观星指南（2023年9月）
9月的天空会发生什么？金星回到了早晨的天空，获月，以及寻找黄道光……
哈雷彗星的尘埃、火星尘与银河
2023年5月12日 Halley Dust, Mars Dust, and Milky Way Image Credit & Copyright: Petr Horalek / Institute of Physics in Opava Explanation: Grains of cosmic dust streaked through night skies in early May. Swept up as planet Earth plowed through the debris streams left behind by periodic Comet Halley, the annual meteor shower is known as the Eta Aquarids. This year, the Eta Aquarids peak was visually hampered by May’s bright Full Moon, though. But early morning hours surrounding last May’s shower of Halley dust were free of moonlight interference. In exposures recorded between April 28 and May 8 in 2022, this composited image shows nearly 90 Eta Aquarid meteors streaking from the shower’s radiant in Aquarius over San Pedro de Atacama, Chile. The central Milky…
黄道光束、金星与木星
2023年2月27日 Zodiacal Ray with Venus and Jupiter Image Credit & Copyright: Ruslan Merzlyakov (astrorms) Explanation: What’s causing that unusual ray of light extending from the horizon? Dust orbiting the Sun. At certain times of the year, a band of sun-reflecting dust from the inner Solar System appears prominently after sunset or before sunrise and is called zodiacal light. The dust was emitted mostly from faint Jupiter-family comets and slowly spirals into the Sun. The featured HDR image, acquired in mid-February from the Sierra Nevada National Park in Spain, captures the glowing band of zodiacal light going right in front of the bright evening planets Jupiter (upper) and Venus (lower). Emitted from well behind the zodiacal light is a dark night sky that prominently includes the…
澳大利亚尖峰石阵上空的银河与黄道光
2022年10月23日 Milky Way and Zodiacal Light over Australian Pinnacles Image Credit & Copyright: Jingyi Zhang Explanation: What strange world is this? Earth. In the foreground of the featured image are the Pinnacles, unusual rock spires in Nambung National Park in Western Australia. Made of ancient sea shells (limestone), how these human-sized picturesque spires formed remains a topic of research. The picturesque panorama was taken in 2017 September. A ray of zodiacal light, sunlight reflected by dust grains orbiting between the planets in the Solar System, rises from the horizon near the image center. Arching across the top is the central band of our Milky Way Galaxy. The planets Jupiter and Saturn, as well as several famous stars are also visible in the background night sky….
形似恒星之门的银河
2022年8月17日 Stargate Milky Way Image Credit & Copyright: Maxime Oudoux Explanation: There is a huge gate of stars in the sky, and you pass through it twice a day. The stargate is actually our Milky Way Galaxy, and it is the spin of the Earth that appears to propel you through it. More typically, the central band of our Milky Way appears as a faint band stretching across the sky, only visible in away from bright city lights. In a long-exposure wide-angle image from a dark location like this, though, the Milky Way’s central plane is easily visible. The featured picture is a digital composite involving multiple exposures taken on the same night and with the same camera, but employing a stereographic projection that causes…
夜空中的银河和黄道光
2022年3月1日 Dueling Bands in the Night Image Credit & Copyright: Jeff Dai (TWAN) Explanation: What are these two bands in the sky? The more commonly seen band is the one on the right and is the central band of our Milky Way galaxy. Our Sun orbits in the disk of this spiral galaxy, so that from inside, this disk appears as a band of comparable brightness all the way around the sky. The Milky Way band can also be seen all year — if out away from city lights. The less commonly seem band, on the left, is zodiacal light — sunlight reflected from dust orbiting the Sun in our Solar System. Zodiacal light is brightest near the Sun and so is best seen just…
星光和尘埃织就的夜晚
2021年10月2日 A Light and Dusty Night Image Credit & Copyright: Rodrigo Guerra Explanation: Posing as a brilliant evening star, Venus lies near the western horizon in this southern hemisphere, early spring, night skyscape. To create the composite view exposures tracking the sky and fixed for the foreground were taken on September 25 from Cascavel in southern Brazil. In view after sunset, Venus appears immersed in a cone of zodiacal light, sunlight scattered from dust along the Solar System’s ecliptic plane. In fact from either hemisphere of planet Earth, zodiacal light is most visible after sunset near a spring equinox, (or before sunrise near an autumn equinox) when its luminous arc lies at steep angles to the horizon. Extending above the sunset on this night, the…
星空中的黄道光
2021年04月10日 Zodiacal Night Image Credit & Copyright: Jean-Francois Graffand Explanation: An intense band of zodiacal light is captured in this serene mountain and night skyscape from April 7. The panoramic view was recorded after three hours of hiking from a vantage looking west after sunset across the Pyrenees in southern France. At 2838 meters altitude, Mont Valier is the tallest peak near center. In the sky above, the familiar stars of Orion and the northern winter Milky Way are approaching the rugged western horizon. At the shoulder of Orion, Betelgeuse is one of three bright yellowish celestial beacons. It forms a triangle with fellow red giant star Aldebaran located below Betelgeuse and to the right, and the red planet Mars. Mars shines just under the…
黄道光与火星
2021年03月11日 Zodiacal Light and Mars Image Credit & Copyright: Joshua Rhoades Explanation: Just after sunset on March 7, a faint band of light still reaches above the western horizon in this serene, rural Illinois, night skyscape. Taken from an old farmstead, the luminous glow is zodiacal light, prominent in the west after sunset during planet Earth’s northern hemisphere spring. On that clear evening the band of zodiacal light seems to engulf bright yellowish Mars and the Pleiades star cluster. Their close conjunction is in the starry sky above the old barn’s roof. Zodiacal light is sunlight scattered by interplanetary dust particles that lie near the Solar System’s ecliptic plane. Of course all the Solar System’s planets orbit near the plane of the ecliptic, within the…
智利上空的银河与黄道光
2020 March 9 Milky Way and Zodiacal Light over Chile Image Credit & Copyright: Roman Ponča (ht: Masaryk U.) Explanation: What is the band of light connecting the ground to the Milky Way? Zodiacal light — a stream of dust that orbits the Sun in the inner Solar System. It is most easily seen just before sunrise, where it has been called a false dawn, or just after sunset. The origin of zodiacal dust remains a topic of research, but is hypothesized to result from asteroid collisions and comet tails. The featured wide-angle image shows the central band of our Milky Way Galaxy arching across the top, while the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a satellite galaxy to our Milky Way, is visible on the far…