May 2021 News - Research and Starcharts plus eclipse info
Edwin Rod
The forecast is looking promising for Wellington and the west cost of the North Islands for the lunar eclipse this Wednesday night. Most of the South Island is looking clear, however the East coast along with northland do not look promising. If the weather is clear here I’ll get the cameras and gear out and have a look from home.
Proxima Centauri is again in the news one paper is looking at flares and the other looking at the possibility of detecting artificial light from the planet. If you’re interested in exo planets and the interesting radius gap there is one of Ocean planets that lose their atmospheres. The ice giant Uranus also get a look in with 3 interesting papers. I have been following Starlink and the other mega constellations planned with interest and there is one in there on that subject. The rotation of Venus is also interesting too.
Weather permitting I might have an eclipse photo to share and if not there is plenty of reading. It’s one stormy winters night here in Wellington!
Eclipse weather map
https://twitter.com/NiwaWeather/status/1396730184456359940
Eclipse Map — 26 May 2021 Total Lunar Eclipse
https://www.timeanddate.com/eclipse/map/2021-may-26?n=22
Lunar eclipse on Wednesday
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Research papers
Discovery of an Extremely Short Duration Flare from Proxima Centauri
https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.09519
Formation of Earth-sized planets within the Kepler-1647 System Habitable Zone
https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.11628
High contrast imaging at 10 microns, a search for exoplanets
https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.13032
Appearing today in Nature
The Arxiv version https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.01504
The average sidereal day on Venus in the 2006-2020 interval is 243.0226 ± 0.0013 Earth days (1s). The spin period of the solid planet exhibits variations of 61 ppm (~20 minutes) with a possible diurnal or semidiurnal forcing. The length-of-day variations imply that changes in atmospheric angular momentum of at least ~4% are transferred to the solid planet.
ALMA observations of doubly deuterated water
https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.13411
The Breakthrough Listen Search For Intelligent Life Near the Galactic Center I
https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.14148
The 10 parsec sample in the Gaia era
https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.14972
From the SpaceX Starlink megaconstellation to the search for Type-I civilizations
https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.07227
Probing the icy shell structure of ocean worlds with gravity-topography admittance
https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.02790
Grid of Pseudo-2D Chemistry Models for Tidally-Locked Exoplanets
https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.02245
Mass-radius relationships for irradiated ocean planets
https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.01102
The science case for spacecraft exploration of the Uranian satellites
https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.01164
In Search of Subsurface Oceans within the Uranian Moons
https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.06087
The Atmosphere of Uranus
https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.06377
Impacts of Water Latent Heat on the Thermal Structure of Ultra-Cool Objects
https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.07000
Variable Irradiation on 1D Cloudless Eccentric Exoplanet Atmospheres
https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.08009
Detectability of Artificial Lights from Proxima b
https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.08081
Joint Analysis of Multicolor Photometry
https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.08223
The Earth-like Galactic cosmic ray intensity in the habitable zone of the M dwarf GJ 436
https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.09251
Non-thermal escaape of the Martian CO
https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.09789
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Interesting News items
Colorado River
Cool flight video
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasas-ingenuity-mars-helicopter-flies-faster-farther-on-third-flight
Matariki
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/441384/christchurch-to-light-up-the-sky-for-matariki
Australias Mammals
Mercury
Proxima
https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-news/proxima-centauri-releases-powerful-flare/
Venus
One interesting Moon
https://astronomy.com/magazine/2019/08/what-lies-beneath-tritons-ice
Sky Glow
http://spaceref.com/astronomy/the-natural-brightness-of-the-night-sky.html
Mars subsurface
https://www.brown.edu/news/2021-04-22/subsurface
Double Stars
Desert Fireballs
Dark Skys