Asteroid Archives - Maya Ninth Wave

5 planets will parade across the sky in rare astronomical event, while skyscraper-sized asteroid flies by Earth — Credit: CC0 Public Domain

More than half the solar system’s planets will align Monday in a rarely seen spectacle, arcing across a corner of the night sky.

Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Uranus will parade across the sky, accompanied by the moon and a possible star cluster. While the scenario will be visible to the naked eye, astronomers recommend breaking out the binoculars or a telescope for a more detailed view.

The planets will be arrayed across the western horizon in an arc about 20 to 25 minutes after Monday’s sunset, according to Space.com, starting with Mercury and Jupiter. However, twilight’s brightness could mask them, Space.com warned, adding that the viewing window is only about 25 to 30 minutes.

The planets will also be so close to the horizon that any structure or sightline glitch could obscure them. “Your best option is looking out over a westward-facing shoreline that is

Asteroid collision shows how much amateur astronomers have to offer — The DART impact ejected vast amounts of dust and debris from the surface of the asteroid Dimorphos. The trail of dust is more than 10,000 kilometres long.Credit: CTIO/NOIRLab/SOAR/NSF/AURA/T. Kareta (Lowell Observatory), M. Knight (US Naval Academy)

When NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft slammed into an asteroid on purpose last September, many telescopes were trained on this one-of-a-kind celestial event. Some were operated by teams of amateur astronomers — skilled skywatchers for whom astronomy is not their full-time day job (or, more accurately, night job). Three such teams on France’s Réunion island in the Indian Ocean, plus one in Nairobi, managed to watch the impact in real time.

These skywatchers are among the authors of a study in Nature that describes how the asteroid, named Dimorphos, became temporarily brighter and redder as the spacecraft hit it¹. One of five papers about the impact published in Nature

Tag: Asteroid

5 planets will parade across the sky in rare astronomical event, while skyscraper-sized asteroid flies by Earth

Asteroid collision shows how much amateur astronomers have to offer