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Comets-Comet_SWAN-3.jpgComet "SWAN"57 visiteDa "NASA - Picture of the Day" del 4 Ottobre 2006:"A newly discovered comet has brightened enough to be visible this week with binoculars. The picturesque comet is already becoming a favored target for northern sky imagers. Pictured above just last week, Comet SWAN showed a bright blue-green coma and an impressive tail. Comet C/2006 M4 (SWAN) was discovered in June in public images from the Solar Wind Anisotropies (SWAN) instrument of NASA and ESA's Sun-orbiting SOHO spacecraft. Comet SWAN, near magnitude six, will be visible with binoculars in the North-Eastern sky not far from the Big Dipper over the next few days before dawn. The comet is expected to reach its peak brightness this week. Passing its closest to the Sun two days ago, Comet SWAN and will be at its closest to the Earth toward the end of this month. Comet SWAN's unusual orbit appears to be hyperbolic, meaning that it will likely go off into interstellar space, never to return".
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Comets-Comet_Siding_Spring-PIA12836.jpgComet Siding Spring54 visiteCaption NASA:"Is it a bird, or a plane? It's comet Siding Spring streaking across the sky, as seen by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE.
The comet, also known as C/2007 Q3, was discovered in 2007 by observers in Australia. The snowball-like mass of ice and dust spent billions of years orbiting in the deep freeze of the Oort Cloud, a spherical cloud of comets surrounding our Solar System. At some point, it got knocked out of this orbit and onto a course that brings it closer to the Sun. Sunlight has warmed the Comet, causing it to shed ices and dust in a long tail that trails behind it.
On October 7, 2009, comet Siding Spring passed as close as 1,2 Astronomical Units from Earth and 2,25 Astronomical Units from the Sun (an Astronomical Unit - AU - is the distance between the Sun and Earth). Now, the comet is leaving the warmer, more hospitable neighborhood of the Solar System and heading back out to chillier parts. In this view, longer wavelengths of InfraRed Light are red and shorter wavelengths are blue.
The comet appears red because it is more than ten times colder than the surrounding stars. Colder objects give off more of their light at longer wavelengths.
An ice cube, for example, pours out a larger fraction of its light at longer InfraRed wavelengths than a cup of hot tea emits".MareKromium
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Comets-Comet_Tuttle_and_M33.jpgComet 8-P/Tuttle and M-3354 visiteCaption NASA:"This gorgeous galaxy and comet portrait was recorded on December 30th, 2007, in the skies over Hoogeveen (NL). The combined series of 60-by-60" exposures finds the lovely green coma of Comet 8P/Tuttle near its predicted conjunction with the Triangulum Galaxy.
Aligning each exposure with the stars shows the comet as a streak, slowly moving against the background stars and galaxy. An alternative composition with exposures centered on the comet, shows the background stars and galaxy as streaks.
The alluring celestial scene would also have been a rewarding one for the influential 18th Century comet hunter Charles Messier. While Messier scanned French skies for comets, he carefully cataloged positions of things which were fuzzy and comet-like in appearance but did not move against the background stars and so were definitely not comets. The Triangulum Galaxy, also known as M-33, is the 33rd object in his famous not-a-comet catalog.
The modern understanding holds that the Triangulum Galaxy is a large spiral galaxy some 3 MLY distant. Comet 8P/Tuttle, just bright enough to be visible to the unaided eye in dark, Northern Skies, is about 40 MKM (such as 2 LM - Light Minutes) away".MareKromium
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Comets-Garrad-PIA12985.jpgComet Garradd54 visiteThis image from the WISE mission was taken on January 2nd, 2010, during the check-out phase, before the start of the WISE survey. It is a mosaic of 3 individual WISE frames spanning an area on the sky about 7 times the size of the full Moon in portions of the constellations Bootes and Canes Venatici.
In the lower right portion of the image there is a streak of orange light. This is most likely a human-made satellite, orbiting Earth at a higher altitude than the WISE telescope, which is at 523 km above the surface. WISE sees many of these as it scans the sky.
Just above the satellite in the image is Comet C/2008 Q3 (Garradd). Comets are balls of dust and ice left over from the formation of the Solar System. As a comet approaches the Sun it is heated and releases gas and dust from its surface that is blown back by the solar wind into a long, spectacular tail. This comet was discovered in August 2008 by Gordon Garradd of the Siding Spring Observatory in Australia. This comet probably comes from the Oort Cloud, a vast collection of remnants from the formation of the Solar System thought to surround it. At the time the comet was observed by WISE, in the constellation Bootes, it was a distance of 419 million kilometers (2.789 Astronomical Units, AU) from Earth. But we are just catching it while it is near the Sun. The orbit calculated for Comet C/2008 Q3 (Garradd) is inclined to the plane of the Solar System by nearly 140 degrees and takes it very far from the Sun (trillions of kilometers). It made its closest approach to the Sun in June of 2009 at a distance of 1.8 AU (270 million km), just outside the orbit of Mars. If it comes back near the Sun at all, it won't be for hundreds of thousands of years.
In the upper left of the image is the impressive globular cluster Messier 3 (M3). M3 was discovered in the constellation Canes Venatici by famous French Astronomer, Charles Messier in 1764, and first seen to be made of stars around 1784 by the British astronomer who discovered infrared light, William Herschel. Globular clusters are huge globs of stars (hence the name) that are found orbiting in the outer reaches of most galaxies. They are thought to form around the same time that a galaxy forms. The Milky Way has over 200 known globular clusters. M3 is one of the largest and brightest globular clusters around the Milky Way. It is just barely visible to the naked eye from a dark location. M3 is made of about half a million stars, thought to be about 8 billion years old. It is about 150 light-years across (1 light-year is equal to 9.46 trillion km) and located some 34,000 light-years from Earth.
WISE sees invisible infrared light, and the colors here are mapped to 3 of the 4 wavelength bands observed by WISE. Blue represents light with a wavelength of 3.4 microns, cyan maps to 4.6 microns and red is lightat 12 microns (a micron is 1 millionth of a meter, and visible light runs from 0.4-0.7 microns). The light from relatively hot objects, like stars in M3, is seen in blue and cyan. Red color represents cooler things, like dust from the comet and its tail. When this image was taken the WISE team was still calibrating the rate of the scan mirror with the motion of the WISE telescope. The rate was not yet perfected and careful examination of this image reveals some stars that are a little smeared and not exactly aligned in the blue/cyan with the red.
MareKromium
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Comets-Hale-Bopp-00.jpgHale-Bopp - HST (1)61 visiteDue immagini della famosissima Cometa Hale Bopp che, qualche anno fa, ci tenne tutti con il naso "all'insù" per qualche tempo.
Queste immagini (HST) nascondono un'Anomalia che hanno evidenziato (a quanto ne sappiamo) solo pochi Ricercatori: alla Sn del nucleo di Hale-Bopp - per di chi guarda il secondo dei due frames - si vede qualcosa (una sorta di "nuvoletta") che gli Scienziati si sono ben guardati dal tentare di interpretare (forse per paura di fare figuracce e/o di dire sciocchezze...). Di che cosa si tratta? Un frammento della Cometa? Un difetto dell'immagine? O forse, come dicono i Ricercatori più smaliziati, una "Nave Spaziale" che seguiva la cometa - ed ora perdonateci il gioco di parole - "accodandosi" ad essa?!?...
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Comets-Hale-Bopp-01.jpgHale-Bopp - HST (2)53 visiteIn questi 8 frames HST l'Anomalia di cui parlavamo per il quadro precedente si vede ancora solo nelle prime due immagini (26 Settembre e 23 Ottobre). Noi diciamo con chiarezza che si tratta di qualcosa di reale e di inspiegabile; magari non sarà una Nave Spaziale aliena che si è accodata ad Hale-Bopp ma è certo che qualcosa era vicino alla cometa e 1) la seguiva oppure 2) faceva parte di essa.
Le Fonti Ufficiali non hanno detto MAI nulla, ma queste immagini parlano - chiaramente - da sole.
Che cosa, dunque, seguiva e/o accompagnava Hale-Bopp?!?...
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Comets-Hale_Bopp-02.jpgThe "Dust" and "Ion" Tails of Hale-Bopp72 visiteLo splendore e la magnificenza della Cometa Hale-Bopp, durante il suo passaggio del 1997. Nell'immagine, vediamo le due code di Hale-Bopp: la coda ionica (blu intenso), composta da molecole di gas ionizzati - è il monossido di carbonio che, quando viene 'eccitato', risplende di luce azzurra - la quale si crea dall'interazione fra le particelle contenute nel Vento Solare ed i gas presenti in prossimità del nucleo della cometa. La coda ionica, in quanto spinta dal Vento Solare, si muove come una sorta di banderuola e si dirige sempre in posizione diametralmente opposta rispetto al Sole (la sorgente del "Vento"). Anche la coda di polveri (grigio-celeste) segue le leggi della coda ionica, ma essa si orienta in maniera meno netta rispetto al Sole. Questa seconda coda è formata da particelle di roccia e polveri - le cui dimensioni variano dal micron al metro ed oltre - staccatisi dal nucleo della cometa durante - ed a causa - della sua "Corsa verso il Sole".
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Comets-Halley-30155.jpgThe Halley Comet, from Giotto53 visiteCaption ESA originale:"A composite image of the nucleus of comet Halley. This image is composed of 68 images of varying resolution. The data at the brightest point on the nucleus is at the highest resolution (50 m).
The Sun comes from 30° above the horizontal to the left and is 17° behind the image plane (observation phase angle of 107°). The night side of the nucleus can be seen silhouetted against a background of bright dust in the far-field. Jets can be seen originating from 2 regions on the nucleus. Structure can be seen within the jets. A bright area is seen within the night side of the nucleus. We believe this to be a hill or mountain approximately 500 mt high. Other surface details can be seen in the illuminated region".
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![Comets-Halley-Giotto-86hc145[1].jpg](albums/userpics/10008/small_Comets-Halley-Giotto-86hc145%5B1%5D.jpg "Nome del file=Comets-Halley-Giotto-86hc145[1].jpg
Dimensione del file=634KiB
Dimensioni=1756x1788
Aggiunta il=Set 17, 2006")
Comets-Halley-Giotto-86hc145[1].jpgThe "Halley Comet", from Giotto54 visitenessun commento
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Comets-Halley-nucleus.jpgThe Nucleus of Halley56 visiteWhat does a Comet Nucleus look like?
Formed from the primordial stuff of the Solar System, Comet Nuclei were thought to resemble to very dirty icebergs. But ground-based telescopes revealed only the surrounding cloud of gas and dust of Active Comets nearing the Sun, clearly resolving only the Comet's Coma, and the characteristic cometary tails.
In 1986, however, the European Spacecraft "Giotto" became one of the first group of spacecrafts which encountered and photographed the Nucleus of a Comet, when it passed and imaged Halley's Nucleus as it approached the Sun.
Data from Giotto's camera were used to generate this enhanced image of the potato shaped Nucleus that measures roughly 15 Km across. Some Surface Features on the dark Nucleus are on the right, while gas and dust flowing into Halley's Coma are on the left.
Every 76 years Comet Halley returns to the Inner Solar System and each time the Nucleus sheds about a 6-meter deep layer of its ice and rock into space. This debris shed from Halley's Nucleus eventually disperses into an orbiting trail responsible for the Orionids Meteor Shower, which occurs in October of every year, and the Eta Aquariids Meteor Shower, that occurs in May.MareKromium
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Comets-Hartley_2-PIA13626.gifSnowballs near Comet Hartley-291 visiteCaption NASA:"This movie shows the motion of some Icy Particles in the Cloud around Comet Hartley 2, as seen by NASA's EPOXI mission Spacecraft. A star moving through the background is marked with red and moves in a particular direction and with a particular speed, while the Icy Particles move in random directions. The Icy Particles are marked in green, blue and light blue.
The images for the movie were obtained by the Medium-Resolution Imager on Nov. 4, 2010, the day the EPOXI mission Spacecraft made its closest approach to the Comet".MareKromium
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Comets-Machholz___Meteor.jpgComet Machholz and a "corkscrew" meteor53 visiteCaption NASA originale:"Meteor trains (train--->trajectory) that twist noticeably are rare but have been noted before. The underlying reason for unusual meteors trains is that many meteors are markedly non-spherical in shape and non-uniform in composition. Meteors, usually sand sized grains that originate in comets, will disintegrate as they enter the Earth's atmosphere. Non-uniform meteors may evaporate more on one side than another. This may cause a rotating meteor to wobble slightly in its path, and also to spray fast moving debris in a nearly spiral path. The fast moving meteor debris ionizes molecules in the Earth's atmosphere that subsequently glow when they reacquire elections. Surely no meteor is perfectly uniform and spherical, so that a slight swagger that is below perceptibility is likely typical. Meteors may well have seeded Earth with the prebiotic molecules that allowed for the development of life".
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