Shine on you Crazy Crescent!

Just a few days ago, this happened....




This is a very rare "conjunction". The photo shows the Moon, Venus and Jupiter, almost side-by-side.

This will not happen again until 2032.

What is interesting is that although the Moon is officially a "crescent", the whole disc is visible.

This is a phenomenon known as "earthshine", often seen on clear frosty days in the daylight in England.

What is happening is this: The Sun is shining on the Earth, and the moon is acting like a very crude mirror, reflecting light back to the earth FROM the earth.

It works like this.... Light from the Sun hits the Earth, bounces to the Moon, bounces off the Moon and back into our eyes.

The upshot is that we can see the unlit side of the moon. It is not lit by the sun, but by the blue-green planet 3/4 of a million miles away.

When I first saw this "earthshine" in the UK at the age of seven, I could not work out how I could "see" the "unseen" side of the Moon.

Yet another example of the wonder of physics.

Room with a View

Why put a telescope into space?

It is a simple question, but it also has a simple answer.

The atmosphere.

It is the reason why stars "twinkle". The best way to explain this is also simple. Dive into a swimming pool an look up. What you see is a distorted version of what you know to be "up there" because the water swirls and distorts the image.

Earth's atmosphere is just like that, the only differences being that it is a lot less dense, but far "deeper".

A similar effect can be seen in large cities, especially New York and San Francisco. The normal lights of the night can be seen to be twinkling just like the stars do. The only difference here is that the view is horizontal. The twinkling is due to pollution this time.

So, we sent the Hubble Space Telescope into orbit to capture color images (of the Crab Nebula) like THIS:

Oh Frabjous Day!

As Cassini wends its way in and around the Saturnian system, scientists around the world have gazed in awe at the images sent back.

This is Dione, one of the more well-known satellites of Saturn. The probe's closest approach was 500km, at 1820 GMT on October 11th. This was taken from about a million km away. We have an artist working on a better painting, but we don't hold out much hope.

Our previous photographs of this distant moon were blurry at best, but the quality of these is as if we are actually there.

It takes over four hours for these images to reach Earth.

Although I am a nuclear scientist, my research leads me to digressions in other fields, one of them astronomy.

As we usher in the year 2006, one has to wonder what prospects science will offer us, given that we have come this far.