#Astronomy

#Astronomy

Astronomers say the space rock, called 2026 JH2, is up to four times the size of a London bus and will get 'as close as you can without hitting'. It is expected to zoom by our planet at an estimated distance of around 56,000 miles (90,000km) late on Monday night. This is exceptionally close - the equivalent of just a quarter of the distance between us and the moon.

Astronomers use the term quasi-moon to describe a mass that appears to orbit Earth while actually maintaining its own orbit around the sun. It is never fully captured by Earth's gravity.

As the last strip of pink on the horizon fades to indigo on the Maniototo Plain in Otago, every word I speak arrives in a puff of condensation. Six hundred metres above sea level, in winter the temperature here can drop to -15C. Spring isn't much warmer. But the chill is worth it. Standing in the dark in what feels like the middle of nowhere, I've come to a paddock not far from the historic mining town of Naseby to stargaze.

'Inside it, you have the part of the galaxy that is still actively building itself with ongoing star formation. Outside it, you have a disc region populated almost entirely by stars that have drifted there from elsewhere.'

The new images of the Sombrero Galaxy, captured by the 570-megapixel Dark Energy Camera, reveal its bright core amid 2,000 globular star clusters tightly bound by gravity.

The precise expansion rate of the universe - called the Hubble constant - has turned into a major pain point as attempts to nail it down keep leading to widely differing figures.

The lantern slides are transparent photographs or paintings on glass plates designed to be projected onto a screen using an early slide projector. They were sitting in three plastic tubs in a Fuertes office.

The square structure, topped with a telescope dome, was built for the 1769 Transit of Venus - an event that also saw Captain James Cook dispatched across the globe to secure a clearer view.

The atmosphere of TOI 5205b has a lower concentration of heavy elements relative to hydrogen than gas giants in our own solar system, suggesting something different about its formation.

MoonFest draws inspiration from John Draper, who made history in 1840 by capturing one of the earliest photographs of the moon, bridging the gap between Earth and our celestial neighbor.

A lunar eclipse occurs when the Earth lines up between the moon and the sun. The sun's light is blocked casting a shadow on to the moon. But in some eclipses sunlight does reach the moon indirectly, daubing the moon in a sunset palette. Any light that does pass shines through our atmosphere and transforms the lunar surface into a deep, coppery red.