at the far left. The other naked-eye planets Jupiter, Saturn, and Venus, can also be spotted, with the positions of too-faint Uranus and Neptune marked near the arcing trace of the ecliptic plane. On the far right and close to the western horizon after sunset is a young crescent Moon whose surface is partly illuminated by earthshine. In the foreground of the composite panorama captured on 2 January, planet Earth is represented by Mount Etna's lower Silvestri Crater. Of course Earth's early evening skies are full of planets for the entire month of January. On 13 January, a nearly Full Moon will appear to pass in front of Mars for skywatchers in the continental U.S. and Eastern Canada.

Photo by Dario Giannobile

Sninský kameň, Vihorlatské vrchy in the winter, frost on trees.

Milan Bališin, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. View source.

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

An unassuming region in the constellation Taurus holds these dark and dusty nebulae. Scattered through the scene, stars in multiple star systems are forming within their natal Taurus molecular cloud complex some 450 light-years away. Millions of years young and still going through stellar adolescence, the stars are variable in brightness and in the late phases of their gravitational collapse. Known as T-Tauri class stars they tend to be faint and take on a yellowish hue in the image. One of the brightest T-Tauri stars in Taurus, V773 (aka HD283447) is near the center of the telescopic frame that spans over 1 degree. Toward the top is the dense, dark marking on the sky cataloged as Barnard 209.

Photo by Long Xin