Your one stop portal for the latest astronomy discoveries and news.
If you think Starry Night Pro 5 is just too expensive, here is another killing application for you! Celestia 
This astronomy simulator is able to be runned on multiplatforms such as Windows, Mac OS X and Linux (X86). Therefore, it covers a big area!
I am really sorry for not updating AstronomyNotes for 10 days. I have been busy with my school activities and homeworks. 
Anyway, I am here to introduce a very nice astronomy simulator, Starry Night Pro 5! In my opinion, it’s the greatest astronomy simulator in the world! Most of the astronomers use astronomy simulators to simulate the moving of any celestial object. More than that, it can be used as a learning guides. It can tell you the science information of the specified celestial objects. What’s more are you expecting from this? It also has fantastic “Sky Guides” which lead you to the sky events!
Furthermore, you can choose where to observe the celestial objects. For example, on the surface of 9 Major Planets, their Moons and spaceship! It can control your telescope as well! It’s really wonderful, I am sure you want to give it a try!
Do you know what is a moonquake exactly? It’s just like the earthquake on earth but normally they last longer. The longest earthquake was just lasting less than 2 minutes but most of the shallow moonquake can last more than 10 minutes! 
Just another question is raised. What is a shallow moonquake? There are at least four types of moonquakes. According to NASA, they are
Deep moonquake is happened about 700KM below the surface of moon and most probably caused by tides. Thermal quakes are caused by the expansion of the frigid crust when first illuminated by the morning sun after two weeks of deep-freeze lunar night. Shallow moonquakes are only happened 20KM or 30KM below the moon, thus, it’s the most dangerous. 
According to NASA, between 1972 and 1977, the Apollo seismic network saw twenty-eight of them; a few “registered up to 5.5 on the Richter scale,” says Neal. A magnitude 5 quake on Earth is energetic enough to move heavy furniture and crack plaster.
The scientists are not sure about the cause of the shallow moonquakes as well as the place where they happen. They have to know this as the lunar bases must be built on the safest spots. They are going to implement 10 to 12 seismometers around the whole moon to find the safest spots.
March 10, 2006: Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has successfully entered Mars’s orbit.
Below are the events it has completed:
Eastern Time
4:07 p.m.: Turn to burn attitude
4:24 p.m.: Orbit insertion burn begins
4:46 p.m.: Behind Mars / expected loss of signal
4:51 p.m.: Expected end of orbit insertion
5:16 p.m.: Emerges from behind Mars
5:16 p.m.: Re-acquisition of signal
5:30 p.m.: Health and status report
About MRO
It has traveled 500 million km to reach Mars since it is launched from Florida on August 12, 2005. It needed to use its main thrusters as it neared the planet in order to slow itself enough for Mars’ gravity to capture it. The thruster firing began while the spacecraft was still in radio contact with Earth, but needed to end during a tense half hour of radio silence while the spacecraft flew behind Mars. Scientists are now having 6 months to adjust the orbit to the right size and shape.
After it goes into the prime orbit, it will start observing the atmosphere, surface and subsurface of Mars in incrediblely high details!
The instruments on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter will examine the planet from this low-altitude orbit. A spectrometer will map water-related minerals in patches as small as a baseball infield. A radar instrument will probe for underground layers of rock and water. One telescopic camera will resolve features as small as a card table. Another will put the highest-resolution images into broader context. A color camera will monitor the entire planet daily for changes in weather. A radiometer will check each layer of the atmosphere for variations in temperature, water vapor and dust.
Thanks to MRO, we’ll know more about Mars soon! 
More on Nasa- Mars Reconnasissance Orbiter
March 10, 2006: It’s official, Solar minimum has arrived. Sunspots have all but vanished. Solar flares are nonexistent. The sun is utterly quiet.
Like the quiet before a storm.
This week researchers announced that a storm is coming–the most intense solar maximum in fifty years. The prediction comes from a team led by Mausumi Dikpati of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). “The next sunspot cycle will be 30% to 50% stronger than the previous one,” she says. If correct, the years ahead could produce a burst of solar activity second only to the historic Solar Max of 1958.
Dikpati’s prediction is unprecedented. In nearly-two centuries since the 11-year sunspot cycle was discovered, scientists have struggled to predict the size of future maxima—and failed. Solar maxima can be intense, as in 1958, or barely detectable, as in 1805, obeying no obvious pattern.
The key to the mystery, Dikpati realized years ago, is a conveyor belt on the sun.
The sun’s conveyor belt is a current, not of water, but of electrically-conducting gas. It flows in a loop from the sun’s equator to the poles and back again. Just as the Great Ocean Conveyor Belt controls weather on Earth, this solar conveyor belt controls weather on the sun. Specifically, it controls the sunspot cycle.
Solar physicist David Hathaway of the National Space Science & Technology Center (NSSTC) explains: “First, remember what sunspots are–tangled knots of magnetism generated by the sun’s inner dynamo. A typical sunspot exists for just a few weeks. Then it decays, leaving behind a ‘corpse’ of weak magnetic fields.”
Enter the conveyor belt.
Right: The sun’s “great conveyor belt.”
“The top of the conveyor belt skims the surface of the sun, sweeping up the magnetic fields of old, dead sunspots. The ‘corpses’ are dragged down at the poles to a depth of 200,000 km where the sun’s magnetic dynamo can amplify them. Once the corpses (magnetic knots) are reincarnated (amplified), they become buoyant and float back to the surface.” Presto—new sunspots!
Source: Solar Storm Warning
March 9, 2006: NASA’s Cassini spacecraft may have found evidence of liquid water reservoirs that erupt in Yellowstone-like geysers on Saturn’s moon Enceladus. The rare occurrence of liquid water so near the surface raises many new questions about this mysterious moon.
“Other moons in the solar system may have liquid-water oceans covered by kilometers of icy crust,” said Andrew Ingersoll, imaging team member and atmospheric scientist at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, Calif. “What’s different here is that pockets of liquid water may be no more than tens of meters below the surface.”
“As Cassini approached Saturn, we discovered the Saturnian system is filled with oxygen atoms. At the time we had no idea where the oxygen was coming from,” said Candy Hansen, Cassini scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena. “Now we know Enceladus is spewing out water molecules, which break down into oxygen and hydrogen.”
Above: Cassini’s infrared spectrometer took the temperature of a tiger stripe. The fissure is at least 15 degrees K warmer than its surroundings–a sign of geothermal activity.
Scientists still have many questions. Why is Enceladus so active? Might this activity have been continuous enough over the moon’s history for life to have had a chance to take hold in the moon’s interior? In the spring of 2008, scientists will get another chance to look at the geysers–and another crack at answering these questions–when Cassini flies within 350 kilometers (approximately 220 miles) of Enceladus.
Source: Radical! Liquid Water on Enceladus
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