Does anyone know how I can contact Slooh? I've tried custserv@slooh.com and support@slooh.com , but didn't get a response from either. Well. I got a canned response from custserv, but it was not useful. I changed my password a couple of days ago, and now the site does not recognize my apprentice subscription. I can't find any links on the site to deal with the issue.

It must be one of the greatest coincidences in all of planetary science, but our Moon, which is about 400 times smaller in diameter than the visible face of the Sun, is also about 400 times closer. That means, when the alignment is just right and the New Moon lies between the Earth and the Sun, the Moon’s face covers the Sun almost precisely so we can see for a few minutes the ghostly outer layers of the solar corona while the Sun’s blinding disk is covered. This is what we call a total solar eclipse, one of the most striking phenomenon in all of nature.

A total solar eclipse is a coincidence of time as well as space. Millions of years ago, the Moon was much closer to Earth, so when it passed in front of the Sun it completely blocked its light, including the delicate streamers of light from the corona. Tens of millions of years from now, as the Earth and Moon continue their tidal interactions, the Moon will move to a higher orbit and it will become too far away to cover the brightest part of the solar disk. Total solar eclipses will become a thing of the past.

Tony’s account of his finding:

“Main Belt 3-6km diameter near-circular orbit.

I was testing a program I am developing to detect moving objects in Slooh images. I tried it with set of FITS targeting 2016 LJ49 to check that it would find that object. It spotted an object that should not be there.

I followed up using Astrometrica to obtain more accurate motion, and restacked. The object was faint but distinctly visible in each mission. There is no object near this position in the MPC Checker. 5 of the 6 individual mission measurements were reported as aje002a (temporary designation), the 6th being the worst residual was not submitted.

Find Orb analysis indicated it is probably an MBA or Mars crosser so I didn’t expect it to go on the NEOCP. FO gave a prediction for the following night and I recovered it ~30″ from the predicted position.

I followed up also on the 3rd and night. Find Orb shows this object should remain visible (just) during next month’s dark period so hopfully the orbit will be good enough to be able to recover it next year.”

A core-collapse supernova is one of the most energetic and violent events in the universe, releasing as much energy in a few weeks as an entire galaxy. So they understandably get a lot of press. But only the biggest and rarest stars have a chance of becoming a supernova. Stars like our Sun, and those up to about eight solar masses, will end their lives in a less spectacular fashion by gently blowing off their outer layers as a planetary nebula and leaving their cores behind as a white dwarf star. Bigger stars, however, keep burning their store of fuel in the core until energy can no longer be generated, and the star collapses suddenly and explodes outward leaving behind a neutron star or, in some cases, a black hole. That’s what a supernova is all about.

In our galaxy, a big star explodes as a supernova every 50-100 years, on average. We’re due for one: the last observable supernova in the Milky Way happened in 1604. But with the help of big telescopes, astronomers discover a few dozen supernovae each year in other galaxies. And there are so many galaxies in the observable universe, astronomers estimate some 30 stars explode as a supernova every SECOND! The universe is a big place…

While the positions of the Earth and Moon may appear stable and unchanging to us, they in fact are part of a far more dynamic system than first meets the eye. When the Moon first formed some 4.5 billion years ago, it orbited a mere 22,000 kilometers away from Earth, compared the roughly 400,000 kilometers now separating the two. However, as the Moon orbits around Earth, the tidal forces that the two exert on each other (and that power our ocean’s tides) have slowly speed up the Moon’s orbit, with the result that it moves roughly 3.8 centimeters further from Earth each year.

This retreat should continue unabated for many years, but for all the Moon-lovers out there, hope still exists! The tidal forces that accelerate the Moon get weaker the further out the Moon gets, and they also slow down Earth’s rotation. For comparison, an Earth day was only 5 hours long when the Moon formed. Millions of years from now, the tidal forces will balance out, and the Moon will have stopped moving away from Earth, but a single Earth “day” will be about 47 of our days long! By that point, any future humans will still be able to gaze at a much more distant Moon, but will have very weird calendars. Still a win in my book!

The Sun has always been an object of fascination for mankind, and we can find many ancient references to those who watched and recorded to happenings of our Solar System’s star. Sunspots, the dark blemishes that periodically dot the Sun’s are some of its most distinctive features, and have a similarly long history of observation. One of the first recorded mentions of sunspots can be found in the Book of Changes, a Chinese text compiled around 2,800 years ago! The text records that “A dou was seen in the sun”, and “A mei was seen in the Sun.” Given the context of the surrounding text, “dou” and “mei” are thought to mean “darkening”, in other words, a sunspot! Attributing astrological significance to sunspots, the ancient Chinese took careful note of them, as alluring then as they are to us today.

The Strawberry Moon will rise this Friday, setting the stage for not one, but two lunar spectacles. June’s Strawberry Moon — named by Algonquin Native American tribes to signify the start of the strawberry harvesting season — is a special type of full moon, called a mini moon.

A full moon occurs when the Sun, Earth and the moon line up. The Strawberry Moon will reach its fullest phase on Friday, June 9 at 9:09 a.m. EDT, but it will appear slightly smaller than the average full moon.

The moon’s orbit around Earth isn’t perfectly circular — it’s slightly elliptical, so that when the moon reaches a point in its orbit where it is farthest from Earth (also known as apogee) it looks smaller in the sky. This type of full moon is called a mini moon.

A mini moon is essentially the opposite of a supermoon, which refers to a full moon that occurs at perigee, or the point where the moon is closest to Earth. While a mini moon lies approximately 252,000 miles from Earth, a supermoon is about 225,700 miles. At a farther distance from Earth, a mini moon may appear up to 14 percent smaller than a supermoon and slightly less luminous than a normal full moon. What’s more is the Strawberry Moon will reach apogee on June 8 at 6:22 p.m. EDT, hours before reaching its fullest phase on Friday.

In addition to the moniker Strawberry Moon, June’s full moon has also been nicked named the Full Rose Moon and the Honey Moon. Despite it’s tasty sweet name, the Strawberry Moon will only appear to have pinkish-red tones when it close to the horizon.

When examining seismic data gathered during the Apollo lunar missions, Moon scientists experienced quite a shock. They had detected earthquakes!

Or rather, as they came to be known, moonquakes. However, the moonquakes aren’t quite like their Earth-bound brethren, for example not being caused by plate tectonics like on Earth as the Moon has no continental plates. Instead, moonquakes can be caused by a variety of lunar phenomena, including meteor impacts, tidal stress as the Moon orbits the Earth, and the expansion and contraction of the frigid lunar surface. Fortunately for any prospective lunar skyscrapers, moonquakes are generally quite weak, generally too small to be noticed, although they can last for hours at a time, much longer than those on Earth. Nevertheless, the moonquakes demonstrate that despite appearances, our little Moon is really quite a vibrant and active body, just like the planet it orbits!

I have been fortunate to lead several Slooh solar eclipse expeditions – and the Transcontinental Eclipse of 2017 is set to be the best yet because Slooh members will be joining us in Idaho!

Based on my experience covering eclipses for Slooh, here are my recommendations for how-to enjoy and view a Total Solar Eclipse successfully:

• Above all else think “Safety First, Enjoyment Second!”. It is incredibly easy to damage your eyes permanently if you look at the Sun without certified solar filters.

• Forget about cameras, phones and telescopes – enjoy the experience with your filtered eyes – not through a viewfinder.

• Use certified eclipse glasses. The cardboard type (certified marked) are good but uncomfortable to wear and frequently slip off your ears.

• If you do want a close-up view there are some special certified eclipse binoculars you can buy. Or you can buy some certified filter material to attach securely to your existing binoculars.

• If you want to use a telescope you have several options: specialist solar telescope, normal telescope with certified solar filter or film, normal telescope projecting onto a screen (I don’t recommend the latter as people could try and look through the telescope).

• If you are determined to spoil your experience and photograph the eclipse, you’ll need a DSLR camera with a longish lens – I recommend >300mm (a small refracting telescope is likely to be cheaper than a camera lens). You’ll need to use a certified solar filter or film for the partial phases. You’ll remove your solar filter at totality and take a range of different exposures during that all-to-brief period to capture phenomena like Baily’s Beads and the Sun’s corona. Don’t underestimate just how much effort it takes to photograph an eclipse successfully – assume that you’ll experience the event through the viewfinder and miss the glorious experience enjoyed by those who left their cameras at home!

• Always test your eclipse glasses and filters – hold them up to an incandescent light to spot any pinholes or scratches. Throw them away if damaged in any way.

There’s a wealth of information available regarding photographing solar eclipses. Here are some of my favourites:

• B&H Photographing an Eclipse
• Fred Espenak’s Eclipse Photography
• Nikon: How-to Photograph a Solar Eclipse
• Eclipse2017.org Photographing the Eclipse
• Eclipse Chasers Solar Eclipse Photography Guide
• NASA Guide to Eclipse Photography

Jupiter’s Great Red Spot has been raging for at least 300-years and is the oldest and largest storm in the solar system.

• The Great Red Spot is a persistent anticyclonic storm on the planet Jupiter, 22 degrees south of the equator, which has lasted at least 349 years.

• The storm is large enough to be visible through Earth-based telescopes.

• It was probably first observed by Cassini, who described it around 1665.

• The oval object rotates counter-clockwise, with a period of about 6 days.

• The Great Red Spot’s dimensions are 24–40,000 km × 12–14,000 km.

• It is large enough to contain two or three planets of Earth size.

• The cloud-tops of this storm are about 8 km above the surrounding cloud-tops.

• Storms such as this are not uncommon within the turbulent atmospheres of gas giants.

• Jupiter also has white ovals and brown ovals, which are lesser unnamed storms.

• White ovals tend to consist of relatively cool clouds within the upper atmosphere.

• Brown ovals are warmer and located within the “normal cloud layer”.

• Such storms can last hours or centuries.

The two brightest stars in the constellation Orion, Rigel and Betelgeuse, present a compelling study in the colors, temperatures, and life cycles of stars.

The massive star Betelgeuse, which marks the easternmost shoulder of Orion, is clearly red-orange in color. That’s because the star’s core has nearly run out of fuel and contracted, heated up, and pushed out the outer layers which have grown tenuous and cool. The temperature of the visible outer layers of Betelgeuse are just 3,500 K, much cooler than our Sun and much redder. The star will soon have no fuel left to hold itself up and will collapse and explode as a supernova in the next hundred thousand years.

Rigel, by contrast, which lies at the western foot of Orion, is more massive than Betelgeuse but a little younger. The star’s core still has plentiful fuel to burn to push back against gravity and has not yet grown hot enough to swell its outer layers. As a result, Rigel is still hot– about 12,000 K– and much bluer. It’s also relatively compact compared to Betelgeuse. But Rigel will, in time, deplete its fuel and eventually swell to become a red supergiant like Betelgeuse in the next million years or so. In time, it too will detonate as a supernova and then disappear from our skies.

Stars of this open cluster stand out clearly from the background inner spiral arm of the Milky Way. They are predominantly blue. And blue means they are very hot, much hotter than our yellow-orange Sun. Many of these will have short lives in astronomic terms.

This cluster has one outstanding feature – obvious low star density near the nucleus. Scientists are not sure why it is so.

I like open star clusters that are in front of the Milky Way. They create a very nice contrast with fainter but very rich background star fields. Sometimes they appear to be flying and indeed they are. They are closer to us and may move in a different direction. Another nice feature of the Milky Way are obscuring dark clouds. Despite there are no famous ones in this region you may see slightly darker regions of irregular shapes resembling rivers and lakes.

I created this image using Canary Two Wide Field telescope mostly from my own missions reserved from July to September 2016. The total integration time is less than 1 hour. I enlarged the images to the unbinned resolution of 0.635 arcsecond/pixel and thus creating a 4K HD image. Careful application of deconvolution with star protection in PixInsight helped me to enhance contrast and thus resolution of close double stars.

While they may appear stable to you and I, the stars in the night sky are in constant motion, shifting positions over time until asterisms like the Big Dipper are stretched and twisted. The five middle stars of the asterism are moving together as part of what’s called the Ursa Major Moving Group, which means they retain their orientation. However, the two stars at the ends of the Big Dipper, Dubhe and Alkaid, are moving in a direction opposite to the rest. This means that over time this asterism will stretch to resemble a different kitchen appliance, a celestial knife. For fans of the Big Dipper, there’s still good news, in more than a hundred thousand years from now, the stars of the Big Dipper will once again align to form its signature shape, only this time in the opposite direction. Something for our great-great-grandkids to look forward to!

The live view from the Slooh Solar Telescope at the Canary Islands observatory this morning displayed some cool (literally for some) solar features.

The specialist H-Alpha telescope is tuned to show features in the Sun’s “chromosphere” – the second of three layers in the Sun’s atmosphere (above the photosphere and below the “solar transition layer” and corona).

These descriptions of the solar features we are watching this morning are from the Astronomical League’s solar viewing program:

• Prominence: These streams of charged solar material flowing up from the solar atmosphere and down again following local magnetic field lines are visible on the Sun’s limb (edges).

• Filaments: These are prominences seen against the face of the Sun, appearing as long, narrow dark streamers or diffuse complex dark areas. Filaments often mark areas of magnetic shearing.

• Plage: These are patchy H-alpha brightenings on the solar disk, usually found in or near active regions, which can last for several days. They are irregular in shape and variable in brightness, marking areas of nearly vertical emerging or reconnecting magnetic field lines.

• Sunspots: Temporary phenomena that appear visibly as dark spots compared to surrounding regions. They are caused by intense magnetic activity, which inhibits convection, forming areas of reduced surface temperature. Although normally a white light phenomena, they do appear in Slooh’s H-alpha views, but their penumbrae are lower in contrast than in white light.

• Active Region: A localized, transient volume of the solar atmosphere in which plages, sunspots, filaments, flares, etc., may be observed. Active regions are the result of enhanced magnetic fields; they are bipolar and may be complex if the region contains two or more bipolar groups.

The Triangulum Galaxy, M33, is located approximately three million light-years from Earth. This distance is key in a fan theory that pinpoints the possible location of the Star Wars Universe through…E.T? Yes, E.T. the friendly alien from Steven Spielberg’s 1982 classic family film.

The famous tagline of the movie goes, “He is afraid. He is totally alone. He is three million light years from home.” Fans suggest that therefore E.T’s home must be in the Triangulum Galaxy. So where does the galaxy far far away fit into this theory?

In George Lucas’s prequel, The Phantom Menace, E.T. (or his race) makes an appearance in the Galactic Senate. This is almost unnoticeable unless you know to look for it. This subtle touch is an Easter Egg that is up for much interpretation. Many fans say E.T.’s appearance is due to Lucas and Spielberg’s longtime friendship, but as others would suggest, do they share the same galaxy? The Triangulum Galaxy perhaps?

What’s the farthest thing you can see without binoculars or a telescope? If you have good eyesight and very dark and clear sky, the farthest object you can see is likely the face-on spiral galaxy M33, also called the Pinwheel Galaxy, in the constellation Triangulum. At a distance of 3 million light-years, M33 is one of only three spiral galaxies, along with the Andromeda Galaxy and the Milky Way, in our own Local Group of Galaxies.

With a diameter of about 60,000 light-years, the Triangulum galaxy ranks a distant third in size compared to Andromeda and the Milky Way in the Local Group. It’s home to about 40 billion stars. The Milky Way, by contrast, has some 400 billion stars and the Andromeda Galaxy has as many as a trillion stars. M33 may itself be a satellite of the Andromeda Galaxy.

Welcome to /r/slooh

Slooh is a live telescope streaming service that has been operating since 2003. We have situated large, robotic telescopes under the highest, darkest skies on Earth, so you can look up in wonder any time of day, even if it is cloudy where you live. And Slooh’s global telescope network provides coverage of space from around the world, monitored 24 hours a day by Slooh Astronomers and shared live with you.

This subreddit is meant as a place to share our free featured shows from the Space Situation Room and build a community around the stars. We have regular content from expert astronomers that we hope to share here and create a place of discussion for all things space.

With over 30 telescopes in the network and partners all over the world, we are able to share every interesting celestial moment with you via live video, including fully produced shows featuring Slooh Astronomers and expert guests as well as daily telescope feeds of space. We have journeyed with a mobile observatory to Kenya, the Faroe Islands, Indonesia, Iceland, Australia, and Alaska, and partnered with observatories in Arizona, Japan, Hawaii, Cypress, Dubai, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Norway and many more to livestream celestial events of potentially hazardous asteroids (PHAs), comets, transits, eclipses, solar activity, auroras and more.

We hope you find the content on this sub engaging and we look forward to discussing and building a community with you!

One of my favourite stars to view in the night sky is Polaris, or the North Star. It’s been used to navigate for millennia and although we have GPS for our road trips nowadays, Polaris is still a splendid celestial object to ponder. Polaris is a particularly bright star that appears to stand still while the other stars of the northern sky seem to rotate about it, making it a reliable fixed point. If you’re new to stargazing, it’s an excellent “gateway” star. Fortunately for us, there’s an easy way to find it using the Big Dipper. First, locate the Dipper in the night sky — in particular the two stars at the end of Dipper’s ladle, Dubhe and Merak. If an imaginary line is drawn between Dubhe and Merak and then extended northward by 5 times its own length, you will be led straight to Polaris, and can view it at your leisure. Happy stargazing!

Accompanying Visual

Ancient peoples studied the sky because they thought there was a close connection between the positions of stars and planets and events on Earth. The Babylonians kept records as far back as 2000BC and could predict movement of the Sun, Moon and planets quite accurately, but they did not try to explain those movements physically.

The Greeks began ask why things in nature happen. Thales of Miletus (625 – ~547BC) believed that nature is understandable. Anaximander (~610 – 545BC) described the stars as “condensations of air with openings where the flames come out.”.

Aristotle (384-322 BC) recognised the essential qualities of hot & cold and wet & dry. From combinations of these qualities he imagined everything to be made from:

• cold + dry = Earth

• cold + wet= Water

• hot + wet = Air

• hot + dry = Fire

Using these ‘elements’ he constructed a ‘cosmos’. The Earth (earth) is ‘obviously’ static and at the centre. This is surrounded by water (sea) and air (atmosphere). Beyond that is a layer of fire and beyond that is the rotating celestial sphere carrying the fixed stars.

Plato (~427 – 348 BC) pointed out that the stars move round the Earth in a regular pattern but the ‘planets’, (including the Sun and Moon) seem to wander about. Plato challenged his contemporaries to explain these movements.

One approach was to insert additional spheres between the ‘fire’ and the sphere containing the ‘fixed stars’. Each sphere would carry a planet and would rotate at an appropriate speed. This left much room for debate as to the physical nature of the spheres. However, the Greeks were more interested in finding the geometry rather than explaining the physical properties.

Of course, the idea of planets rotating on a simple sphere did not fit very well with observations. In particular several of the planets sometimes reverse direction in relationship to the background “fixed” stars. This “retrograde motion” required further explanation…