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Christmas in the Skies

Christmas is a special day with a magic of its own. A Christmas eclipse is a great treat and centuries ago a long-awaited comet finally showed up on Christmas day. On the other hand, imagine spending the holidays a quarter of a million miles from home, as the crew of Apollo 8 did.

You can't take a Christmas tree into space. It wouldn't be allowed in the weight allowance and imagine the danger of all those pine needles floating around! But in 1973 a recycling effort produced a tree made of recycled cans on board Skylab.

Three craters on the asteroid Vesta, imaged by NASA's Dawn mission in 2011. It looks like a snowman - just needs a hat and scarf, perhaps a carrot and coal!

On Christmas Day in 2010 NASA's Swift observatory detected a lengthy and extremely powerful gamma ray burst. What if Vincent van Gogh - a knowledgeable amateur astronomer - could have painted it? Starry Night might have looked something like this.

Credit for the adptation: S. Campana, INAF-Osservatorio astronomico di Brera]

If you're dreaming of a white Christmas, the cosmos may have something of interest. How about deep snow on one of Saturn's moons, a gigantic Christmas tree whose lights are baby stars, a snowman on an asteroid or an Einstein ring?

Cosmic White Christmas

Solstice greetings! Today is December 21, and December 21/22, 2015 is the day of the winter solstice for the northern hemisphere.

Astronomically, the solstice is the time at which the Sun is over the Tropic of Capricorn and the poles are at their maximum tilt in relation to the Sun. That actually happens tomorrow at 4:49 PAM GMT. But at that time, in New York will be five hours earlier – December 21 at 11:49 PM and earlier for other North American time zones.

Southern hemisphere friends are well aware that the December solstice is their summer solstice. And for Australia and New Zealand, it will happen this year on Tuesday, the 21st.

By the way, even though this is the shortest day in the northern hemisphere, the mornings will still get darker for a few weeks. Earth's orbit isn't a perfect circle and we move at fluctuating speeds in orbit. So the Sun may lag behind the clock or be ahead of it, but it works out on average!

This is an exquisite 2-minute video showing the Snowflake Cluster, a group of baby stars in a dusty region near the Cone Nebula. It's made from observations by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope.

Google celebrated the Winter Solstice with a Google doodle.

Happy Birthday, Isaac Newton. The great English scientist who revolutionized our understanding of gravitation and motion was born on Christmas Day 1642.

Happy Birthday, Isaac!

Mona, no white Christmas in Ohio in the United States.
Warm and wet.