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4 planets and the moon are about to line up in the sky

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The moon is lining up to lead a parade of planets across the predawn sky starting April 23. 

In advance of an unusual alignment of the five visible planets in the solar system, four planets are lining up behind the moon like ducks in a row. On April 23, Saturn, Mars, Venus and Jupiter will all be visible above the horizon in the early morning hours in the northern hemisphere. 

Mercury will join this parade of planets in mid-June. 

When the planets align

Planetary alignments occur when the planets’ orbits bring them to the same region of the sky, when viewed from Earth. These planetary alignments are not rare, but they’re not regularly occurring, either: The last time five planets aligned in the night sky was in 2020, preceded by alignments in 2016 and 2005. 

These alignments take time to develop. Venus, Mars, and Saturn have been night-sky neighbors since late March. On April 4 and 5, they came so close together, when viewed from Earth, that Mars and Saturn appeared less far apart than the width of the full moon in the southeast early morning sky. 

Related: Photos: Magnificent views of the nighttime heavens in America’s ‘Dark Sky’ parks

This sky chart shows the close conjunction of Venus and Jupiter before sunrise on April 30. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

Jupiter turned the trio into a foursome in mid-April. The moon will appear in its last quarter phase to Saturn’s right on April 23. Mars will be an orange dot below and to the left of Saturn, while Venus will be a brighter light below and to the left of Mars. Jupiter will be lowest and leftmost in the sky.

The way to tell the planets from the stars in the sky is by the light, said Michelle Nichols, the director of public observing at Chicago’s Adler Planetarium.

“Stars twinkle,” Nichols told Live Science. “Planets don’t.”

Watching the planetary alignment

The planets will be most visible in the northern hemisphere an hour to 45 minutes before sunrise. The moon will remain above the horizon until April 29, but the four planets will remain in their cosmic line until early July. Mercury will appear in the line as early as June 10 in places with a flat, eastern horizon (think Denver or the coast of North Carolina, looking out over the ocean), leading to the final five-planet alignment. The planets will appear to march from the east to the south, Nichols said. Late June will provide the best viewing conditions for the alignment. 

Uranus and Neptune will also be in the field of view in the Northern Hemisphere during the alignment. Uranus will be between Mercury and Mars and will be visible in areas without much light pollution. It might be possible to see it with the naked eye in a dark-enough sky, but binoculars will aid in observing it, Nichols said. Neptune will require a telescope to view. 

“It’s just a great time to go out and see the planets,” Nichols said. 

Originally published on Live Science

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NASA’s Mars Perseverance Rover Arrives at Ancient Delta for New Science Campaign

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Animation of the Perseverance Rover driving on Mars. NASA/JPL-Caltech

Collecting samples as it explores an ancient and now-dry river channel is but one goal the six-wheeled geologist will pursue during its second Red Planet exploration.

After collecting eight rock-core samples from its first science campaign and completing a record-breaking, 31-Martian-day (or sol) dash across about 3 miles (5 kilometers) of

Jezero Crater’s Delta Is Getting Closer: The expanse of Jezero Crater’s river delta is shown in this panorama of 64 stitched-together images taken by the Mastcam-Z system on NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover on April 11, 2022, the 406th Martian day, or sol, of the mission. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS

The delta, a massive fan-shaped collection of rocks and sediment at the western edge of Jezero Crater, formed at the convergence of a Martian river and a crater lake billions of years ago. Its exploration tops the Perseverance science team’s wish list because all the fine-grained sediment deposited at its base long ago is the mission’s best bet for finding the preserved remnants of ancient microbial life.

Using a drill on the end of its robotic arm and a complex sample collection system, Perseverance is gathering rock cores for return to Earth – the first part of the Mars Sample Return campaign.

“We’ve been eyeing the delta from a distance for more than a year while we explored the crater floor,” said Ken Farley, Perseverance project scientist at Caltech in Pasadena. “At the end of our fast traverse, we are finally able to get close to it, obtaining images of ever-greater detail revealing where we can best explore these important rocks.”

Perseverance Views Its Parachute: This image of the parachute that helped deliver NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover to the Martian surface was taken by the rover’s Mastcam-Z instrument on April 6, 2022, the 401st Martian day, or sol, of the mission. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS

Sticking a Fork in Three Forks

The Delta Front Campaign kicked off Monday, April 18, with about a week’s worth of driving to the southwest and then west. One goal of this excursion is to scope out the best route to ascend the delta, which rises about 130 feet (40 meters) above the crater floor. Two options, called “Cape Nukshak” and “Hawksbill Gap,” look traversable. The science team is leaning toward Hawksbill Gap because of the shorter drive time needed to reach the top of the delta, but that may change as the rover acquires additional information on the two options.

Whichever route Perseverance takes to the plateau atop the delta, the team will perform detailed science investigations, including taking rock core samples, on the way up, then turn around and do the same thing on the way back down. The rover is expected to collect around eight samples over about half an Earth year during the Delta Front Campaign.

After completing the descent, Perseverance will, according to current plans, again ascend the delta (perhaps via the other, untraveled route) to begin the “Delta Top Campaign,” which will last about half an Earth year as well.


AutoNav Drives Perseverance Forward: Video taken by NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover shows some of the terrain the rover had to negotiate during its drive to the delta at Jezero Crater in April 2022. Credit: NASA/

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Once-in-a-decade report urges NASA to explore Uranus

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A once-in-a-decade report out Tuesday recommended NASA and other space agencies study the planet Uranus within the next decade to better understand giant icy worlds in our solar system and beyond.

Why it matters: Proposals published today by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine are not binding, but they are influential and often guide federal funding toward future space missions.

  • NASA committed to two flagship missions recommended in the last planetary science survey 10 years ago — the Europa Clipper scheduled to launch in 2024 and the Perseverance Mars rover.

The Committee on the Planetary Science and Astrobiology Decadal Survey designated the Uranus Orbiter and Probe as the highest-priority new flagship mission for initiation between 2023 and 2032, calling the planet “one of the most intriguing bodies in the solar system.”

  • “Its low internal energy, active atmospheric dynamics, and complex magnetic field all present major puzzles. A primordial giant impact may have produced the planet’s extreme axial tilt and possibly its rings and satellites, although this is uncertain,” the report reads.
  • The mission would deliver a probe to Uranus’ atmosphere in order to better understand the planet’s origin, interior, atmosphere, magnetosphere, rings and satellites.

The Enceladus Orbilander, the second-highest priority mission flagged in the report, would entail exploring Saturn’s sixth-largest moon, specifically for evidence of life beyond Earth in the water-rich plumes spewing into space from the planet’s subsurface ocean.

  • The Cassini spacecraft in 2017 discovered the plumes contained hydrogen, suggesting there are probably hydrothermal vents at the bottom of Enceladus’ sea. Scientists have proposed that conditions around those underwater vents could support life.
  • The proposed Orbilander would analyze plume material from orbit and during a two-year landed mission to better understand the habitability of Enceladus’ ocean.

What they’re saying: “This report sets out an ambitious but practicable vision for advancing the frontiers of planetary science, astrobiology, and planetary defense in the next decade,” said Robin Canup, assistant vice president of the Planetary Sciences Directorate at the Southwest Research Institute and co-chair of the National Academies’ steering committee for the report.

  • “This recommended portfolio of missions, high-priority research activities, and technology development will produce transformative advances in human knowledge and understanding about the origin and evolution of the solar system, and of life and the habitability of other bodies beyond Earth,” Canup added in a statement.

The big picture: For the first time, the report also recommended NASA and other agencies prioritize planetary defense by detecting and tracking objects that pose a threat to life on Earth, saying this proposal was “more concerned with human health and safety rather than the advancement of scientific understanding.”

  • It said the meteor that exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia, in 2013 demonstrated how dangerous extraterrestrial bodies are to Earth and its inhabitants and the importance of planetary defense.
  • The meteor, weighing 10,000 metric tons, released about 440 kilotons of energy when it exploded above the city, injuring over 1,000 people.

Go deeper: Chinese astronauts land on Earth after longest crewed space mission

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Perseverance rover arrives at ancient Mars river delta

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NASA’s life-hunting Perseverance Mars rover just reached a big mission milestone.

Perseverance has arrived safely at the remains of an ancient Red Planet river delta on the floor of the 28-mile-wide (45 kilometers) Jezero Crater, NASA announced today (April 19).

Mission team members said the delta will be a “veritable geologic feast” for Perseverance, which is hunting for signs of fossilized Mars life. (The most promising rocks will be cached for a sample-return mission campaign that NASA and its European counterpart intend to launch later this decade.)

“We’ve been eyeing the delta from a distance for more than a year while we explored the crater floor,” Ken Farley, Perseverance project scientist at the California Institute of Technology, said in a statement Wednesday (April 19) from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which manages Perseverance’s mission. 

Now that the rover is in the region, its next moves will be “obtaining images of ever-greater detail revealing where we can best explore these important rocks,” Farley added.

Related: 12 amazing photos from the Perseverance rover’s 1st year on Mars

Perseverance landed in February 2021 inside Jezero Crater, which mission scientists have said hosted a lake and a river delta billions of years ago. Such conditions should be amenable to microbes, meaning the delta region is a rich area to search for signs of Mars life (if it ever existed).

The rover was working somewhat south and west of its landing site during its first (Earth) year on Mars but recently made it way back through the touchdown area to get to the delta. Perseverance will spend about the next week driving to the southwest, and the west, to figure out how best to explore this patch of the delta.

Perseverance’s data suggests that the delta deposits are about 130 feet (40 meters) above the crater floor, and the teams are considering two options, according to the JPL statement. The preferred route, at least for now, is through a region nicknamed “Hawksbill Gap,” as it appears to be reachable in a shorter time. But a backup option, “Cape Nukshak,” is available in case data in the coming days shows it to be a safer route.

The Perseverance rover spots its parachute on this image taken on April 8, 2022. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

“Whichever route Perseverance takes to the plateau atop the delta, the team will perform detailed science investigations, including taking rock core samples, on the way up, then turn around and do the same thing on the way back down,” JPL officials said in the statement.

The rover will spend roughly six months picking up eight samples during this maneuvering campaign, called Delta Front. The plan then calls for Perseverance to go on top of the delta again, perhaps taking the backup option to sample a region untraveled before, to spend six more months on a “Delta Top Campaign.”

“The delta is why Perseverance was sent to Jezero Crater: It has so many interesting features,” Farley said. “We will look for signs of ancient life in the rocks at the base of the delta, rocks that we think were once mud on the bottom of ‘Lake Jezero.'”

Perseverance will also attempt to pick up sand and rock fragments originating from upstream, in areas that the rover is not expected to visit during its lifetime on Mars. Farley said the geography will be an immense help: “We can take advantage of an ancient Martian river that brought the planet’s geological secrets to us.”

JPL officials added that Perseverance began its second science campaign a month earlier than expected, due to its upgraded autonomous hazard-detection system that allows it to dodge obstacles in Jezero Crater such as boulders, sharp rocks, craters and sandpits. (The rover was commanded to halt and turn in place 55 times to avoid hazards during this latest road trip, JPL added.)

By contrast, NASA’s decade-older Curiosity Mars rover had to turn back recently from a planned route due to dangerous “gator-back” terrain. Curiosity also sports an older version of Martian wheel less optimized for the sometimes treacherous terrain, as compared to Perseverance. JPL officials say that Percy’s wheels have twice as many treads and a gentle curve, which is more adaptable to the terrain.

Follow Elizabeth Howell on Twitter @howellspace. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook. 



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Russian Cosmonauts Set Up Futuristic New Robotic Arm on ISS During Six Hour Spacewalk

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Cosmonauts Oleg Artemyev and Denis Matveev installed the robotic arm on the Nauka multiupurpose laboratory module.
Image: NASA

Yesterday, two Russian cosmonauts spent six hours and 37 minutes in low Earth orbit installing a giant robotic arm on the International Space Station that’s designed to work autonomously, move its way across the outside of the station, and pick up and transport astronauts during spacewalks.

Cosmonauts Oleg Artemyev and Denis Matveev of Roscosmos journeyed out of the ISS at 11:01 a.m. ET on Monday and wrapped up their spacewalk at 5:37 p.m., according to NASA. While hanging off the space station, the pair installed and connected a control panel for the European robotic arm, which will be used to serve the Russian side of the ISS. The duo also removed the arm’s protective covers and installed handrails on the Nauka module, a multipurpose Russian lab.

A European consortium led by Airbus Defense and Space in the Netherlands designed and developed the robotic arm for the European Space Agency. The 37-foot-long arm, which launched to space in July 2021, acts much like a human arm, with wrists, elbows, and shoulders. But unlike a human arm, this robotic arm has two hands and is the first robot to be able to anchor itself to the space station and walk back and forth by moving one hand over the other.

An artist’s depiction of the giant robot arm in action outside the ISS.
Illustration: ESA

Essentially, it’ll be as though the space station sprouted a giant arm, one capable of handling payloads as they arrive and transferring them directly from outside the ISS to the inside without the need for space-walking astronauts. In fact, the robotic arm could eventually be used to transport space-walkers themselves. Astronauts currently use safety tethers to attach themselves to and move across the ISS while performing spacewalks, but the giant arm is designed to pick them up ever so gently in their weightless state and transport them to different spots on the space station exterior.

But the robot arm is not quite ready to perform yet. Cosmonauts Artemyev and Matveev are scheduled for another spacewalk on April 28 to finish installing the arm. They will jettison thermal blankets that protected the arm during its journey to space, release its launch restraints, flex the joints, and monitor its ability to use two grapple fixtures. Further spacewalks will be needed to complete the outfitting of the “manipulator system,” as NASA describes the arm.

The European robotic arm is being outfitted on the Russian module amidst rising tensions over the orbiting space lab; Russia has threatened to end its cooperation with western countries on the ISS. Dmitry Rogozin, the head of Roscosmos, has taken to Twitter to express his discontent with sanctions imposed by the U.S., Canada, and the European Union following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in late February.

The U.S. and Russia have had a longstanding partnership with the ISS that’s lasted for more than three decades, although both sides have occasionally squared off. NASA is progressively relying on private companies like SpaceX to launch its astronauts to the ISS, rather than booking seats on Russian Soyuz spacecraft.



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Jupiter’s moon Europa may have a habitable ice shell

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Scientists have been intrigued for more than 20 years by dramatic gashes on Europa’s icy surface. These double ridges have crests that can reach almost 1,000 feet (305 meters) high, with wide valleys between them. These features were first imaged by the NASA Galileo spacecraft in the 1990s, but researchers haven’t been able to determine how they formed.

While studying the Greenland ice sheet using ice-penetrating radar observations, a team of researchers observed a similar double-ridge feature shaped like the letter M that’s like a miniversion of the one on Europa.

Airborne instruments help researchers study Earth’s polar regions to watch changes in ice sheets that could have an effect on the global sea level. These eyes in the sky also look for ponds of surface meltwater, conduits that carry seasonal drainage and subglacial lakes.

“We were working on something totally different related to climate change and its impact on the surface of Greenland when we saw these tiny double ridges — and we were able to see the ridges go from ‘not formed’ to ‘formed,’ ” said study senior author Dustin Schroeder, an associate professor of geophysics at Stanford University’s School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences, in a statement.

Operation IceBridge — a NASA mission that collected surface elevation and radar data of the ice sheet between 2015 and 2017 — revealed that Greenland’s double ridge formed after the ice fractured around water that was refreezing inside the ice sheet. The pressure of the water pocket caused the distinct peaks to rise.

This led researchers to question if the same thing would be possible on Europa, where pockets of water could exist beneath the ice shell — and create potentially habitable environments on the otherwise inhospitable shell of the moon.

“In Greenland, this double ridge formed in a place where water from surface lakes and streams frequently drains into the near-surface and refreezes,” said lead study author Riley Culberg, a doctoral student in electrical engineering at Stanford, in a statement.

“One way that similar shallow water pockets could form on Europa might be through water from the subsurface ocean being forced up into the ice shell through fractures — and that would suggest there could be a reasonable amount of exchange happening inside of the ice shell.”

An ever-changing lunar surface

Europa appears to be a dynamic place, where plumes of water rise up through cracks in the ice shell, which is tens of miles thick. And this ice shell could be a place where the subsurface ocean and nutrients mix together.

“Because it’s closer to the surface, where you get interesting chemicals from space, other moons and the volcanoes of Io (another moon that orbits Jupiter), there’s a possibility that life has a shot if there are pockets of water in the shell,” Schroeder said. “If the mechanism we see in Greenland is how these things happen on Europa, it suggests there’s water everywhere.”

This was the first time that scientists were able to watch something similar happen on Earth and actually observe the subsurface processes that led to the formation of the ridges, Culberg said.

“The mechanism we put forward in this paper would have been almost too audacious and complicated to propose without seeing it happen in Greenland,” Schroeder said.

The broad data the team has already collected on Greenland’s ice sheet may allow them to use it as an analog for the dynamic processes occurring on Europa in the future as well.

The temperature, chemistry and pressure are different on Europa when compared to Greenland, so the team want to investigate how these water pockets work on Europa.

Europa is a target of two upcoming missions, the European Space Agency’s JUICE (short for the Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer) and NASA’s Europa Clipper. Clipper will carry ice-penetrating radar, similar to how the researchers studied Greenland, to collect subsurface imaging of Europa’s ice shell.

Europa stands out as one of the best candidates for hosting extraterrestrial life in our solar system due to the liquid water in the subsurface ocean and what scientists understand about its chemistry, Culberg said.

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NASA’s next decade: Build a mission to an ice giant

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Late in 2021, the astronomy community released its decadal survey, a road map of scientific priorities for the next 10 years, which describes the hardware we need to build in order to achieve them. That survey was focused on distant objects and recommended projects like large, broad-spectrum space telescopes.

This week sees the release of a second decadal survey, this one focused on the needs of astronomers and planetary scientists who focus on the objects in our Solar System. This survey’s big-ticket recommendations are orbiters for Uranus and Enceladus, while smaller missions include preparations for sample returns from Mars, the Moon, and Ceres. As always, what we get done will depend on whether the planetary science budgets do better than keeping pace with inflation.

Big priorities

The survey lays out the overall scientific themes behind the priorities, but they’re broad enough that they pretty much cover everything. As listed, they include a look at the materials present in small bodies within the Solar System to infer the details of planet formation from the protoplanetary disk, and observations of the planets to track their evolution since then. Also a priority: moon formation; studying the interiors and atmospheres of the planets; and the role of impacts in shaping planet evolution. Finally, there’s the possibility of life existing at present or in the past on a body other than Earth.

That seems to cover just about everything in the Solar System, which means these research priorities could justify just about any mission. So what hardware has the scientific community chosen to pursue?

The big-ticket item is the Uranus Orbiter and Probe, or UOP, which will undoubtedly get a better name prior to launch. Much like earlier Galileo and Cassini missions, UOP will consist of an orbiter that stays in place to study the system, and an atmospheric probe that will make a one-way trip into the planet (or, in Cassini’s case, the atmosphere of the moon Titan). Ideally, UOP will be constructed within the next decade in order to use a gravity assist from Jupiter that will be available if it’s launched within a window that ends in 2032.

Why Uranus? We’ve already done extensive study of the gas giants Jupiter and Saturn, but the two ice giants of the outer Solar System, Neptune and Uranus, have only been visited by Voyager 2 decades ago. Exoplanet surveys have revealed that Neptune-size planets are quite common elsewhere in our galaxy, so their study will be generally informative. Uranus in particular is interesting because it seems to have been struck violently early in its history, causing its axis of rotation to shift by nearly 90 degrees. It also has moons that seem to have been geologically active and may harbor oceans. Aside from all that, it happens to be considerably closer than Neptune.

Should budget increases outpace inflation, the survey recommends a second flagship mission, this one to Enceladus, one of Saturn’s moons. Enceladus appears to have a sub-ice ocean and geysers that release some of its contents to space. The “Enceladus Orbilander” will fly through the plumes of these geysers to analyze their content and then land for two years of operation on the moon’s surface. The goal would be to have it launched in time to reach the moon by the 2050s, when orbital variations will provide more sunlight on the southern hemisphere of Enceladus, where the geysers are located.

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Hubble Space Telescope celebrates 32nd anniversary with gorgeous gravitational ‘dance’ photo

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The Hubble Space Telescope captured an image of a unique group of merging galaxies that provides a glimpse into processes in the early universe.

The five galaxies, known as the Hickson Compact Group (HCG) 40, are in the process of merging into a single entity, a process that will be complete roughly a billion years from now, Hubble officials said in a statement. The officials released the image in anticipation of the venerable telescope’s 32nd anniversary, which occurs on Sunday (April 24).

The image is part of the Hubble Space Telescope’s longstanding work in studying galactic evolution.

“Studying nearby groups like HCG 40 helps astronomers learn about how galaxies formed,” the Hubble team said. “Tight groups like this,” Hubble officials added of HGC 40, “may have been more common in the early universe when their superheated, infalling material may have fueled very energetic black holes called quasars.”

Related: The best Hubble Space Telescope images of all time!

The Hickson Compact Group 40 is a group of five merging galaxies, as shown here in a Hubble Space Telescope image. (Image credit: SCIENCE: NASA, ESA, STScI IMAGE PROCESSING: Alyssa Pagan (STScI))

The group, located some 300 million light-years away from Earth, is very tightly packed into a region of space less than twice the diameter of the stellar disk of our own galaxy, the Milky Way. 

Although scientists have found more than 100 compact galaxy groups, according to the Hubble team, the configuration of HGC is rather unique as the galaxies are not part of a larger galaxy cluster, making them an interesting target for astronomers to study. How this configuration came into being is still a matter of debate.

“One possible explanation is that there’s a lot of dark matter — an unknown and invisible form of matter — associated with these galaxies,” Hubble officials wrote. “If they come close together, then the dark matter can form a big cloud within which the galaxies are orbiting. As the galaxies plow through the dark matter, they feel a resistive force due to its gravitational effects. This slows their motion and makes the galaxies lose energy, so they fall together.”

Studying the details of galaxies in nearby groups like this helps astronomers sort out when and where galaxies assembled themselves, and what they are assembled from, Hubble officials added.

The famed telescope launched on space shuttle Discovery on April 24, 1990 on a quest to better understand the early universe. Astronauts serviced the observatory five times, the last in 2009. 

While Hubble is aging, including overcoming some serious “safe mode” incidents in 2021, the telescope remains healthy. NASA plans to pair Hubble’s work with the just-launched successor James Webb Space Telescope. Webb is in a months-long commissioning period set to finish around June.

Follow Elizabeth Howell on Twitter @howellspace. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook. 



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Lyrid meteor shower set to peak this week above Colorado

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One of the oldest recorded meteor showers is set to peak this week, and it could send hundreds of meteors streaking across the sky in Colorado. 

The 2022 Lyrid Meteor Shower is expected to peak on Thursday night through Friday morning, with up to 18 meteors per hour expected. Stray meteors will likely be spotted in the days leading up to and following the peak.

The Lyrid Meteor Shower is caused by debris from comet Thatcher, which has a 415-year orbit around the sun. Historical Chinese literature claims that the shower was first spotted more than 2,500 years ago, with the actual comet not being again visible from Earth until 2276. 

This year’s Lyrid shower is extra special, because it marks the end of a meteor shower drought that began in January 2022, according to AccuWeather.com. 

The best time to view the shower will be between 12 AM and 2 AM, just before moon rise. If the night is clear, the shower will be visible without special equipment. Keep in mind that light pollution can block out meteors, so metropolitan viewers may have a harder time seeing them. If you’re willing to take a road trip for stargazing, check out this OTC list of extraordinary places to stargaze in Colorado.

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Lyrid meteor shower set to peak this week above Colorado

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One of the oldest recorded meteor showers is set to peak this week, and it could send hundreds of meteors streaking across the sky in Colorado. 

The 2022 Lyrid Meteor Shower is expected to peak on Thursday night through Friday morning, with up to 18 meteors per hour expected. Stray meteors will likely be spotted in the days leading up to and following the peak.

The Lyrid Meteor Shower is caused by debris from comet Thatcher, which has a 415-year orbit around the sun. Historical Chinese literature claims that the shower was first spotted more than 2,500 years ago, with the actual comet not being again visible from Earth until 2276. 

This year’s Lyrid shower is extra special, because it marks the end of a meteor shower drought that began in January 2022, according to AccuWeather.com. 

The best time to view the shower will be between 12 AM and 2 AM, just before moon rise. If the night is clear, the shower will be visible without special equipment. Keep in mind that light pollution can block out meteors, so metropolitan viewers may have a harder time seeing them. If you’re willing to take a road trip for stargazing, check out this OTC list of extraordinary places to stargaze in Colorado.

 STAY INFORMED: Sign-up for the daily OutThere Colorado newsletter here

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