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This Friday, September 15, 2017, the long and successful Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn and its moons will come to and end when the spacecraft plunges into Saturn’s cloud tops. Let’s highlight some of the mission’s biggest discoveries and look at how to use Starry Night to fly with the spacecraft throughout its 20-year journey. You’ll see what Cassini saw, from launch, through gravitational assist planetary flybys and Saturn moon encounters, to the End of Mission (EOM) - and how you can see when the last signals from the mission arrive at Earth...
On August 21, 2017, a Total Solar Eclipse will occur along a track running across the Continental USA from Salem, Oregon to Charleston, South Carolina. At most points along the track, totality will last more than two minutes, peaking at 2 minutes, 41.6 seconds just east of St. Louis, Missouri. Observers south and north of the track will see only a partial eclipse, the degree varying depending on the distance north or south...
Until recently, our solar system was the only planetary system humans knew. It was even thought by some that our solar system was unique in the universe. This changed in the early 1990s, when astronomers began to discover the first exoplanets, worlds orbiting other stars. Since the first discovery, astronomers have found thousands of other exoplanets. Astronomers now believe that planetary systems are plentiful throughout the universe...