Astro Bob

  This latest image of Jupiter, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope on on Aug. 25, 2020, captures a magnificent view of the Great Red Spot, a larger-than-Earth hurricane, along with a remarkable new storm shaped like a caterpillar (upper left) brewing in the planet's northern hemisphere. The image also features Jupiter’s icy moon Europa. NASA, ESA, A. Simon (Goddard Space Flight Center), and M. H. Wong (University of California, Berkeley) and the OPAL team Two gigantic storms appear in this latest Hubble photo of Jupiter — the familiar Great Red Spot that dominates the planet's southern hemisphere and a new tempest that bubbled up alongside the peach-colored North Temperate Belt (NTB) in mid-August . Dubbed the NTB Outbreak it now extends more than halfway around the planet. The outbreak's genesis are storm systems d eep within Jupiter's atmosphere that punched their way to the upper cloud deck and injected fresh ammonia ice and water 19 miles (30 km) above the visible ...

Saturn (left) and Jupiter have been a familiar sight in the southern sky this summer and fall. Keep an eye on them. In the weeks ahead Jupiter will close the gap. Bob King Jupiter and Saturn have been our nighttime companions all summer and now into the fall. Just lift your head and face south any clear evening and you'll find them staring back at you. Both planets shine from the teapot-shaped constellation Sagittarius. First visible at nightfall they wheel slowly westward with Earth's rotation and slink below the horizon shortly after midnight. Jupiter and Saturn are paired up in Sagittarius. Watch for the waxing moon to swing below Jupiter on Sept. 24 and Saturn on the 25th. Stellarium In late September the two planets are separated by 7.5° or about the same distance between bright Betelgeuse and its neighbor Bellatrix in Orion. But that's changing.  Each planet orbits the sun at its own speed, moving eastward — to the left in the northern hemisphere — over the months and...

A sugar maple leaf transitions from summer to fall earlier this week. Bob King Have we come this far again? Yes, we have. While the pandemic has made some of us feel stuck in time, the Earth hurries along its orbit like an eager dog on a walk. Yesterday, daylight still dominated night by just a hair. Today they're equal at 12 hours apiece. In the brief interim summer became fall. It happened officially at 8:30 a.m. CDT today (September 22). Achieving this delicate balance took six full months, and it will only take a day to break it. Tomorrow, night will have a slight edge, and by November, we'll wonder where all the light went. Fewer hours of daylight mean less sunshine and that leads to falling temperatures and seasonal change. One of those changes occurs in tree leaves. Chlorophyll, the pigment that gives leaves their green color, uses sunlight to convert carbon dioxide and water into energy and food. It takes a lot of energy to make chlorophyll so when daylight dwindles and...