By Jove: Our 2016 Guide to Jupiter at Opposition

Sunday, March 20, 2016

By Jove: Our 2016 Guide to Jupiter at Opposition

By Jove: Our 2016 Guide to Jupiter at Opposition:

Getting closer... Jupiter, imaged on February 24th. Image credit and copyright: Efrain Morales

Ready to explore the largest planet in our solar system? The month of March heralds the return of Jupiter to evening skies. Early March 2016 sees the planet Jupiter starting off the month less than one degree from the star Sigma Leonis. Opposition occurs on March 8^th, at 11:00 Universal Time (UT). Watch out for those double shadow transits, as we're in the midst of a season of favorable events involving the Jovian moons (See last week's post). During opposition, the four large major moons of Jupiter cast their shadows nearly straight back onto the Jovian cloud-tops as seen from our Earthly perspective. At quadrature—the point when Jupiter stakes out a 'quadrant' of the sky 90 degrees east or west of the Sun as seen from the Earth –the moons and the planet Jupiter itself casts their shadows off to one side.The Moon occults Jupiter three times in 2016: July 9^th, August 6^th and September 2nd. The very best is the final event on September 2^nd, which occurs during daylight hours for Mexico and the western US, just 18 degrees east of the Sun in the evening sky. Jupiter also passes just 4' from Venus the month prior on August 27^th. Solar opposition for Jupiter in 2016 occurs on September 26th.Every ancient culture noticed five 'wandering stars' that stubbornly refused to maintain their station, and instead moved across the sky. The four major points that describe a planet's apparent motion are: opposition, solar conjunction, and the east and west quadrature points.As the name suggests, opposition is simply the point at which a given outer planet rises 'opposite' to the setting Sun. Jupiter orbits the Sun once every 11.9 years, meaning it has moved roughly one zodiacal constellation eastward per every 399 days between oppositions. Oppositions falling during northern hemisphere winter place a planet high in the sky, a position which the Sun will occupy six months before and hence. Jupiter's opposition in 2016 falls just 11 days prior to the March northward equinox on March 20th, placing Jupiter on the Leo-Virgo border very near the September equinoctial point in the astronomical constellation Virgo. In fact, Jupiter plunges south of the celestial equator on September 21^st 2016, not to cross northward again until May 24^th, 2022.Visually, Jupiter shines at its brightest this season at magnitude -2.5. Jupiter is the fourth brightest natural object in the skies of the Earth, right behind the Sun, Moon and Venus. Place Jupiter at the Moon's distance from the Earth, and it would span a terrifying 20 degrees across the sky. By coincidence, the innermost large Moon Io orbits Jupiter at nearly the same distance as the Moon does from the Earth. Is Jupiter a friend or foe? There's been a recent suggestion that we've perhaps overstated the giant planet's alleged role as a cosmic goal tender, warding off potentially hazardous comets. Any inbound cometary body crossing Jupiter's orbit stands a 40% chance of having its orbit altered, a good or bad outcome from the view of the Earth.Here, from our current base camp in Rota, Spain, Jupiter sits high over the Atlantic in the early morning hours, a beacon marking a warning of the supposed 'ends of the Earth' to medieval sailors daring to strike out westward.Though Jupiter is sometimes fancied as a 'failed star,' it also fails this definition miserably: Jupiter would need about a dozen times its current mass to rate as even a sub-stellar brown dwarf.In the eyepiece of even a small 60mm refractor, the main two equatorial cloud bands are immediately visible, striping the ochre disk of the bloated world. One major mystery is just why the Southern Equatorial Belt pulls a vanishing act every decade or so, as it last did in 2010, while the other Northern Equatorial Belt seems permanent. And speaking of which, the famous 'Great Red Spot' is now not as 'grand' in recent times, appearing a salmon-to-brick brown colored.First noted by Giovanni Cassini in 1665, the intervening centuries have seen the massive storm shrink. Will this iconic planetary atmospheric feature disappear entirely in our lifetimes? We'll surely miss the Great Red Spot if so, as it made a good 'tick mark' to gauge Jupiter's rotation. Spinning around once every 9.9 hours, the Jovian 'day' is the shortest of any planet in the solar system. In fact, if you follow Jupiter from sunset to sunrise during opposition, you can just about witness one full rotation... in a single night!At opposition, Jupiter appears 45” in size, 1/40th the diameter of a Full Moon. The Moon also pairs with Jupiter on the evening of March 21^st/22nd, sitting two degrees from the planet.And get set to explore Jupiter this summer, as NASA's Juno spacecraft enters orbit around the giant planet on July 4^th. Launched in August, 2011, Juno will become the seventh spacecraft to visit the planet and only the second (after Galileo) to enter orbit.2016 is an amazing year for all things Jovian!

The post By Jove: Our 2016 Guide to Jupiter at Opposition appeared first on Universe Today.

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The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is the United States government agency responsible for the civilian space program as well as aeronautics and aerospace research. President Dwight D. Eisenhower established the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in 1958 with a distinctly civilian (rather than military) orientation encouraging peaceful applications in space science. The National Aeronautics and Space Act was passed on July 29, 1958, disestablishing NASA's predecessor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). The new agency became operational on October 1, 1958.

UFO SIGHTINGS PHOTO PHOTOGRAPHY

The Oxford English Dictionary defines a UFO as "An unidentified flying object; a 'flying saucer'." The first published book to use the word was authored by Donald E. Keyhoe. The acronym "UFO" was coined by Captain Edward J. Ruppelt, who headed Project Blue Book, then the USAF's official investigation of UFOs. He wrote, "Obviously the term 'flying saucer' is misleading when applied to objects of every conceivable shape and performance. For this reason the military prefers the more general, if less colorful, name: unidentified flying objects. UFO (pronounced Yoo-foe) for short." Other phrases that were used officially and that predate the UFO acronym include "flying flapjack", "flying disc", "unexplained flying discs", "unidentifiable object", and "flying saucer". The phrase "flying saucer" had gained widespread attention after the summer of 1947. On June 24, a civilian pilot named Kenneth Arnold reported seeing nine objects flying in formation near Mount Rainier. Arnold timed the sighting and estimated the speed of discs to be over 1,200 mph (1,931 km/h). At the time, he described the objects' shape as being somewhat disc-like or saucer-like, leading to newspaper accounts of "flying saucers" and "flying discs". In popular usage the term UFO came to be used to refer to claims of alien spacecraft. and because of the public and media ridicule associated with the topic, some investigators prefer to use such terms as unidentified aerial phenomenon (or UAP) or anomalous phenomena, as in the title of the National Aviation Reporting Center on Anomalous Phenomena (NARCAP).

UFO PHOTO PHOTOGRAPHY

UFO - Unidentified Flying Object An unidentified flying object, or UFO, in its most general definition, is any apparent anomaly in the sky that is not identifiable as a known object or phenomenon. Culturally, UFOs are associated with claims of visitation by extraterrestrial life or government-related conspiracy theories, and have become popular subjects in fiction. While UFOs are often later identified, sometimes identification may not be possible owing to the usually low quality of evidence related to UFO sightings (generally anecdotal evidence and eyewitness accounts). Stories of fantastical celestial apparitions have been told since antiquity, but the term "UFO" (or "UFOB") was officially created in 1953 by the United States Air Force (USAF) to serve as a catch-all for all such reports. In its initial definition, the USAF stated that a "UFOB" was "any airborne object which by performance, aerodynamic characteristics, or unusual features, does not conform to any presently known aircraft or missile type, or which cannot be positively identified as a familiar object." Accordingly, the term was initially restricted to that fraction of cases which remained unidentified after investigation, as the USAF was interested in potential national security reasons and/or "technical aspects" (see Air Force Regulation 200-2). During the late 1940s and through the 1950s, UFOs were often referred to popularly as "flying saucers" or "flying discs". The term UFO became more widespread during the 1950s, at first in technical literature, but later in popular use. UFOs garnered considerable interest during the Cold War, an era associated with a heightened concern for national security. Various studies have concluded that the phenomenon does not represent a threat to national security nor does it contain anything worthy of scientific pursuit (e.g., 1951 Flying Saucer Working Party, 1953 CIA Robertson Panel, USAF Project Blue Book, Condon Committee).

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Photos of Nature | Nature Photography What is The Universe

Sunday, March 20, 2016