August 12 Pluto Names, Perseids Peak, Snowball Planets
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View larger. | Computer-generated image showing New Horizons’ location in our solar system today. The green line shows where New Horizons has traveled since launch; the red indicates its future path. This perspective is from above the sun and "north" of Earth's orbit. Via JHUAPL. Read more.
New Horizons provided close-up images of Pluto in 2015. For many on Earth today, these spacecraft images provide a once-in-a-lifetime glimpse of Pluto. See a map, and read about the new Pluto feature names.
Snowball planets are rocky worlds with frozen oceans. They were thought to be lifeless. But a new study suggests some might have land areas near their equators warm and wet enough to support life. Read more.
You might catch a meteor in moonlight tonight, or the shower might be a bust for you in 2019. Never fear. The Perseids will come again next year. Their parent comet – Swift-Tuttle – takes about 130 years to orbit the sun once. It last rounded the sun in the early 1990s and is now far away. But we see the Perseids each year, when Earth intersects the comet’s orbit and debris left behind by Swift-Tuttle enters our atmosphere. Read more. Chart via Guy Ottewell.
Yuri Beletsky - who works at Las Campanas in northern Chile - posted this image on August 10 and wrote: "Even when the weather is bad, we astronomers never lose hope. Cloudy weather, it’s the worst nightmare for us. But at the same time the nature can surprise us with stunning views during those nights. Here is an amazing 22 degree halo around the moon just above the Magellan telescope :) The brightest ‘star’ on the left is the planet Jupiter." Thanks, Yuri!
