#astromonday!!

[thecollectionsof]

Happy astromonday!!

This week we've had some aurora seen in the UK and with this in mind I wanted to talk a little bit about our Sun!!

At 4.5 billion years old it's estimated that our sun is about halfway through its lifespan. It's about 26k light years from the centre of the Milky Way galaxy, 150million km from Earth (8 light minutes), and the distance between the Earth and the Sun is often called one astronomical unit (or AU).

We all know the Sun is very hot - at 15million°C at the core and 1million°C at the outermost atmospheric layer, called the corona. The Sun is made of hydrogen which is turned into helium by nuclear fusion at its core, releasing so much energy it heats up to plasma form. The plasma is constantly moving on the Sun's surface.

The chemical reactions release bursts of energy called solar flares, where the hydrogen and helium heat up and launch charged protons and electrons from the Sun and into space. Earth's magnetic fields divert most of these charged particles away, but some are carried into Earth's atmosphere, where they react with the nitrogen and oxygen there, creating colourful results. These are the aurora!!

When solar activity is higher, more charged particles are launched and enter our atmosphere, which is why the aurora borealis has been seen unusually far south. Solar activity changes over time and sometimes there are more solar flares than other times.

I hope you have a fantastic day!! 🌞

hi juno happy astromonday !!!!

i want to see an aurora so, so bad. they look stunning, and i mean just look at that picture !!! are you joking!!!! i wish i could talk to someone who lived hundreds of years ago about things like eclipses and the aurora borealis, i would love to hear what they thought about them.

thanks for another cool astromonday, i hope your day is going well !!!

[glittertrail]

Happy astromonday!! Today I'd like to tell you about two of my favourite moons: Phobos and Deimos, the two moons of Mars!!

Mars is 80million km from Earth, one of our closest neighbours, and people had wondered if he had moons since ancient times. When Jupiter was found to have four moons in 1610, it was theorised Mars had two, and even the book Gulliver's Travels describes Mars having two moons. However, his two moons were discovered in 1877, thirty years after Neptune, which is 50 times further away than Mars (and over 100 years after Gulliver's Travels)!!

Phobos is the closest moon to any planet just under 6,000km from Mars - the distance from New York to Paris. He is also one of the few moons to orbit his planet faster than the planet turns - he takes 7 hours, and Mars' day is just over 24 hours, so if you were on Mars you would see him three times in one full day!!

Deimos is one of the smallest satellites of any planet, at just over 6km in diameter. He is 23,000km from Mars which is still very close to his planet, and he takes 30 hours to orbit Mars once. It's strange to imagine that if you were standing on Phobos or Deimos, how much of the sky Mars would take up, they are so close to him!!

Phobos and Deimos have a lot of planned missions, both for exploration and understanding or their origins (as it's not clear whether they formed with Mars or were captured like Neptune's moon Triton), and there is even suggestion of building a bridge from Phobos to Mars.

I have a question for you this week!! What celestial body would you most like to explore, regardless of risks? This can be a planet, moon, asteroid, comet, or anything else!!

I hope you have a fantastic day!! 🪐

Is it possible to build a bridge between Mars and Phobos? Bc that sounds amazing. But maybe a little complicated. Imagine having a bridge between the earth and our moon!

You know exactly the kind of day I've had lmao but thank you 😊 i hope you've had a nice day too, I think that it'd be cool to see a meteor shower from up there! That'd be pretty cool! Or see what's inside the helix nebula or the spiral galaxy 🥰 what about you? Anything you would like to explore?

[plegdoctor]

Happy astromonday!! Yes I know it's a Tuesday 🤣 

Next in the series on satellites I have another Saturnian moon for you, and this time it's Hyperion, one of his more unusual moons.

Hyperion was discovered in 1848 by William Lassell, a brewer who became an astronomy enthusiast and then astronomer. He also discovered Triton, Neptune's largest moon. Hyperion is 1.4million km from Saturn and is in orbital resonance with Titan, Saturn's largest moon. He orbits Saturn in 21 Earth days, so he is fast!! However, he is also one of the strangest moons in the Saturn system.

He is one of the largest irregular-shaped (not spherical) moons - his size is 360km at the widest point, so a little smaller than Enceladus and about a quarter of the size of our moon. 

Although he orbits in resonance with Titan, his orbit is not a set path, and wobbles unpredictably. As well as that, he does not have a fixed orbital point that he turns on, so not only is he an unusual shape, but his poles change - only Nix and Hydra, two of Pluto's moons, are similar. He is also not tidally-locked to Saturn, the largest satellite not to be; so he rotates at his own rate too. 

Most unusual is his general appearance. He is slightly red, and has material similar to Iapetus on his surface. He is very deeply catered, his largest being 120km wide. It's theorised this is because he is very porous, mostly made of water ice, and has a lot of space under his crust, weakening his surface and meaning greater effect  by impactors. 

I hope you liked this!! Have a fantastic day 🪐

🌕

[puppywritesthings]

Happy astromonday!! Yes I know it's a Tuesday 🤣 

Next in the series on satellites I have another Saturnian moon for you, and this time it's Hyperion, one of his more unusual moons.

Hyperion was discovered in 1848 by William Lassell, a brewer who became an astronomy enthusiast and then astronomer. He also discovered Triton, Neptune's largest moon. Hyperion is 1.4million km from Saturn and is in orbital resonance with Titan, Saturn's largest moon. He orbits Saturn in 21 Earth days, so he is fast!! However, he is also one of the strangest moons in the Saturn system.

He is one of the largest irregular-shaped (not spherical) moons - his size is 360km at the widest point, so a little smaller than Enceladus and about a quarter of the size of our moon. 

Although he orbits in resonance with Titan, his orbit is not a set path, and wobbles unpredictably. As well as that, he does not have a fixed orbital point that he turns on, so not only is he an unusual shape, but his poles change - only Nix and Hydra, two of Pluto's moons, are similar. He is also not tidally-locked to Saturn, the largest satellite not to be; so he rotates at his own rate too. 

Most unusual is his general appearance. He is slightly red, and has material similar to Iapetus on his surface. He is very deeply catered, his largest being 120km wide. It's theorised this is because he is very porous, mostly made of water ice, and has a lot of space under his crust, weakening his surface and meaning greater effect  by impactors. 

I hope you liked this!! Have a fantastic day 🪐

Astromonday on a Chewsday!! I’m blessed!

[inthehytes]

Happy astromonday!!

I'm back with more stuff on Saturn!! I'd imagine if you were to think of Saturn, one of the first things you'd think of are his famous rings, which is what I wanted to talk about today!! Here they are as categorised by NASA:

It's thought the rings were formed from comets, asteroids, or other satellites that came too near to Saturn and were ripped apart by his gravity. They are mainly made up of trillions of tiny ice and dust particles which also orbit Saturn. They are spread up to 400,000km from him - further than the Earth to the Moon - but are extremely thin, only about 10 metres wide!!

Along with Saturn's gravity, the rings are also influenced by some of his satellites. Some moons are categorised as "shepherd moons" meaning their orbits and gravity influence snd shape the rings. Prometheus and Pandora are two examples - they act as shepherds to the F Ring.

Pan, another tiny shepherd moon and the closest moon to Saturn, instead clears a space called the Encke Gap with his orbit. He orbits Saturn very quickly, and his gravity also makes some ring particles to form waves as he moves, causing a ripple effect and making "wakes" in the rings which are clumps of bunched up particles.

Imagine if Earth had so many moons and rings!! I wonder what it would look like from Saturn to see so many satellites and the movement of the rings from there.

I'll go into more detail about two of my favourite moons next time, for now I hope you have a fantastic day!! 🪐

This was so fantastic and informative bestie!!!! Though I’m a little sad you can’t stomp on Saturns rings 😔the little shepherd moons sound so adorable 🥺 little Pan being fast as fuck makes me think about lightning McQueen zooming around the track going kachow. Saturn being a guy is kinda a bummer but I guess we can’t win everything ✋🏻😭

[natinhaaa]

Hii~~

Could you do Sagittarius sun ,Gemini moon , Gemini rising , cap venus and mercury plz

Thank youu 💕

Alrighty. Here we go.

In general, I feel like you are social butterfly, full of life and quite fun to be around 🤙

There may have been or there are self steem issues related to your appearance and you may also be quite hard on yourself, always trying to do the right thing.

You might feel attracted to good looking and chatty kind of ppl 🤭 There may also be a feeling that relationships are hard or that is hard to trust people but at the same you really wish to find that special someone and may even feel like life doesn't really have a meaning if it doesn't happen!

There may be a need to find a spiritual path and you may also like philosophy and the deep mysteries of life.

You may use work/career as an escape from the world or really just use most of your energy in the development of your career and work.

You may feel things deeply but not know how to explain or show them. Your mission in this life is connected to the spiritual path, developing your sensitive side and your intuition. This may be difficult because you may be very rational and may even be skeptical about spiritual stuff specially cause you got the sun in the 6th house, which also means you may be very organised and connected to routine, health or even exercise. Remember to keep an open mind and to work on yourself and your spiritual abilities in order to fulfill your mission.

Hope it makes sense, please give me some feedback, it helps me so much since I've been studying astrology on my own ♥️

[thecollectionsof]

Happy astromonday!!

Today I wanted to talk more on Saturn and about his satellites!! I want to talk about what I think are two of the most intriguing.

Titan (left) is the second-largest moon in our solar system (bigger than Mercury), discovered in 1655, and is the only one out of over 150 known to have a dense atmosphere since the 1940s. Part of the Voyager I mission launched in 1977 was specifically to explore it. And Voyager I's readings showed a high possibility of there being lakes on Titan's surface!! The Cassini mission landed the Huygens probe on Titan in 2005, and this probe found liquid methane, and it is thought there is an ocean of liquid water under the crust!!

The small moon Enceladus (right), while not the best-known of Saturn's moons, is an intriguing satellite. Discovered in 1789 by Herschel (who also discovered Uranus), he orbits in Saturn's E ring, much closer to Saturn than Titan.

Enceladus has fewer impact craters than other moons, and the Cassini mission found hydrothermal activity under the icy crust, with geysers of water shooting up, most of the liquid falling back to Enceladus as ice. The ice explains why he has no impact cratering and also why he is so reflective. But also water that doesn't fall back to him, actually forms the E-Ring of Saturn!! Enceladus is such an interesting moon, because while not a shepherd moon, he contributes to the E-ring in a unique way!!

I have a question for you this week!! Is there a deity (from any mythology) that you'd like to see a satellite named after? What characteristics would this satellite have in common with the deity?

I hope you have a fantastic day!! 🪐

happy astromonday !!! okay i always read these with my roommate (which is why i usually do them so late) and this time i knew i don't know enough about deities or space things to answer so!! here's how my roommate answers the question <3

Off the top of my head, I can't think of a satellite, but as astronomers and astrophysicists make a push on figuring out where planet X is, I think it should be named Persephone. It evens out the gender imbalance in our solar system and if Pluto can't be a planet than he'd love if his wife was. On a tangent an interesting deity is Melinoë, is a chthonic nymph who I think deserves more recognition. (that being said I think all chthonic deities deserve more recognition, though it wouldn't match the roman naming scheme we have for our planets and their satellites, or the naming scheme of having satellites names be connected to their planet (Enceladus being one of the giants born to Saturn and Gaia, or Jupiter's moons being named after his lovers))

so yeah!! hopefully that makes more sense to you than it does to me, i think just about all of it went over my head. but i hope you had a great day today !!!!

[thecollectionsof]

Happy astromonday!!

For the last in the Mars asks, I have a story about the earliest picture from Mars' surface. This was taken in July 1965 by Mariner 4.

Mariner 4 was an orbiter, it didn't land on Mars, but in 1965 it sent back the first digital images from Mars. Sent over 8 hours to the NASA computers, it comprised of 240,000 numbers, bits of binary code, to make up the 40,000 patches of colour on its surface.

When the code was received back on Earth, the picture was likely to take a while to develop. But the scientists were too impatient to wait. So they printed all the numbers onto long, narrow strips of paper, stuck them to a wall in order, and coloured in each number using a paint-by-numbers method. This eventually created a piece of art you can see with today's ask, a replica of a picture taken from the surface of Mars!!

It really struck me again the love people have had for space and for Mars throughout history. This was 40,000 numbers that were coloured by hand, and how beautiful is the image!!

This week I have a question for you!! Tell me about something you've loved creating or taking part in. This can be art, writing, music, a project, or something else entirely.

I hope you've liked this little series on Mars, have a fantastic day!! 🪐

happy astromonday!!!

it’s things like this that always make me appreciate people. humans love to create and love to learn, and this is proof!! so much time and effort was put into it and i think it’s the cutest thing in the world.

but i love a question time, and okay it’s mostly me hyping up my sister but she deserves it!!! my sister arranges songs on music boxes, and when we still lived together she would have me help her punch out the holes in the strips so we could run them through the boxes. i got to help her take the things she wrote in the program and turn them into physical sheets!!! it’s made for great gifts and great memories, and also it was fun to just draw pictures or spell words with the holes <3<3

i hope you had a great monday, i i hope tuesday is even better!!!!

[thecollectionsof]

Happy astromonday!!

I thought I'd do a small series for the next 4 Mondays on Saturn. He's the second-largest planet, a gas giant, and he is almost ten times further away from the Sun than Earth. He takes almost 30 years to orbit the Sun but only 11 hours to spin on his axis, so he's big but fast!!

We've known about Saturn since the ancient times, and we can see him in the skies with the naked eye, but it was Galileo that first observed the rings he's known for through a telescope. At the time, as he thought they looked like ears, he theorised they were moons; but because Galileo observed them once but they'd vanished another time, he wondered if Saturn (like his deity namesake) had literally devoured them!! It was the mathematician Huygens who theorised they were rings in the mid-17th century, and also discovered that due to Saturn's axis tilt, the rings would only be visible at certain times, as they are huge but very thin.

Huygens also discovered the first moon of Saturn, Titan. The astronomer Cassini found four more in the 1670s: Dione, Iapetus, Rhea and Tethys, all named after Greek titans. To date we have found 83 satellites so far for him, and some of them have intrinsic links with the rings too!!

The picture above is from the Cassini-Huygens mission in 2013, in Saturn's shadow. Take a look at the tiny star on the bottom right of Saturn, between the two outermost rings. That is Earth!!

I'll go into more detail about his satellites and rings next week, for now have a fantastic day!! 🪐

hi juno happy astromonday!!!!!

saturn is so pretty, i love him. especially this photo, and seeing little baby earth in the distance?? everything and everyone we know is in that tiny speck??? the sheer size of space will never cease to amaze me

i can’t wait to hear more about it next monday. have a great day, love !!!

[thecollectionsof]

Happy astromonday!!

In 1984 on the Allan Hills in Antarctica, meteorite hunters found one which in 1996 was found to contain fossilised bacterial lifeforms. It's believed that the meteorite is from Mars!!

Previous orbits of Mars in the 1970s by Mariner 9 (photographing many geographical features that suggested Mars had previously had oceans) and experiments in the soil by landers Viking 1 and 2, had halted by 1982. One positive chemical reaction test from one experiment was not enough to conclusively prove life. But the findings from 1996 brought public interest back to Mars and in 1997, the NASA Mars projects began again!!

The first rover, Sojourner, ran from July to September 1997, but in July 2003 the two rovers Spirit and Opportunity began their missions. Spirit's was to find further evidence of water and Opportunity's was investigating craters, and both were incredibly successful. They were joined in 2012 by Curiosity and 2021 by Perseverance (both still going strong!!). Curiosity found chemical structures in the Martian soil which could support life, but is probably best known for singing happy birthday to herself in 2013!!

Spirit lost her wheel in a crater and stopped sending signals to Earth in 2009. Meanwhile Opportunity carried on going until June 2018 when a Martian dust storm blocked out the sun, and her solar panels lost power. Scientists tried to get signal back for months until they let her go in 2019.

Spirit and Opportunity were planned to last 90 days each. Amazingly they lasted 6 and 15 years instead!! The Mars rovers are evidently very much loved by their creators on the programme and the Mars missions continue.

I hope you have a fantastic day!! 🪐

happy astrowednesday (oops) <3

i think it's beautiful how much we love the rovers. it's things like the amount of time they tried to recover opportunity and curiosity singing happy birthday to herself that shows how much humans love to love <3

[thecollectionsof]

Happy astromonday!!

I'm back with more stuff on Saturn!! I'd imagine if you were to think of Saturn, one of the first things you'd think of are his famous rings, which is what I wanted to talk about today!! Here they are as categorised by NASA:

It's thought the rings were formed from comets, asteroids, or other satellites that came too near to Saturn and were ripped apart by his gravity. They are mainly made up of trillions of tiny ice and dust particles which also orbit Saturn. They are spread up to 400,000km from him - further than the Earth to the Moon - but are extremely thin, only about 10 metres wide!!

Along with Saturn's gravity, the rings are also influenced by some of his satellites. Some moons are categorised as "shepherd moons" meaning their orbits and gravity influence snd shape the rings. Prometheus and Pandora are two examples - they act as shepherds to the F Ring.

Pan, another tiny shepherd moon and the closest moon to Saturn, instead clears a space called the Encke Gap with his orbit. He orbits Saturn very quickly, and his gravity also makes some ring particles to form waves as he moves, causing a ripple effect and making "wakes" in the rings which are clumps of bunched up particles.

Imagine if Earth had so many moons and rings!! I wonder what it would look like from Saturn to see so many satellites and the movement of the rings from there.

I'll go into more detail about two of my favourite moons next time, for now I hope you have a fantastic day!! 🪐

hi juno happy astromonday!!!! i wish i could stand on a planet that had rings and closer moons and look out at them, i bet it would be beautiful <3 and i didn’t even realize the rings were so thin, that’s so cool!!!

thank you for the space facts once again, love <3 i hope you have a great day !!!!

[thecollectionsof]

Happy astromonday!!

Let's talk about Pluto. Declassified as a major planet in 2006 he's still an intriguing (and stunning) entity!! Take a look:

Pluto's largest satellite is Charon, and they are very close not only in size (Charon is just bigger than half Pluto's size) but in orbit.

Charon is only 12,000 miles from Pluto (for comparison, the Moon is 233,000 from Earth but is also only a quarter of the size of Earth).

But even more unusual is that both Pluto and Charon are tidally-locked to each other, meaning that one side will always face each other and the other will not (like our Moon is always facing Earth with one side), and for a planet to be tidally-locked to a satellite is unusual. One theory is that the white heart on Pluto is from an asteroid, which struck and affected his gravitational field, locking it to Charon's.

As they are similar in size, Charon's gravitational field would have a greater influence on Pluto than our Moon on us, although you can see the Moon's effects through tides here!!

Imagine being on Pluto, seeing his satellite always in the same position in the sky on one side, but never seeing it at all on the other.

I hope you have a fantastic day!! 💫

happy astromonday!!!

i love pluto <3 i know he isn’t a real planet anymore but he’ll always be one in my heart <3 and i didn’t know that about charon, but it makes sense—with how small he is and how big charon is comparatively when you take into account that it’s pluto’s moon, it checks out that they’re locked like that

thank you for the fun astronomy lesson again today, i hope you had a great day too!!!

[thecollectionsof]

Happy astromonday!! This week I've been following the Artemis I mission around the Moon, so I thought I'd share something on previous space exploration.

This is the Hubble deep field:

It was taken on an expanse of 'empty' space over long exposure 18th-28th December 1995. It intended to find some of the oldest parts of the universe and gain understanding about how the first stars formed. The oldest light on this image was from 400million years after the big bang, in other words, we are seeing the light as it was over 13billion years ago!!

The Hubble telescope took this image in a space that is only 1/13th the diameter of the Moon, and the amount of life in this tiny space is amazing to me!!

What are your favourite images from space, do you like seeing things from deep space, from other planets, or views we have from Earth?

I hope you have a fantastic day ✨️

it's not astromonday anymore but shhhh let's pretend it is. for the vibes <3

but this is the type of thing that makes me certain that there's other forms of life out there that we can't even comprehend. look at that and tell me that nowhere, in any of that space, are there any lifeforms? it doesn't have to be intelligent of human-like, but i feel like there are definitely at least bacteria on other places in the universe and beyond

and i don't think i have any favorite pictures of space, not yet at least!! i don't really put much time into researching space on my own, but i love learning a little bit about it through these asks <3 i do love pictures like that picture of the earth from the moon, though. seeing planets or moons from another planet? there's something about it that feels so special.

i hope you have a great day too!! <3<3

[thecollectionsof]

Happy astromonday!! I thought this week I'd send you a link to my current obsession of a website: NASA's astronomy picture of the day, here is the link: https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html

I love today's picture of the butterfly nebula, but my favourite from the last week has been this one from 18th November:

It's a protostar, or a star that is still forming, and the nebula around it is stunning!!

But the size of this pic is incredible to me. The website says the size of this is 0.3 light years (so it would take about 3-and-a-half months for light to travel from one end to the other). For comparison, Earth is about 93million miles from our Sun, but that is only 8 light MINUTES which just blows my mind!!

I hope you have a fantastic day 💫

hi juno happy astromonday!!!

that is so cool. the sheer scope of how distant things are in space is something that i truly will never be able to comprehend, and how absolutely massive this thing is?? it’s something quite literally incomprehensible. thanks for sharing this, it’s beautiful!!!!

[thecollectionsof]

Happy astromonday!!

Today (13th March) marks the anniversary of the discovery of Uranus so I wanted to talk about how he and Neptune were found.

In 1781 William Herschel observed an unusual star, noting its slow movement compared to others, and from this discovered it to be a planet!! This was the first planet to be found since the ancient times and was very exciting.

Having discovered Uranus, Herschel wanted to name it after George III, King of England at the time, reasoning that in future people would know when this planet was discovered from its name. He wrote that: "In the present more philosophical era it would hardly be allowable to have recourse to the same method and call it Juno, Pallas, Apollo or Minerva, for a name to our new heavenly body." Other astronomers were not so keen and apparently even George III didn't like it!!

The German astronomer Johann Bode suggested Uranus, as he was the father of Saturn, which stuck. Unfortunately Bode got his Greek and Roman mythology mixed up - Caelus is the father of Saturn, and Uranus is Caelus' Greek equivalent. This is why Uranus is named after a Greek god and not a Roman one.

Calculations on Uranus' movement were made, but he did not orbit as expected, leading astronomers to theorise his orbit was influenced by the gravity of an eighth planet. By 1846, this theory was proven correct when Neptune was discovered!! By then though astronomers had decided to stick to mythological names.

I hope you enjoyed this, have a fantastic day!!💫

ooooh this is cool, happy discovery anniversary!!!! i'm glad it's not named after george III, honestly that's so boring. even if the mythology is mixed up, naming it with the same theme as the others is the best way to do it!! it's interesting to me that the flow of information was so much slower, and it makes sense, but people nowadays would be corrected so quickly if they mixed up greek and roman myths like that (and of course education is more common for the common person in this day and age, but. still, it's interesting). it's kinda cool to hear about things like that happening on such a big scale. thanks for the uranus facts, i hope you're having a great day!!! <3<3

[thecollectionsof]

Happy astromonday!!

Ending the Saturn asks I wanted to talk about the Cassini-Huygens mission.

Named for the two 17th century astronomers who adored him, it launched in 1997, arriving at Saturn in 2003, and ended in 2017, a month shy of 20 years. It was the first mission reaching Saturn since Voyager in the 1980s, to learn more about him and gain understanding about the solar system and the beginnings of life.

This mission has given us so much information, including the discovery of six new moons, landing a probe on Titan and sending us pictures of his surface (the first ever), finding evidence of water on Enceladus, and more information on the rings; plus so many stunning pictures. All the beautiful photos of Saturn in the last 20 years have been thanks to this mission. But the ending was for me the most emotional thing to learn.

In 2017, recognising that the craft was running out of fuel, but also not wanting it to interfere with his intricate moon and ring systems, it was decided to send Cassini on one final mission: directly into Saturn's atmosphere. This mission was done with the view of gaining information about his atmosphere until Cassini stopped responding, as it would have destroyed Cassini from heat and pressure. The picture today is one of the last from the craft.

I can't help thinking of the engineers, putting love and hard work and craftsmanship into a machine which they know they will never see again, something that gave us so much information but can't ever return and there is no physical keepsake of, except in Saturn. I found it kind of haunting to think about, the love these people have for their missions, sending them to space knowing they will never get them back.

The next planned mission around Saturn is called Dragonfly. Due to launch in 2027 it will go to Titan, to learn more about his biochemistry and gain understanding on life.

I hope you've liked this little mini series on Saturn!! Have a fantastic day!! 🪐

hi juno happy astromonday!!!

i'm crying over cassini that's so cute and sad and haunting and !!!!!! they put so much work and effort and passion and love into discovery and they probably felt so attached to it but couldn't ever see it again. i hope dragonfly has such a successful mission and i hope it's getting so much love right now <3