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Great Gobs of Sky Candy

Charlie Martin | 11:36 AM on January 10, 2025
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0

This is a longer Sky Candy. I’ve been limiting it to about ten images, but frankly, there was so much cool stuff this week that I just couldn’t help myself. Nebulae, planets, comets, galaxies, history, and events coming up, we have them all today.

First, the promised nebulas. Er, nebulae. These are always good for a colorful picture, and honestly, there are a lot of them, especially with different astrophotographers, different filters, and different exposures.

The nebulae have lots of fanciful names with reasons that are not so obvious. I suspect a lot of the names come from original observations in low-resolution black and white, but I’ve got nothing by my own dark suspicions as evidence. I can’t see a wizard in this one.

I do think this one resembles an iris flower.

This is kind of heart-shaped, I guess.

… but I have no clue here. Where’s the wolf? Where’s the cave?

And galaxies.

Something that really has been an interesting advance in the last few years has been the use of gravitational lensing. (There’s a word that thwarts autocorrect.) It’s been known that gravity affects light pretty much since Einstein and was experimentally observed near the Sun in 1918. But it’s really only been since Hubble that it’s been exploited. Or at least that’s how it seems to me, feel free to comment with anything earlier than Hubble.

And planets. 

We knew surprisingly little about Mercury until a few years ago. Among other things, we thought for years that Mercury always kept the same side to the Sun. This is commonly said “is tidally locked” but while Mercury is not tidally locked, it’s the next best thing: it’s in a resonance relationship with the sun and rotates three times for every two orbits of the sun — every two Mercury years. We thought it was tidally locked because, by chance and the wonders of orbital mechanics, it was always observed at the same point in its orbital period until the Messenger mission went into orbit and got a long period of observation.

There are a lot of images of Venus on the web with complicated-looking clouds swirling across the surface. This puzzled me because I’d never seen pictures like that a few years ago. I’d always heard it was basically featureless, covered by opaque clouds. 

This explains what the difference was: different parts of the spectrum.

While we’re looking at planets, let’s look closer to home. 

Honestly, I’m just squeezing this in because it’s so freaking cool.

More of Jupiter. Nothing much new to say about it, but I love these pictures.

Moons, planets, and stars.

And maybe planets, We’re pretty certain that there is a planet there, but the picture with its rather fanciful clouds and blue oceans is kind of wishful thinking.

And things next to planets. The red areas on Charon, called the Mordor macula — and similar areas on Pluto, including the wonderfully-named Cthulhu Macula — are thought to be tholins, complex organic molecules formed when simple organic molecules like methane react under ultraviolet and cosmic ray bombardment. Read more here from my research assistant.

And planets next to things. Yes, Pluto is a planet; I don't care.

Always room for some aurorae. The Sun is continuing its fractiousness, so there’ve been lots of fancy displays. 

This one is interesting, as it shows more or less simultaneous aurora from both the North Pole and South Pole.

Not really a lot to say about the rest of these except —

— aurorae are cool.

I wanted to include this because I don’t think a lot of people are aware that regular civilians can participate in real space science. Basically, there aren’t enough Official Accredited Space Scientists to keep up with the massive flood of data, so NASA set up a program through which we can help. 

Sign up for a project here. Sadly, it’s all volunteer, no pay. To Steve Green’s disappointment.

A moment in space science history that is actually very important, On Jan. 9, 1998, the apparent accelerating expansion of the observable universe was announced. This was a really significant surprise and led to the apparent need for dark energy to explain it. Of course, “dark energy” isn’t really an explanation — it’s just a name for something we really don’t understand — yet.

And finally a couple of upcoming events.

If it survives its upcoming closest approach to the Sun, this new comet could be the most spectacular comet in our lifetimes.

And that finishes the Sky Candy for this week. I hope you made it this far. Drop me a comment and tell me if this is too much for one outing.

Charlie Martin

Charlie Martin writes on science, health, culture, and technology for PJ Media. For media inquiries, please contact [email protected]

Category: COLUMNS

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