Eideard

Click on Guillaume Blanchard’s photo to enlarge

The recently discovered Comet Lovejoy has been captured in stunning photos and time-lapse video taken from ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile. The comet graced the southern sky after it had unexpectedly survived a close encounter with the Sun…

ESO optician Guillaume Blanchard made a marvellous wide-angle photo of Comet Lovejoy…Blanchard said: “For me this comet is a Christmas present to the people who will stay at Paranal over Christmas”.

This bright comet was also seen from the International Space Station in another stunning time-lapse sequence on 21 December as the crew filmed lightning on the Earth’s night side.

Comet Lovejoy has been the talk of the astronomy community over the past few weeks. It was discovered on 27 November by the Australian amateur astronomer Terry Lovejoy and was classified as a Kreutz sungrazer, with its orbit taking it very close to the Sun. Just last week, the comet entered the Sun’s corona, a much-anticipated event, passing a mere 140 000 kilometres from the Sun’s surface. A close shave indeed…

The comet was expected to break up and vaporise, but instead it survived its steaming hot encounter with the Sun and re-emerged a few days later, much to everyone’s surprise. It is now visible from the southern hemisphere, appearing at dawn, and features a bright tail millions of kilometres long, composed of dust particles that are being blown ahead of the comet by the solar wind.

Some of the earliest recorded space phenomenon are comets. Ignorant primitives regard[ed] them as omens, demons, messengers from some invisible dude in the sky.

I’m pretty well satisfied simply appreciating their beauty, their history, their passage from birth to death.

ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) has teamed up with NASA’s Cassini spacecraft to study a rare storm in the atmosphere of the planet Saturn in more detail than has ever been possible before…

The atmosphere of the planet Saturn normally appears placid and calm. But about once per Saturn year (about thirty Earth years), as spring comes to the northern hemisphere of the giant planet, something stirs deep below the clouds that leads to a dramatic planet-wide disturbance.

The latest such storm was first detected by the radio and plasma wave science instrument on NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, in orbit around the planet, and also tracked by amateur astronomers in December 2010…

This is only the sixth of these huge storms to be spotted since 1876. It is the first ever to be studied in the thermal infrared — to see the variations of temperature within a Saturnian storm — and the first ever to be observed by an orbiting spacecraft.

“This disturbance in the northern hemisphere of Saturn has created a gigantic, violent and complex eruption of bright cloud material, which has spread to encircle the entire planet,” explains Leigh Fletcher…lead author of the new study. “Having both the VLT and Cassini investigating this storm at the same time gives us a great chance to put the Cassini observations into context. Previous studies of these storms have only been able to use reflected sunlight, but now, by observing thermal infrared light for the first time, we can reveal hidden regions of the atmosphere and measure the really substantial changes in temperatures and winds associated with this event.”

The storm may have originated deep down in the water clouds where a phenomenon similar to a thunderstorm drove the creation of a giant convective plume: just as hot air rises in a heated room, this mass of gas headed upwards and punched through Saturn’s usually serene upper atmosphere. These huge disturbances interact with the circulating winds moving east and west and cause dramatic temperature changes high up in the atmosphere.

“Our new observations show that the storm had a major effect on the atmosphere, transporting energy and material over great distances, modifying the atmospheric winds — creating meandering jet streams and forming giant vortices — and disrupting Saturn’s slow seasonal evolution,” adds Glenn Orton…another member of the team.

Delightful stuff – knowledge and dreams. I’ve dreamt of space travel, adventure and exploration, since I was a kid. There’s hardly an area of human endeavor that grabs the focus of my attention more.