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Mercury has now joined Venus in the SOHO C3 fov. Both are near their superior conjunction (Venus past and Mercury approaching). The C3 gif video also shows a possible CME from today.
I am still amazed how SOHO C3 (above) provides a window into the inner planets and the sun. Watch how the brightness of Mercury on the right is decreasing while that of Venus (left) is increasing. Note also how Mercury is moving faster around the sun and passing the background stars than is Venus.
Today (4/25) the C3 video shows Mercury (racing towards its best appearance in mid May in the western sky) nearly passing Venus in the C3 field of view.
Todays spaceweather has an interesting picture and description of Mercury’s sodium tail. https://spaceweather.com/
Note the small Kreutz comet moving to the sun on May 9 and 10 in the above SOHO C3 video. It did not survive! See also today’s
SpaceWeather page https://spaceweather.com/.C2 SOHO video of the same comet here: https://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/data/LATEST/current_c2.gif
The Pleiades (circled in red) have now entered the SOHO C3 field of view.
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Two bright open star clusters in Taurus (Hyades lower circle and Pleiades upper) now appear in the latest SOHO C3 image. The bright star (black arrow) is Aldebaran which is not a member of the Hyades cluster, but is much closer to us and along the line of sight to the cluster. (also see the ongoing C3 video above)
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Looks like a small comet heading into the sun on 8-10. Check out the SOHO C3 animation on that day. https://soho.nascom.nasa.gov/data/Theater/
I went to Root River Park after the astronomy club meeting to view the recurrent nova RS Ophiuchi. Check it out! It will probably still be visible the next few nights. I found it quite easily but it took me some time to verify that I was looking at the correct object from the bunch of printouts and star maps that I took with me. After much mixing and matching the best maps came from this Sky and Telescope website: //https_skyandtelescope.org/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fskyandtelescope.org%2Fastronomy-news%2Frecurrent-nova-rs-ophiuchi-just-blew-its-top%2F
A modern video demonstrating the archaic observation of what a planet is … “a celestial body distinguished from the fixed stars by having an apparent motion of its own”. In this case the planet Mars (to the left of the sun moves left against the background stars which all move to the right.
Brilliant Venus, approaching inferior conjunction, is now visible in C3 SOHO fov. See above for a video (over the next 10 days) of the planets conjunction with the sun. See also https://spaceweather.com/ for photos and details of the conjunction.
Drove to Kissimmee Florida. Our condo is 73 miles from Cape Kennedy, but I was still able to capture this image with my cell phone camera of the night launch of SpaceX carrying the StarLink G4-6 satellite group from our tennis court! The moon is the white object at the top center. The SpaceX rocket is the orange flash on the left just above the fence. You can see the thin vapor trail streaming out behind. The tiny white dot above the fence and to the left of the “No Smoking” sign is an incoming airplane.
It was so beautiful. We even saw the first stage boosters release then watched the second stage carry the satellite package well into orbit.
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