I guess those are just the graphical representations, and they're more likely just rather close together. :)
Objects in the app may be smaller than they appear.
The Milky Way is best seen during the summer months (from June to August) in the Dolomites. During this time, the galactic core is positioned high in the night sky, offering the best view of the Milky Way's band of stars, dust, and gas.
It’s dark where I am, and the stars are placed very favorably* to check out Corona Borealis (the Northern Crown) to see if the nova at T Coronae Borealis has erupted yet. This is a once in a lifetime opportunity to see a naked-eye recurrent nova.
(*Haha, just kidding, it's cloudy of course)
I made a little movie to show where the nova should appear, at roughly the anticipated brightness.
#Astronomy folks, the white-dwarf/red giant situation at T Coronae Borealis sounds very similar to the precursor to a Type Ia supernova. A little reading tonight has taught me that you get the supernovae with carbon–oxygen white dwarfs. What other kinds are there? At first it occurred to me that a red dwarf would eventually produce a white dwarf that was mostly H/He, but I don't imagine any of those have formed yet. Any hints or leads would be appreciated, I'm looking to improve on my recently-discovered ignorance in this area – Also any corrections to misconceptions stated above 😊
H/T to @OkieSpaceQueen, who pointed out that the nearly full Moon will be close to the star Spica tonight. Spica is the brightest star in the constellation Virgo.
If you take a look at the pair every hour or so, you can notice the relative motion of the Moon against the background stars as it orbits the Earth (a small, but negligible, portion of this is due to the Earth’s motion around the Sun as well).
Very roughly (to make the math easier 😄), the Moon orbits the Earth once in 30 days: 360° ÷ 30 days = 12° per day, or 0.5° per hour. 0.5° is the apparent width of the Moon, so it moves almost it's diameter in one hour.
All views from Ottawa, Canada (N 45º 24' W 75° 41’).
Hey - Fun fact: While you watch this, contemplate the fact that you are looking out into space, and into the past. The Moon is almost 400 000 km away, and light takes a little over one second to reach us. You are looking at the Moon as it appeared one second ago!
Spica is significantly farther away - As you gaze at Spica, you are looking 250 years into the past. The light hitting your eyes left Spica roughly around the time the American Revolution was warming up, oxygen was being discovered by Joseph Priestley, James Cook was on an ocean cruise, and French astronomer Charles Messier was building his catalog of not-comets. 😉
"A 2.5 million-acre swath of southern Oregon has been named the largest Dark Sky Sanctuary in the world.
The region, which on Monday was officially named the Oregon Outback International Dark Sky Sanctuary, comprises the southeastern half of Lake County, including Hart Mountain, Lake Abert and Summer Lake."
The calendar can say what it likes; I know Spring when I see it, and it's in the Cheshire Cat grin of the waxing moon, first of the new lunar year, as it menaces the western horizon tonight.
@rolle likely database restore was corrupted due to new tables between stable and 4.3. It was experimental for a while after all. New domain so went fresh anyway.
After an exchange between @OkieSpaceQueen and myself (they made a comment, I liked it 😄), it occurred to me to do this comparison of views of the morning sky. Apologies to people at different latitudes, but I just wanted to show a pattern.
All views are from the Stellarium desktop app (stellarium.org), and are set to times when the Sun is 10° below the local horizon.
You can see that as you go farther north, the angle the ecliptic makes with the horizon gets smaller and thus makes spotting planets like Mercury harder. Today, if you were at the North Pole, it would be very hard as the Sun, Mercury, and Venus never rise above the horizon! But the Aurora is pretty, I'm sure 😊
A beautiful sunny day in #Ottawa today... Was anyone up early enough to see these planets? I was dreaming about moving hardware around in a hospital room. For some reason.