Vince_Condella's Blog

The Moon and the planet Jupiter are making a nice pair in the sky this evening.  Look south after 7 p.m. and the two bright celestial objects will be easy to find.  And it looks like we will have enough breaks in the overcast to allow us to view this pair.

The Moon is around 225,000 miles away, while Jupiter is hundreds of millions of miles from Earth.  So they aren't really as close to each other as it looks!  Jupiter is the largest planet in our solar system, one of the so-called gas giants.  The other gas giants are Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.  These huge planets are mainly made up of gasses like hydrogen and helium rather than the solid surface we are used to on Earth.

The Moon is right around the first quarter phase, headed toward full moon on October 14.

This fireball occured with the Leonid meteor shower in 1998.  Photo courtesy of Sky & Telescope Magazine and Lorenzo Lovato.

The real show in Earth's atmosphere tonight won't be visible to us.  However, on the other side of the world a large meteor approximately 10 feet in diameter is expected to enter the atmosphere and burn up as a giant fireball.  It will enter the atmosphere over northern Sudan at a speed of approximately 8 miles per second and release energy equivalent to one kiloton of explosives!  This will light up the sky and potentially be visible over northern Africa, the Middle East, and perhaps southern Europe.

The rock was spotted in a telescope over Mt. Lemmon in southern Arizona last night.  Since then it has been tracked by dozens of telescopes and its orbit precisely measured.  The rock should completely burn up before reaching the Earth's surface.