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The Clipper and the Comet

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/2410/EuropaComet_cooper3.jpg The Clipper and the Comet NASA's Europa Clipper
is now headed toward an ocean world beyond Earth.

The large spacecraft is tucked into the payload fairing atop the
Falcon Heavy rocket in this photo, taken at Kennedy Space Center
the day before the mission's successful October 14 launch.

Europa Clipper's interplanetary voyage will first take it to Mars,
then back to Earth, and then on to Jupiter on gravity assist trajectories
that will allow it to enter orbit around Jupiter in April 2030.

Once orbiting Jupiter, the spacecraft will fly past Europa 49 times, exploring a Jovian moon
with a global subsurface ocean that may have conditions to support life.

Posing in the background next to the floodlit rocket
is Comet Tsuchinsan-ATLAS, about a day after the comet's closest approach to
Earth.

A current darling of evening skies,
the naked-eye comet is a vistor from the distant Oort cloud

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APOD: 2024 October 16 – Colorful Aurora over New Zealand

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/2410/AuroraNz_McDonald_1080.jpg APOD: 2024 October 16 – Colorful Aurora over New Zealand Sometimes the night sky is full of surprises.

Take the sky over Lindis Pass, South Island, New Zealand
one-night last week.

Instead of a typically calm night sky filled with constant stars,
a busy and dynamic night sky appeared.

Suddenly visible were pervasive red aurora, green picket-fence aurora, a red SAR arc, a STEVE, a meteor, and the Moon.

These outshone the center of our Milky Way Galaxy and both of its two satellite galaxies: the LMC and SMC.

All of these were captured together on
28 exposures in five minutes,
from which this panorama was composed.

Auroras lit up many skies last week, as a Coronal Mass Ejection from the Sun
unleashed a burst of particles toward our Earth
that created colorful skies over latitudes
usually too far from the Earth's poles to see them.

More generally, night skies this month have other surprises,
showing not only auroras -- but comets.

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What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning. Whenever we proceed from the known into the unknown we may hope to understand, but we may have to learn at the same time a new meaning of the word 'understanding.

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It's been very long since we won the Nobel Prize in Physics.....?

Maybe it's another dimension itself