November 2014 – Astronomy Now

See the year’s largest First Quarter Moon on 29th November

28 November 2014 Ade Ashford

The Moon’s distance from the Earth, and hence its apparent size, waxes and wanes just like its phases. It so happens that Saturday’s First Quarter Moon is closer than normal…

Earth’s ‘plasmaspheric hiss’ protects against a harmful radiation belt

27 November 2014 Astronomy Now

Researchers at MIT, the University of Colorado and elsewhere have found that very low-frequency electromagnetic waves in the Earth’s upper atmosphere form a shield, protecting the planet’s surface from the Van Allen belt’s high-energy radiation.

‘Eye of Sauron’ provides new way of measuring distances to galaxies

26 November 2014 Astronomy Now

A team led by Dr. Sebastian Hoenig from the University of Southampton has developed a new way of measuring precise distances to galaxies tens of millions of light-years away, refining the distance to NGC 4151 and providing a way for accurately determining black hole masses.

The Pleiades in all their glory

26 November 2014 Mark Armstrong

The Pleiades in Taurus, otherwise known as the Seven Sisters, is an unrivalled open cluster of late autumn and winter Northern Hemisphere skies. This marvellous portrait of M45 was taken by Ian Aiken.

Dawn spacecraft’s geological maps of asteroid Vesta

25 November 2014 Astronomy Now

Launched in 2007, Nasa’s Dawn spacecraft orbited and surveyed large asteroid Vesta between July 2011 and September 2012. This detailed map is the culmination of a two-and-a-half-year geological mapping campaign.

3D view of Philae’s descent to comet

24 November 2014 Astronomy Now

Put on your red-blue 3D glasses to appreciate this view of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko as seen by Philae’s ROLIS imaging system from a distance of 2 miles (3 km).

NASA's reworked image of Europa based on late 1990s data from the Galileo spacecraft.

NASA’s ‘remastered’ view of Europa

21 November 2014 Astronomy Now

NASA uses modern processing techniques to rework a mosaic of images sent back by the Galileo spacecraft in the late 1990s, delivering a high-resolution view of this icy ocean world in natural colours.

UK team announces plan to crowd-source moon mission

20 November 2014 Stephen Clark

Scientists hope private backers will kick-start a mission to land a robotic probe on the South Pole of the moon within the next 10 years, drill deep into lunar bedrock and analyze primordial core samples to study the origins of the solar system.

Gravity saved the universe after the Big Bang?

19 November 2014 Astronomy Now

Recent theories suggest that the production of Higgs particles in the inflationary phase of the early universe should have led to instability and collapse. Now a European team offers an explanation why this didn’t happen, answering fundamental questions about how we are all here.

Illustris Collaboration depiction of large-scale structure in the universe.

Quasar axes align with large-scale cosmic structures

19 November 2014 Astronomy Now

A European research team has used data from ESO’s Very large Telescope in Chile to discover that the rotational axes of quasars align with large-scale structures in the universe.