Bioluminescent Plankton

What's Up - December 2017

What’s Up For December? Geminid and Ursid meteor showers & winter constellations!

This month hosts the best meteor shower of the year and the brightest stars in familiar constellations.

The Geminds peak on the morning of the 14th, and are active from December 4th through the 17th. The peak lasts for a full 24 hours, meaning more worldwide meteor watchers will get to see this spectacle.

Expect to see  up to 120 meteors per hour between midnight and 4 a.m. but only from a dark sky. You’ll see fewer after moonrise at 3:30 a.m. local time.

In the southern hemisphere, you won’t see as many, perhaps 10-20 per hour, because the radiant never rises above the horizon.

Take a moment to enjoy the circle of constellations and their brightest stars around Gemini this month.

Find yellow Capella in the constellation Auriga. 

Next-going clockwise–at 1 o'clock find Taurus and bright reddish Aldebaran, plus the Pleiades. 

At two, familiar Orion, with red Betelguese, blue-white Rigel, and the three famous belt stars in-between the two.   

Next comes Leo, and its white lionhearted star, Regulus at 7 o'clock.

Another familiar constellation Ursa Major completes the view at 9 o'clock.

There’s a second meteor shower in December, the Ursids, radiating from Ursa Minor, the Little Dipper. If December 22nd  and the morning of December 23rd are clear where you are, have a look at the Little Dipper’s bowl, and you might see about ten meteors per hour. Watch the full What’s Up for December Video: 

There are so many sights to see in the sky. To stay informed, subscribe to our What’s Up video series on Facebook. Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com.   

British astronaut Tim Peake taking a selfie. That Union Flag is the first of its kind to have ever experienced the vacuum of space.

Kepler-186f, the first Earth-size Planet in the Habitable Zone

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Each year we hold a Day of Remembrance. Today, Jan. 25, we pay will tribute to the crews of Apollo 1 and space shuttles Challenger and Columbia, as well as other NASA colleagues who lost their lives while furthering the cause of exploration and discovery. 

#NASARemembers

Learn more about the Day of Remembrance HERE. 

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com.  

Simple Jupiter Photo with 4 moons - For more images of the cosmos Click Here

Beautiful Saturn, observed by the Cassini probe on November 27, 2013.

(Ian Regan)

The faint rings of Uranus, shot in 1986, are made of countless fragments of water ice containing radiation-altered organic material.

Credit: NASA/JPL/Michael Benson, Kinetikon Pictures

Dazzling Photos Let You Orbit the Earth with Astronaut Tim Peake

Boston Dynamics has shown off its new version of SpotMini, but now it’s also catching us up with its bipedal Atlas bot, the most humanoid of its creations. Atlas can now jump from elevated block to elevated block, and do a complete about-face in the air. It can leap pretty high, and also do a backflip – and then celebrate its backflipping ability. –