Astron

Top events coming up for 2021  https://www.universetoday.com/149259/astronomy-2021-top-events-for-the-coming-year/ Posted on December 24, 2020 by David Dickinson Astronomy 2021: Top Events for the Coming Year Eclipses, meteor showers, occultations and more in store for the next year of astronomy 2021. Ready for another exciting year of skywatching? 2020 produced several memorable astronomical events, including a surprise naked eye comet C/2020 F3 NEOWISE, the sure-fire Geminid meteors, and a fine, once in a lifetime close pairing of Jupiter and Saturn rounding out the year.  

  file:///C:/Users/danws/AppData/Local/Temp/hydro_202021-almanac_planet-visibility.pdf 16 ASTRONOMICAL INFORMATION | New Zealand Nautical Almanac 2020 – 21 ASTRONOMICAL PLANET VISIBILITY 2020 – 2021 The following diagrams show, in graphical form, when the five “naked-eye” planets Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn are visible in the night sky during the period July 2020 – June 2021. Each diagram spans the hours of darkness, covering the period from 16:00 to 08:00 with midnight being represented by the central line across the diagram. For a given date, time runs from the bottom to the top of the diagram. Times are shown in terms of New Zealand Standard Time; one hour must be added when New Zealand Daylight Time is in force. Each diagram is plotted for Wellington; time differences at other locations in New Zealand will generally not exceed an hour. In addition to the planet information, the diagrams show the time of sunset and sunrise as well as the end and start of astronomical

    A great conjunction is a conjunction of the planets Jupiter and Saturn , when the two planets appear closest together in the sky. Great conjunctions occur approximately every 20 years when Jupiter "overtakes" Saturn in its orbit . They are named "great" for being by far the rarest of the conjunctions between naked-eye planets (i.e. excluding Uranus and Neptune ). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_conjunction   The spacing between the planets varies from conjunction to conjunction with most events being 0.5 to 1.3 degrees (30 to 78 arcminutes , or 1 to 2.5 times the width of a full moon ). Very close conjunctions happen much less frequently (though the maximum of 1.3° is still close by inner planet standards): separations of less than 10 arcminutes have only happened four times since 1200, most recently in 2020. [2] https://www.planetary.org/articles/jupiter-and-saturn-great-conjunction-viewing-guide   Heads-up: Jupiter and Saturn are putting

InSight is a robotic lander designed to study the interior of the planet Mars . [10] [11] The mission launched on 5 May 2018 at 11:05  UTC [12] and is expected to land on the surface of Mars at Elysium Planitia on 26 November 2018, [4] [13] where it will deploy a seismometer and burrow a heat probe. It will also perform a radio science experiment to study the internal structure of Mars. [14] The mission is managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for NASA. The lander was manufactured by Lockheed Martin Space Systems and was originally planned for launch in March 2016. [11] [15] The name is a backronym for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InSight   GOOG  

The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is a space telescope for NASA's Explorers program , designed to search for exoplanets using the transit method in an area 400 times larger than that covered by the Kepler mission. It was launched on April 18, 2018 atop a Falcon 9 rocket . Wikipedia The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) will discover thousands of exoplanets in orbit around the brightest stars in the sky. In a two-year survey of the solar neighborhood, TESS will monitor more than 200,000 stars for temporary drops in brightness caused by planetary transits. This first-ever spaceborne all-sky transit survey will identify planets ranging from Earth-sized to gas giants, around a wide range of stellar types and orbital distances. No ground-based survey can achieve this feat. NASA GOOG  

Kepler is a retired space observatory launched by NASA to discover Earth-size planets orbiting other stars. Named after astronomer Johannes Kepler , the spacecraft was launched on March 7, 2009, into an Earth-trailing heliocentric orbit. The principal investigator was William J. Borucki. Kepler observed 530,506 stars and discovered 2,662 exoplanets over its lifetime. [15] A newer NASA mission, TESS , launched in 2018, is continuing the search for exoplanets. [43] Wikipedia   After nine years in deep space collecting data that indicate our sky to be filled with billions of hidden planets - more planets even than stars - NASA's Kepler space telescope has run out of fuel needed for further science operations NASA GOOG