The Sky Live

Image of Comet C/2015 V2 (Johnson) captured on Nov 8, 2015 between 3:00 and 4:00 UT. Image taken with a 17 inches telescope for a total exposure time of approximately 50 minutes. Comet C/2015 V2 (Johnson) on Nov 8, 2015 Comet Johnson is currently at a distance of 866 million km from the sun, approximately of magnitude 17. It is expected to become quite bright in January 2017 reaching 6th or 7th magnitude. Powered by WPeMaticoRead More →

Few hours ago NASA released a bunch of new images of Pluto received from New Horizons. Three of those images show a breathtaking backlit picture of Pluto and clearly put in evidence the dwarf planet’s atmosphere. The image shown here was been obtained by manually stacking the three backlit pictures and enhancing the contrast, in an attempt to extract as much details as possible from the original images. Pluto’s atmosphere and background stars The three small dots in the bottom left area are most likely generated by a background star, which appears 3 times because of the alignment process has been centered on Pluto. TheRead More →

This image taken the the morning of Nov 7, 2015 at 4:19 UT portraits the Moon, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Ganimede and Callisto in a single shot. The Moon, Venus, Mars and Jupiter. Nov 7, 2015 4:19 UT Technical details: Camera Canon SX60 HS. 10 raw frames stacked using RegiStax 5.1 and then processed in Photoshop. ISO 800, 1.0 sec exposure, f/5.0. Focal length: 28.3mm. The zoomed image of Jupiter has been taken with the same camera at 247mm focal length. Powered by WPeMaticoRead More →

The newly discovered comet C/2015 O1 PANSTARRS has just been added to our catalog of tracked objects. Right now the comet is very far, about magnitude 18.8 at a distance of 987M km from the Sun and it is traveling towards the inner Solar System. It will take about one year and an half to reach its perihelion, on Feb 3, 2017. C/2015 O1 orbit inclination, about 68°, and perihelion distance, almost exactly 1 Astronomical Unit, contribute to a quite favorable geometry for observing the comet at perihelion from the northern hemisphere during the first days of February 2017. Comet’s declination will be about +47°Read More →

This image is not new at all, and of course is not the best one that has been published, but it was just impossible to resist playing with the latest published images from New Horizons and creating our own version. The attempt here is to enhance both Pluto’s features and the background stars. Pluto and Charon Jul 9 2015 – Click to enlarge Powered by WPeMaticoRead More →