One of my favorite astrophotographers, Alan Friedman, spied something odd on the Moon.

Flying reindeer I’ll buy. But an inertialess propulsion system? C’mon.

Happy holidays everyone!

Credit: Alan Friedman

[UPDATE: Turns out the fireball described below was the re-entry of the Soyuz booster that brought Expedition 30 up to the International Space Station a few days ago. Thanks to Marco Langbroek for alerting me to this!]

[Update 2 (19:08 GMT): More footage, and a picture in a Dutch paper. Tip o' the Whipple Shield to VirtualAstro and JHG Hendriks.]

Reports are coming in of a very bright fireball over Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands. It happened around 16:30 GMT (17:30 local time in that part of Europe) on December 24 (just a couple of hours ago as I write this). I heard of it when BA Bloggee Dave Grant sent me a note from Dusseldorf; he got video of it!

If you are in that area and saw it, you can report it to the International Meteor Organization or to The Latest Worldwide Meteor / Fireball Reports (note: I found that last site doing a bit of searching and I’m not familiar with it, so I don’t know how official it may or may not be. There are links in the sidebar there to other organizations). make sure you list your position as best you can, and what direction you were looking.

If you did see it, and have pictures or video, please leave a comment below with a link! It’s a holiday, but I can try to post some of the better shots/footage. The more actual footage there is, the better astronomers can trace both the direction from which it came, and the location of any possible meteorites.

The pictures of Comet Lovejoy keep coming, each cooler than the one before. It’s hard to imagine topping the ones from the Space Station, but then you don’t have to imagine it when you can just look at this crazy amazing shot:

Holy Haleakala! [Click to stimulatedemissionate.]

Well, actually, "Holy Paranal!" This picture, by Gabriel Brammer, was taken at the Very Large Telescope observatory on Cerro Paranal in the Atacama desert in Chile, and it’s just stunning. The comet is obvious enough — you can still see the two tails — and the crescent Moon, somewhat overexposed, on the left. On the right is the VLT itself, firing a laser into the sky. The laser makes atoms high in the atmosphere glow, creating an artificial star that can be used to compensate for turbulence in the air, creating sharper images.

I love how the Milky Way is splitting the sky. You can see the dark hole of the Coal Sack, a thick dust cloud that absorbs the star light from behind it, and the Southern Cross in the middle of the frame. The two bright stars just below that are Alpha and Beta Centauri, the former being the closest star system to our own. The southern hemisphere gets a better view of the galaxy than we northerners do, since the geometry of the Earth’s tilt puts the center of the Milky Way higher up for them. I’m jealous enough just because of that, but to have this incredible comet visible too? Curse you antipodeans!

[UPDATE: The ESO has added a nice time lapse video to the mix, using Brammer's photos:

Sigh. So lovely.]

If you’re south of the Equator, the comet will be visible in the east before sunrise for a few more days at least. If you can, go take a look. Comets like this are extremely rare, and you may never get another chance like this again.

Image credit: Gabriel Brammer/European Southern Observatory

For some reason, a lot of gorgeous pictures are being released after I post my Top 24 Deep Space Pictures of 2011 gallery. Figures. Since I already had a few images from NASA’s WISE observatory in the gallery anyway I guess can’t complain too much, especially when they release one as pretty as this!

[Click to infraredenate.]

This is Barnard 3, a dusty, gassy region of the galaxy about a thousand light years away where young stars are lighting up their neighborhood. WISE observes the skies in the far infrared, well past what our eye can detect, so this false-color picture mostly picks out the dust warmed by nearby stars. What you see as green and yellow-green is actually from long, complex molecules similar to soot, called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons or PAHs. Red shows cooler material.

So what’s going on here? Right in the center of the red splotch is a star which is brighter and hotter than our Sun, and is flooding the surrounding material with ultraviolet light and a fast wind of subatomic particles (like the Sun’s solar wind, but a whole lot stronger and with a much, much farther reach). This has carved out a gigantic cavity in that stuff, creating a bubble about 25 light years in diameter — that’s huge: 250,000,000,000,000 kilometers across, more than 10,000 times the size of our solar system!

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I watched "Battle: Los Angeles" recently, a movie about aliens invading the Earth. It wasn’t terrible, and it wasn’t great. It was watchable, and worked sufficiently well in lowering our supply of popcorn at Chez BA.

But like every alien invasion movie I see, there’s one small, really eensy-weensy problem: the reason they give for the invasion itself was dumb. [SPOILER] They came to steal our water? And use it for fuel? Say WHA?

Ignoring the silly idea of using water for fuel — that’s got physics exactly backwards, since you get energy out of combining oxygen and hydrogen to make water, and it takes energy to crack them apart — there’s an even bigger problem…

… which I won’t tell you here, because I go into all sorts of detail in my latest Blastr article, 6 Reasons Why Aliens Would NEVER Invade Earth. Mind you, I’m not talking about aliens just coming here to shoot the breeze, but aliens coming here to shoot us. It’s hard to think of a good reason they’d do so, and certainly the reasons given in pretty much every movie don’t make sense. And I have a real problem with just how bad aliens are at taking over. Wiping us out should be pretty easy; heck, I wrote a whole other Blastr article about that, too.

So head on over there and give it a read. Agree, disagree? Leave a comment there, too. But if you disagree, be nice: I’m way better at wiping out life on Earth than any Hollywood alien could hope to be.

- Blastr: So, you wanna blow up the Earth?
- Blastr: My Favorite TV Scientists
- Blastroid
- Blastr: Other than that, Spock, how was the movie?
- Blastr: I Was A Zombie For Science
- Big budget movies that got their science right
- Master of Blastr

Earlier, I posted an incredible picture of Comet Lovejoy taken by space station astronaut Dan Burbank. NASA just posted an amazing time lapse video made from those pictures!

Holy wow! What an astonishing sight that must be. And did you see the object moving right-to-left a few seconds in, just above the green airglow layer? I suspect that was a low-Earth satellite in a different orbit, moving in a different direction. The storms over a dark Australia below make this video that much more dreamlike.

But it’s real. A comet found by an amateur astronomer, observed the world around — and above — and then seen and photographed from space by a man floating in an internationally designed and built habitat in orbit.

That is, quite simply, very cool.

Tip o’ the lens cap to Asteroid Watch.

I know I post a lot of pictures I describe as amazing, lovely, breath-taking, jaw-dropping… but that’s only because it’s always true. In this case, though, I think those adjectives fall way, way short in describing the seriously paralyzing beauty of this photograph: Comet Lovejoy, as seen by an astronaut on board the International Space Station:

[Click to encomanate -- and yes. you need to.]

Oh. My.

This stunning photo was taken by astronaut Dan Burbank as the ISS passed over Australia at 17:40 GMT on December 21, 2011 [update: more pix here]. It was early morning over Australia at the time, and you can see the dark limb of the Earth, the thin green line of airglow (atoms in the upper atmosphere slowly releasing the energy they accumulated over the day), some southern hemisphere stars… and of course, the incredible, ethereal, other-worldly beauty of Comet Lovejoy, its tails sweeping majestically into the sky.

Wait, what? "Tails", plural? Yup. Hang on a sec. I’ll get to that.

First, the comet was discovered by amateur astronomer Terry Lovejoy in November. It turned out to be a sungrazer, a comet whose orbit plunges it deep into the inner solar system and very close to the Sun’s surface. It screamed past our star last week, on December 15/16, and, amazingly, survived the encounter. Some sungrazers do and some don’t, but Lovejoy is bigger than usual for such a comet, and that may have helped it remain intact as it passed less than 200,000 km over the Sun’s inferno-like surface.

Now the comet is moving back out, away from the Sun and back to the frozen depths of deep space. But the Sun’s heat, even from its greater distance now, is not to be denied. Comets are composed of rock and ice — the ice being what we normally think of as liquid or gas, like ammonia, carbon dioxide, and even good ol’ water. The heat from the Sun turns that ice directly into a gas (in a process called sublimation), which expands around the solid nucleus of the comet, forming what’s called the coma. Pressure from sunlight as well as the solar wind blows this material away from the comet head, resulting in the lovely tail, which can sweep back for millions of kilometers.
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