A Good Week for Astronomy

Here are few quick astronomy hits for this week.

First of all, did anyone see or hear about that amazing spacewalk by a couple of astronauts over the weekend? Wow! I found some wonderful pictures on Space.com that described the dangerous mission to fix one of the space station's solar arrays. The astronaut dangled precariously off the space shuttle's robotic arm in order to untangle some wires. That electrified array carried upwards of 100 volts of electricity. And talk about getting the right guy to do the job-- the guy, Dr. Scott Parazynski, is a former emergency room doctor! It took him 7 hours to get the job done, including a harrowing hour to get back into the shuttle. I bet his parents are very proud of him.

Last Saturday I read that there would be an interesting celestial conjunction in the eastern skies later that night. However, I didn't think that I would have to be up in the wee hours of Sunday morning to see it. No, I wasn't out and about doing who knows what, but I did happen to be out of the house for a few hours between 2 & 5 am because we took our daughter to the emergency room. It was nothing serious thank goodness, but there it was, almost in a straight line up and down from the horizon, a beautiful conjuction-- starting at the bottom, Venus, the Moon, Jupiter and Leo's alpha star, Regulus. Even though we were up because my daughter fell ill in the middle of the night and everything turned out alright, seeing this conjunction made me feel that everything indeed would be alright.

News flash: There's an exploding comet in our skies! Comet Holmes, which is a fuzzy spot in the constellation Perseus, has become a surprise to many astronomers. Comets as they enter the Solar System, usually have a increasingly long tail as it nears the Sun, however in this case, Comet 17P/Holmes is tail less. No one's unsure how long the comet will last at its present state, but experts say it could last weeks, if not months. Check it out before it's gone!

And last, but not least, astronomers have found a star outside our Solar System with at least 5 planets. This is the first time that a star has been found with at least 5 planets. The fifth was found to orbiting relatively distant from its home star, but is much bigger than our planet Earth.