* Astronomy

Venus is observable at dusk tonight.


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No one has seen more of Mars in exquisite detail than have members of the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE).
That team is based at the University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, with UA Professor Alfred S. McEwen as principal investigator. The HiRISE camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has taken more than 1,400 huge photographic swaths of the martian landscape since it began science operations last November. That's the largest amount of data from any single Mars experiment in history.
McEwen will share highlights from the first glut of HiRISE data at an LPL Public Evening talk Tuesday, April 24. The 7:30 p.m. talk, which will be in the Kuiper Space Sciences lecture hall (Room 308), is free and open to the public.

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Project to be discussed during Midland presentation for "Astronomy Day"
Astronomer Gary Hill tackles one of the biggest questions in all the sciences.
Actually, the question now looms as the largest one facing science today.

"It's essentially the fundamental question of what's the universe made of. Over the past decade, the astronomy community has been trying to measure how the universe has been expanding through time. They found out about seven years ago that it's actually accelerating. You don't expect the universe to accelerate unless something's pushing out. There are stars and matter in the universe, and the gravity of those is actually going to make the universe decelerate is what you expect" - Astronomer Gary Hill , who will speak at the Marian Blakemore Planetarium during Saturday's Astronomy Day events hosted by the Planetarium and the West Texas Astronomers.

Now that astronomers know the universe is "doing the contrary and accelerating" they have named the unknown force dark energy.

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Take a 2-minute guided tour on where to look in the night sky for this month's stunning views.

See JPL video