Credit Dell Vance
The Milky Way Galaxy is a spiral galaxy with several arms. Our solar system is located in one of the smaller arms, the Orion Arm. In the wintertime evening sky, the Milky Way runs from Cassiopeia to a position just east of Orion. The Milky Way can be easily found by locating Sirius, the Dog Star, and Procyon. The Orion Arm of the Milky Way lies between these two stars.
The wintertime view of the Milky Way is quite different than the summertime view.
In the summertime evening sky, you will find the Milky Way is running from Cassiopeia through Cygnus, the Swan, and ending between Sagittarius and Scorpio. It is very bright and has dark regions of dust. The area between Sagittarius and Scorpio is in the Sagittarius Arm of the Milky Way. The Sagittarius Arm has a high concentration of stars. Directionally you are looking toward the center of the Milky Way.
Clyde Tombaugh, as a young man, built his own Telescopes and made sketches of Mars and Jupiter. In 1929 he sent his sketches to the Lowell Observatory in
Credit NASA
About every two years Earth and Mars are aligned in their orbits so that a space mission can be sent to Mars at the most opportune time. That alignment took place during July 2020 when NASA launched the large robotic rover called Perseverance to Mars. After a 300 million mile journey, Perseverance landed on Mars on Feb. 18. Another Mars adventure begins on the Red Planet.
Landing a rover on Mars is not easy. Although NASA has successfully landed a number of unmanned landers and rovers on Mars since 1976 only 40% of the missions to Mars have successfully landed. The challenge is the last stage of entry into the Martian atmosphere, the descent, and landing on the Red Planet s surface. The rover will be entering the Martian atmosphere at 12,000 miles an hour. Small thrusters keep the rover on a proper trajectory with its heat shield to help slow it down. Seven miles above the Red Planet s surface a parachute deploys and Perseverance separates from its heat shield.
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Snowmen were all-around the state capitol in Salt Lake City on Sunday, Feb. 21. 2021 with many holding signs asking for a price on carbon to rescue their Endangered species.
Though there wasn t much snow in the Utah Skies on Sunday, hundreds of snowmen made it to the grounds at the state Capitol at Salt Lake City as the snow was all part of a plea to rescue the endangered species.
(Photo : Balazs Benjamin)
The Lawmakers
The expression intends to encourage lawmakers, Democrats, and Republicans, state and local, to call for a price on carbon. According to Nick Huey, a 28-year-old father from Taylorsville, who arranged the event on Sunday said more than 50 volunteers turned out to create at least 500 snowmen and snowwomen, making use of snow that was already on the property.
Credit NASA Hubble Space Telescope
Over the last twenty years or so, astronomers have detected over 4,000 planets orbiting other star systems. Our Milky Way galaxy may have billions of planets orbiting other stars. It’s a goal to find earth-sized planets orbiting their stars in what is called the habitable zone, or that distance from their parent star where any water on the planet is liquid.
SETI is a project that searches for radio waves coming from these types of planets. The discovery of such radio emitting planets would be strong evidence of intelligent life on that planet.
The Parkes observatory has detected a possible radio wave from a planet orbiting Proxima Centauri, the closest star to our Sun. Proxima Centauri is only 4.2 light years away and has two confirmed planets, one orbits its parent star in the star s habitable zone.