The third brightest object in the sky
tonight is the International Space Station.
Precisely at 5:37pm, one minute, above South-Southwest.
If only my world was as predictable,
my orbit stable, looking down on this.
The Atlantic east coast of the United States from the ISS. Easy to recognize cities include New York City and Long Island at the right and to the left for Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington DC near picture center.
If you want to watch the ISS pass over your home (it’s visible with naked eye), check at SpotTheStation.nasa.gov
Before daybreak these mornings, two bright objects
of nighttime, Moon and Venus, are East.
Earthshine’s glow lights the Moon’s dark side
with this twice-reflected sunlight and Earth appears
a half-lighted landscape in the lunar sky.
This NASA photograph from Apollo 11 shows the partly-illuminated Earth rising over the lunar horizon. The Earth is approximately 400,000 km away.
The crescent of Neptune and Triton, captured by Voyager 2 on August 25, 1989, as the spacecraft headed toward interstellar space. (Credit: NASA-JPL)
Voyager visited finding storms, a cyclonic
Great Dark Spot. Your biggest moon, Triton,
is a captured dwarf planet. Carbon squeezed
out of methane mixes with water, creating
crystallized carbon. It’s raining diamonds on Neptune.
Neptune’s Great Dark Spot, a huge and surprisingly vigorous storm, imaged by Voyager 2 on August 23, 1989. (Credit: NASA-JPL/Justin Cowart)
I look for a red giant tonight.
A star late in its stellar evolution.
In a cloud that’s not a cloud.
How old we are. How we want
a supernova ending. How difficult is dying.
The 13-year-old spacecraft sends us its final
photographs of the rings and Titan moon,
as it is steered toward Saturn’s surface.
At 76,000 mph, the atmosphere will tear
it apart and vaporize this celestial explorer.
Cassini–Huygens, or more commonly, Cassini, was a Flagship-class unmanned robotic spacecraft which was planned, built, launched, and operated in collaboration between NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Italian Space Agency, and was sent to the planet Saturn. Cassini was the fourth space probe to visit Saturn and the first to enter its orbit. It studied the planet and its many natural satellites from when it entered orbit in 2004[5] to when it began its final, suicide descent in September 2017.
The spacecraft was steered to its death when its fuel had been expended so that it would not crash into one of Saturn’s moons and possibly contaminate it with materials from Earth.
Giovanni Domenico Cassini (8 June 1625 – 14 September 1712) was an Italian mathematician, astronomer, astrologer and engineer who discovered four satellites of the planet Saturn and noted the division of the rings of Saturn.
Writing the Day 