| | December 17
Start Watching for Ursid Meteors | | | |
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 | | | Here are the Big and Little Dippers - Ursa Major and Minor - for whom the Ursid meteor shower is named. From a Northern Hemisphere location, around the time of the December solstice, you'll find the Big Dipper well up in the north-northeast around 1 a.m. That's about the time of night you'll want to start watching this meteor shower. Read more. | | |
| Tonight … Start watching for Ursid meteors | | | The annual Ursid meteor shower runs from about December 17 to 26 each year. It typically peaks around the December solstice, which, in 2019, comes on December 21 or 22, depending on your time zone. The shower's peak is probably the morning of December 22, but any of the next few mornings should yield some Ursids as well. Read more. | | | Water on giant exoplanets both common and scarce | | | A new study of the atmospheres of known giant exoplanets suggests that water - an essential ingredient for life - may be common on other worlds in our Milky Way galaxy. At the same, there may be less of it than astronomers once expected. Read more. | | | | | What we're reading From CNET … CHEOPS launch postponed due to 'software error' | | | The European Space Agency's alien world observatory - CHEOPS - was scheduled to launch this morning from the spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana. The flight was canceled, but a new launch time - likely within the next 24 to 48 hours - is expected to be announced by ESA shortly. “More than 4,000 exoplanets have been discovered in the Milky Way, yet we still know far too little about these distant worlds in our cosmic neighborhood,” said planet researcher Heike Rauer in Berlin. “We are all eager to see which ‘faces’ the planets characterized by CHEOPS will show us.” Read more. | | | | | |
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|  | | SpaceX Starlink satellites over Texas | | View at EarthSky Community Photos. | Charlie Favret of Round Rock, Texas, created this composite image of a stack of 64 frames captured last Friday morning. He wrote: "I was curious to know if one could see the Starlink satellites on a bright night a couple of days after a full moon and inside the city limits. The answer is most definitely yes. The first one began to appear 40 degrees above the northwest horizon, and they just kept coming, one after another for 10 minutes, making a chain marching completely across the sky. While it was a stunning sight, is it also a sign of the night sky horror to come? If you look carefully you can see 35 of the Starlink satellites and 2 meteors, maybe lucky Geminids?" Read more about Starlink. | | | | | |
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 | | Month of Margazhi begins today in India | | View at EarthSky Community Photos. | Here's an an Indian Kolam and flowers in front of a house - captured earlier today by our friend Kandaswamy Natarajan in the city of Chennai, India. This form of drawing - often using rice flour, chalk or rock powder - is a traditional welcome for the month of Margazhi - a month in the Hindu Tamil calendar - which starts today. Thank you, Kandaswamy! Click in to view more seasonal images from the EarthSky Community, or submit your image here. | | |
