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SKY NIGHTLY
Venus, Jupiter in night sky dance
by Staff Writers
Washington (AFP) March 12, 2012


An unusual opportunity to see two of the brightest planets, Venus and Jupiter, appear to be right next to each other in the night sky is peaking in the next two days, astronomers said.

On a clear night from March 12-14, skywatchers may extend an arm and see the two planets look as though they are a couple fingers' width apart, or about three degrees, even though they are actually quite far from one another in space.

The brighter of the pair will be Venus because it gets light from the Sun that is twice as bright as Earth gets and 50 times more intense than the sunlight that shines on Jupiter, according to Sky & Telescope magazine.

Venus is also seven times closer to Earth than Jupiter, which is the bigger of the two and may appear to be about twice the size of Venus.

After the 14 of March, Jupiter will drop lower until it is eventually invisible after sunset by mid-April.

The moon enters the picture on March 25 and 26, with its thin crescent shape appearing to nearly kiss Jupiter the first night, particularly in North America, and Venus the second.

Live shots of the planets in the night sky are being captured by the Slooh telecope project and aired on http://events.slooh.com.

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Rare Ultra-blue Stars Found in Neighboring Galaxy's Hub
Boston MA (SPX) Jan 16, 2012
Peering deep inside the hub of the neighboring Andromeda galaxy, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has uncovered a large, rare population of hot, bright stars. Blue is typically an indicator of hot, young stars. In this case, however, the stellar oddities are aging, sun-like stars that have prematurely cast off their outer layers of material, exposing their extremely blue-hot cores. Astronome ... read more


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