A gravel country lane gently winds through this colorful rural night skyscape. Captured from Monroe County in southern West Virginia on the evening of October 10, the starry sky above is a familiar sight. Shimmering curtains of aurora borealis or northern lights definitely do not make regular appearances here, though. Surprisingly vivid auroral displays were present on that night at very low latitudes around the globe, far from their usual northern and southern high latitude realms. The extensive auroral activity was evidence of a severe geomagnetic storm triggered by the impact of a coronal mass ejection (CME), an immense magnetized cloud of energetic plasma. The CME was launched toward Earth from the active Sun following a powerful X-class solar flare.
Five bright comets are compared in these panels, recorded by a coronograph on board the long-lived, sun-staring SOHO spacecraft. Arranged chronologically all are recognizable by their tails streaming away from the Sun at the center of each field of view, where a direct view of the overwhelmingly bright Sun is blocked by the coronagraph's occulting disk. Each comet was memorable for earthbound skygazers, starting at top left with Comet McNaught, the 21st century's brightest comet (so far). C/2023 A3 Tsuchinshan-Atlas, approaching its perihelion with the active Sun at bottom center, has most recently grabbed the attention of comet watchers around the globe. By the end of October 2024, the blank 6th panel may be filled with bright sungrazer comet C/2024 S1 Atlas. ... or not.
Shockwaves ripple across the glare as a launch eclipses the setting Sun in this exciting close-up. Captured on September 17, the roaring Falcon 9 rocket carried European Galileo L13 navigation satellites to medium Earth orbit after a lift-off from Cape Canaveral on Florida's space coast. The Falcon 9 booster returned safely to Earth about 8.5 minutes later, notching the 22nd launch and landing for the reusable workhorse launch vehicle. But where did it land? Just Read the Instructions.
For northern hemisphere dwellers, September's Full Moon was the Harvest Moon. On September 17/18 the sunlit lunar nearside passed into shadow, just grazing Earth's umbra, the planet's dark, central shadow cone, in a partial lunar eclipse. Over the two and half hours before dawn a camera fixed to a tripod was used to record this series of exposures as the eclipsed Harvest Moon set behind Spiš Castle in the hazy morning sky over eastern Slovakia. Famed in festival, story, and song, Harvest Moon is just the traditional name of the full moon nearest the autumnal equinox. According to lore the name is a fitting one. Despite the diminishing daylight hours as the growing season drew to a close, farmers could harvest crops by the light of a full moon shining on from dusk to dawn. This September's Harvest Moon was also known to some as a supermoon, a term becoming a traditional name for a full moon near perigee.
Spanning light-years, this suggestive shape known as the Seahorse Nebula floats in silhouette against a rich, luminous background of stars. Seen toward the royal northern constellation of Cepheus, the dusty, dark nebula is part of a Milky Way molecular cloud some 1,200 light-years distant. It is also listed as Barnard 150 (B150), one of 182 dark markings of the sky cataloged in the early 20th century by astronomer E. E. Barnard. Packs of low mass stars are forming within, but their collapsing cores are only visible at long infrared wavelengths. Still, the colorful Milky Way stars of Cepheus add to this stunning galactic skyscape.
Mars has two tiny moons, Phobos and Deimos, named for the figures in Greek mythology Fear and Panic. Detailed surface views of smaller moon Deimos are shown in both these panels. The images were taken in 2009, by the HiRISE camera on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft, NASA's long-lived interplanetary internet satellite. The outermost of the two Martian moons, Deimos is one of the smallest known moons in the Solar System, measuring only about 15 kilometers across. Both Martian moons were discovered in 1877 by Asaph Hall, an American astronomer working at the US Naval Observatory in Washington D.C. But their existence was postulated around 1610 by Johannes Kepler, the astronomer who derived the laws of planetary motion. In this case, Kepler's prediction was not based on scientific principles, but his writings and ideas were so influential that the two Martian moons are discussed in works of fiction such as Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, written in 1726, over 150 years before their discovery.
Galaxies of the NGC 7771 Group are featured in this intriguing skyscape. Some 200 million light-years distant toward the constellation Pegasus, NGC 7771 is the large, edge-on spiral near center, about 75,000 light-years across, with two smaller galaxies below it. Large spiral NGC 7769 is seen face-on to the right. Galaxies of the NGC 7771 group are interacting, making repeated close passages that will ultimately result in galaxy-galaxy mergers on a cosmic timescale. The interactions can be traced by distortions in the shape of the galaxies themselves and faint streams of stars created by their mutual gravitational tides. But a clear view of this galaxy group is difficult to come by as the deep image also reveals extensive clouds of foreground dust sweeping across the field of view. The dim, dusty galactic cirrus clouds are known as Integrated Flux Nebulae. The faint IFN reflect starlight from our own Milky Way Galaxy and lie only a few hundred light-years above the galactic plane.
The full Moon and Earth's shadow set together in this island skyscape. The alluring scene was captured Tuesday morning, August 20, from Fiji, South Pacific Ocean, planet Earth. For early morning risers shadowset in the western sky is a daily apparition. Still, the grey-blue shadow is often overlooked in favor of a brighter eastern horizon. Extending through the dense atmosphere, Earth's setting shadow is bounded above by a pinkish glow or anti-twilight arch. Known as the Belt of Venus, the arch's lovely color is due to backscattering of reddened light from the opposite horizon's rising Sun. Of course, the setting Moon's light is reddened by the long sight-line through the atmosphere. But on that date the full Moon could be called a seasonal Blue Moon, the third full Moon in a season with four full Moons. And even though the full Moon is always impressive near the horizon, August's full Moon is considered by some the first of four consecutive full Supermoons in 2024.
There is a quiet pulsar at the heart of CTA 1. The supernova remnant was discovered as a source of emission at radio wavelengths by astronomers in 1960 and since identified as the result of the death explosion of a massive star. But no radio pulses were detected from the expected pulsar, the rotating neutron star remnant of the massive star's collapsed core. Seen about 10,000 years after the initial supernova explosion, the interstellar debris cloud is faint at optical wavelengths. CTA 1's visible wavelength emission from still expanding shock fronts is revealed in this deep telescopic image, a frame that spans about 2 degrees across a starfield in the northern constellation of Cepheus. While no pulsar has since been found at radio wavelengths, in 2008 the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope detected pulsed emission from CTA 1, identifying the supernova remnant's rotating neutron star. The source has been recognized as the first in a growing class of pulsars that are quiet at radio wavelengths but pulse in high-energy gamma-rays.
On August 11 a Rocket Lab Electron rocket launched from a rotating planet. With a small satellite on board its mission was dubbed A Sky Full of SARs (Synthetic Aperture Radar satellites), departing for low Earth orbit from Mahia Peninsula on New Zealand's north island. The fiery trace of the Electron's graceful launch arc is toward the east in this southern sea and skyscape, a composite of 50 consecutive frames taken over 2.5 hours. Fixed to a tripod, the camera was pointing directly at the South Celestial Pole, the extension of planet Earth's axis of rotation in to space. But no bright star marks that location in the southern hemisphere's night sky. Still, the South Celestial Pole is easy to spot. It lies at the center of the concentric star trail arcs that fill the skyward field of view.
On August 11 a Rocket Lab Electron rocket launched from a rotating planet. With a small satellite on board its mission was dubbed A Sky Full of SARs (Synthetic Aperture Radar satellites), departing for low Earth orbit from Mahia Peninsula on New Zealand's north island. The fiery trace of the Electron's graceful launch arc is toward the east in this southern sea and skyscape, a composite of 50 consecutive frames taken over 2.5 hours. Fixed to a tripod, the camera was pointing directly at the South Celestial Pole, the extension of planet Earth's axis of rotation in to space. But no bright star marks that location in the southern hemisphere's night sky. Still, the South Celestial Pole is easy to spot. It lies at the center of the concentric star trail arcs that fill the skyward field of view.
A single exposure made with a camera pointed almost due north on August 12 recorded this bright Perseid meteor in the night sky west of Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. The meteor's incandescent trace is fleeting. It appears to cross the stars of the Big Dipper, famous northern asterism and celestial kitchen utensil, while shimmering curtains of aurora borealis, also known as the northern lights, dance in the night. Doubling the wow factor for night skywatchers near the peak of this year's Perseid meteor shower auroral activity on planet Earth was enhanced by geomagnetic storms. The intense space weather was triggered by flares from an active Sun.