December 2016 – Astronomy Now

See Mars and Neptune get close on New Year’s Eve & New Year’s Day

31 December 2016 Ade Ashford

The young crescent Moon’s nightly motion from 31 December 2016 to 3 January 2017 carries it past dazzling planet Venus and first-magnitude Mars. A small telescope also reveals outermost planet Neptune, which passes just 0.02 degrees from Mars around 7h UT on 1 January, offering observers around the world a New Year’s Day treat.

NASA’s NEOWISE mission spies one comet, maybe two

30 December 2016 Stephen Clark

NASA’s NEOWISE mission has recently discovered some celestial objects traveling through our neighborhood, including one on the blurry line between asteroid and comet. Another — definitely a comet — might be seen with binoculars through next week.

Internal debris may be causing problem with Mars rover’s drill

29 December 2016 Stephen Clark

Engineers believe a piece of foreign object debris may be intermittently stalling a motor needed to place the Curiosity Mars rover’s drill bit onto rocks, and the robot’s ground team is assessing the source of the potential contamination.

Cassini takes a close up look at Saturn’s moon Pandora

27 December 2016 Astronomy Now

NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has captured one of the highest-resolution views ever taken of Saturn’s moon Pandora.

Astronomers team up to give first look at birthplaces of most current stars

27 December 2016 Stephen Clark

Astronomers have gotten their first look at exactly where most of today’s stars were born. To do so, they used telescope arrays in New Mexico and Chile to look at distant galaxies seen as they were some 10 billion years ago.

Piers Sellers, shuttle astronaut and renowned climate researcher, dies at 61

26 December 2016 Stephen Clark

Former astronaut Piers Sellers, a British-born climate scientist who flew on three space shuttle missions to help construct the International Space Station, has died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 61.

Hunt for water at Ceres goes underground

23 December 2016 Stephen Clark

NASA’s Dawn spacecraft has continued its survey of the dwarf planet Ceres this year, discovering rock-bound ice hidden just beneath the airless world’s rugged surface and a handful of icy outcrops inside craters in the northern hemisphere, raising hopes that Ceres could have once held a buried habitable ocean of liquid water.

Festive nebulae light up Milky Way Galaxy satellite

23 December 2016 Stephen Clark

The sheer observing power of the Hubble Space Telescope is rarely better illustrated than in an image such as this. This glowing pink nebula, named NGC 248, is located in the Small Magellanic Cloud, just under 200,000 light-years away and yet can still be seen in great detail.

A cosmic winter wonderland

22 December 2016 Astronomy Now

Although there are no seasons in space, this cosmic vista invokes thoughts of a frosty winter landscape. It is, in fact, a region called NGC 6357 where radiation from hot, young stars is energizing the cooler gas in the cloud that surrounds them.

Engineers examine unexpected readings from JWST shake test

20 December 2016 Stephen Clark

NASA says engineers are diagnosing the source of “anomalous readings” during a recent vibration test of the sensitive optics and sensors at the heart of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope.