August Astronomy Notes From Around the Local Galaxy

Mars Could Be Between Ice Ages
After examining stunning high-resolution images taken last year by the Reconnaissance Orbiter, researchers have documented for the first time that ice packs at least 1 kilometer (0.6 miles) thick and perhaps 2.5 kilometers (1.6 miles) thick existed along Mars’ mid-latitude belt as recently as 100 million years ago. In addition, the team believes other images tell them that glaciers flowed in localized areas in the last 10 to 100 million years – a blink of the eye in Mars’s geological timeline.
Have I Mentioned the Coolest Animated ‘Planetarium’ Online?
For a little astronomy and astrology fun go to Shadow & Substance website. They have the coolest animations of solar and lunar eclipses plus the Perseid meteor showers and Comet Holmes. The website is http://shadowandsubstance.com/. Everything is free; they even have links where you can download the software for an animated image of the night sky from wherever you are located.

Scientists Discover Earth’s Chirping Radio Emissions

The European Space Agency’s Cluster mission is listening in on the chirps and whistles that are emitted by Earth’s aurora.

Was the World Knocked on Its Side?

Gregory Jenkins, assistant professor of meteorology at Penn State, thinks that a large planetoid — the same one that fractured to create the moon — crashed into the Earth four and a half billion years ago, tilting it 70 degrees from vertical.

Earth’s ‘wobbly’ orbital behaviors also drive climate changes, ice ages

Wysession says that in the future, the Earth will be farther away from the sun in winter and closer to it in the summer, causing more severe temperature swings in these two seasons. This will happen about 12,000 years from now.