亚得里亚海上空的新智彗星

亚得里亚海上空的新智彗星

2022年7月26日 Comet NEOWISE Rising over the Adriatic Sea Video Credit & Copyright: Paolo Girotti Explanation: This sight was worth getting out of bed early. Two years ago this month, Comet C/2020 F3 (NEOWISE) rose before dawn to the delight of northern sky enthusiasts awake that early. Up before sunrise on July 8th, the featured photographer was able to capture in dramatic fashion one of the few comets visible to the unaided eye this century, an inner-Solar System intruder that has become known as the Great Comet of 2020. The resulting video detailed Comet NEOWISE from Italy rising over the Adriatic Sea. The time-lapse video combines over 240 images taken over 30 minutes. The comet was seen rising through a foreground of bright and undulating noctilucent…

回顾新智彗星

回顾新智彗星

2021年7月31日 Remembering NEOWISE Image Credit & Copyright: Petr Horalek / Institute of Physics in Opava Explanation: It was just last July. If you could see the stars of the Big Dipper, you could find Comet NEOWISE in your evening sky. After sunset denizens of the north could look for the naked-eye comet below the bowl of that famous celestial kitchen utensil and above the northwestern horizon. The comet looked like a fuzzy ‘star’ with a tail, though probably not so long a tail as in this memorable skyview recorded from the Czech Republic on July 23th, 2020, near the comet’s closest approach to planet Earth. Photographs of C/2020 F3 (NEOWISE) often did show the comet’s broad dust tail and fainter but separate bluish ion tail…

新智彗星的彗尾

新智彗星的彗尾

2021年03月08日 Three Tails of Comet NEOWISE Image Credit & Copyright: Nicolas Lefaudeux Explanation: What created the unusual red tail in Comet NEOWISE? Sodium. A spectacular sight back in the summer of 2020, Comet NEOWISE, at times, displayed something more than just a surprisingly striated white dust tail and a pleasingly patchy blue ion tail. Some color sensitive images showed an unusual red tail, and analysis showed much of this third tail’s color was emitted by sodium. Gas rich in sodium atoms might have been liberated from Comet NEOWISE’s warming nucleus in early July by bright sunlight, electrically charged by ultraviolet sunlight, and then pushed out by the solar wind. The featured image was captured in mid-July from Brittany, France and shows the real colors. Sodium…

克里特岛上空的奇景

克里特岛上空的奇景

2020年11月16日 Light and Glory over Crete Image Credit & Copyright: Tomáš Slovinský Explanation: The month was July, the place was the Greek island of Crete, and the sky was spectacular. Of course there were the usual stars like Polaris, Vega, and Antares — and that common asterism everyone knows: the Big Dipper. But this sky was just getting started. The band of the Milky Way Galaxy stunned as it arched across the night like a bridge made of stars and dust but dotted with red nebula like candy. The planets Saturn and Jupiter were so bright you wanted to stop people on the beach and point them out. The air glowed like a rainbow — but what really grabbed the glory was a comet. Just…