With guest appearance by Orion on the bottom right

Neat! Hopefully that’s the Moon or else we’re in a lot of trouble!

Here is a video from the Kryoneri Observatory in Greece, showing BepiColombo during the flyby. Wow!

You don’t need a Facebook account to see it: https://www.facebook.com/athensobservatory/...56196052386495/

It appears that they are using luminosity distances (see http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/cosmo_02.htm#DL for definition) based on https://lscsoft.docs.ligo.org/ligo.skymap/l...p/bayestar.html (look at min_distance parameter) and https://emfollow.docs.ligo.org/userguide/glossary.html (look at “burst range”). In these units the CMB is at ~15000 Gpc.

Interesting tweet from Alan... perhaps they have resolved Ultima Thule?

https://twitter.com/alanstern/status/1079111629604831233

Rosetta is now on a collision course with 67P C-G... impact expected tomorrow (30 September) at 11:20 UT (+-20 min)

http://blogs.esa.int/rosetta/2016/09/29/co...euvre-complete/

Before the burn started, it obtained this wide-angle picture of the comet: http://www.esa.int/spaceinimages/Images/20...de-angle_camera

There's an article about this in today's New York Times with some interesting additional information from Drs. Bannister & Brown: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/14/science/...arf-planet.html

Press release from the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope, http://www.cfht.hawaii.edu/en/news/NewDwarfPlanet/



Orbital elements from IAU MPC: http://www.minorplanetcenter.net/mpec/K16/K16N67.html

Here is a press release about the radio telescope observations of Pluto & Charon using ALMA:

http://public.nrao.edu/news/pressreleases/alma-pluto

Neat two-frame animation of the orbital motion

There is a new geologic map of Mars that was recently released by the USGS -- check it out!

http://pubs.usgs.gov/sim/3292/

I entered the orbital elements into Celestia and rendered the orbits of Eris, Sedna & 2012 VP113. It's hard to display all of them simultaneously because of the different inclinations, but I think this gives a good perspective.

Edit: I added another view with a different orientation (far above the ecliptic plane). In the first one it seems like 2012 VP113 has a larger semimajor axis than Sedna, but that was just due to the perspective.

Emily,

Have you tried the JPL small-body database browser?

http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.cgi?sstr=2012...log=0;cad=0#orb

It's a little hard to zoom out properly, but if you're happy with showing most of the orbit, this could be good enough for now... I've attached a screenshot.

Well, this is interesting... apparently all the hype was simply due to a misunderstanding by the NPR reporter who was interviewing Dr. Grotzinger!

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/201...out_entire.html

A tweet by Curiosity (screenshot attached) was meant to reduce the expectations and clarify Dr. Grotzinger's remarks, but apparently it wasn't noticed and the story went viral.

Sigh...

--Lucas

Looks like ODY is back in business!

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/odyssey/...ey20120713.html

--Lucas

For the impatient among us...

http://space.jpl.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/wspace?t...=1&showac=1

in very good agreement with the "countdown" clock at the MSL site (obviously!)

Wow! That is truly awesome and inspiring!

I don't know if you're taking requests, but it would be really neat to see a model of Opportunity at some spot in her trek and do a "fly over".

Lots of Pancam pictures returned on March 3rd, including some of Stu's "lucky horseshoe" crumbling apart as Spirit moved those 39 cm! I'm sure he doesn't mind one bit

Looking forward to some color mosaics by the experts!



http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/spirit/pa...7MP2400L5M1.JPG

Well, I'd argue against the use of the term "high definition" in this context, with Pluto being 1 pixel across!

Still, nice to see new images from NH!

Does anyone here have a plot of the brightness variations of Pluto as seen by NH? Are we talking about changes of a few percent, or are they larger?

PANSTARRS-1 is in operation now in Haleakala. But the full-operation PANSTARRS (also refered to as PS-4) is facing an uncertain future. It should be located in Mauna Kea, but there's fierce opposition to the construction of any new telescopes in the Hawaiian islands by certain groups of natives.

In related news, LSST (an 8-m telescope designed to look for killer asteroids among other topics) is proceeding in its design and construction (it will be located in northern Chile) and just received a 30-million gift from Bill Gates and Charles Simonyi.

Thanks guys, I've started the download and I'm drooling all over the keyboard. So many memories from past sols!

I just downloaded MMB and it looks great! Quick question (couldn't find the answer in the MMB help) -- is there a way to use MMB to download data from, say, the last 100 sols? Assuming disk space and bandwidth are not a problem...

Thanks centsworth_II! With the arrow that you included, "Home Plate" becomes very obvious!

Based on Tesheiner's map for Spirit's ground track, I figured that the rover is at position x=20065, y=26773 in that image. Is that about right?

--Lucas

Hi all,

Long time reader, first time poster... Thanks to all the UMSF members for sharing such an amazing array of knowledge with the rest of us!

The IAS viewer is truly awesome! Regarding this image:

http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/PSP_001777_1650

Can anyone pinpoint Spirit's location? Tesheiner maybe?

Thanks!

--Lucas