1. looking back over November 2015
Space News
looking back over
November 2015

2. Giant Gathering of Galaxies @ 8.5 billion Light-Years
NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope and Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer have discovered a giant gathering of galaxies located 8.5 billion light-years away. The galaxy cluster (MOO J ) is in a very remote part of the universe and is the most massive structure yet found at such great distances.

3. Eclipse or Transit ??
Gaia (sited at L2) is conducting the most detailed census of stars in our Galaxy. However, on 6th November, it was perfectly placed to witness a rare lunar transit across the Sun. This was of course not an eclipse seen on Earth.

4. Pluto had (has?) volcanoes erupting ICE !!
Wright Mons on Pluto photographed by New Horizons - is a broad, mountain, about 150 km across and 4 km high, with a 56 km wide, deep summit depression. Similar in shape to volcanoes on Earth and Mars. This may have been a volcano that erupted molten ice (=water?) from within the ice cold planet.

5. How long will Phobos continue to orbit Mars?
Phobos (=Fear) is probably a captured asteroid. Orbiting only 5,800 km above the surface (cf the 400,000 km for the Moon) gravitational tidal forces are slowly dragging it down.
The lines may be due to gravitational stretching – leading to final disintegration into a ring of dust and rocks around the planet.

6. African Taurid – plus Moon and 3 Planets
If you’d taken a trip to the Amboseli National Park, Kenya early last month you may have caught this view of the Moon, Venus, Mars and Jupiter, plus the occasional Taurid meteor – as seen here. This year’s Taurids, travelling at 27kps, had a high proportion of bright fireballs.

7. Taurid Fireball
This Taurid fireball “got in the way” of this attempt to photograph the Orion Nebula (top left) from a site in the Swiss Alps. Rigel is on the right.

8. A Spooky Event for San Franciscans . . .
Hundreds of people in California reported this or a similar sight. Experienced sky observers agreed that it was the plume resulting from a rocket launch – which was an unpublicized test of a submarine-launched Trident II D5 missile.

9. Bloody Orion
We are all familiar with the “Orion Nebula” - but maybe not as good as this… This composite required 212 hours camera time and 1400 separate shots, followed by a whole year of processing to get the complete constellation in one view. Can you identify all the mains stars?

10. Comet 67P-CG Jets out into Space
This animation shows 3 shots of ‘67P’ taken at 20 minute intervals in July as the Rosetta spacecraft continues to orbit the comet and provide photo information like this.
Rosetta will be gently ‘crashed’ into the surface in late 2016.
How these jets make up the whole ‘tail’ of the comet is still a matter for further research.

11. Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko
November P shows many separate jets as it nears the Sun.

12. EXO-MARS getting ready to move to launch site
The two ExoMars spacecraft of the 2016 mission are being prepared for shipping to the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan ahead of their launch in March.
A joint endeavour with Russia’s Roscosmos, ExoMars comprises two missions. The Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) and Schiaparelli make up the 2016 mission, while the 2018 mission will combine a rover and a surface science platform. Both missions will be launched on Russian Proton rockets from Baikonur.

13. Earth’s Magnetic Field Intensity is Double the Average
The intensity of Earth’s geomagnetic field has been dropping for the past 200 years, at a rate that some scientists suspect may cause the field to bottom out in 2,000 years, temporarily leaving the planet unprotected against damaging charged particles from the sun. This drop in intensity is associated with periodic geomagnetic field reversals, in which the Earth’s North and South magnetic poles flip polarity, and it could last for several thousand years before stability.

14. Anything interesting during December to: