Good morning.
We’ll have a mostly sunny Friday with a high of thirty.
As it has for so many years, Whitewater’s Christmas Parade will travel along Main Street toward the downtown of the city beginning at 6 PM.
NASA recently released a video of Comet ISON traveling toward the sun, using images recorded from 11.20 to 11.25.13:
Did Comet ISON survive its orbit around the sun? At first, it didn’t seem so:
The comet, known as ISON, was discovered last year when it was still far beyond Jupiter, raising the prospect of a spectacular naked-eye object by the time it graced Earth’s skies in December.
Comet ISON passed just 730,000 miles (1.2 million km) from the surface of the sun at 1:37 p.m. EST/1837 GMT on Thursday. Astronomers used a fleet of solar telescopes to look for the comet after its slingshot around the sun, but to no avail.
“I’m not seeing anything that emerged from the behind the solar disk. That could be the nail in the coffin,” astrophysicist Karl Battams, with the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, said during a live broadcast on NASA TV.”
But the icy object’s obituary may have been a premature one:
“Now, in the latest LASCO C3 images, we are seeing something beginning to gradually brighten up again,” said astrophysicist Karl Battams, of the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, in a NASA Comet ISON Observing Campaign (CIOC) blog update. “One could almost be forgiven for thinking that there’s a comet in the images!”
Has Comet ISON succumbed to its fiery encounter, breaking up, leaving only a few pieces of ex-comet behind? Or has it really risen from the dead, re-brightening and set to dazzle our night skies as it swings back out into deep space? It’s too early to tell, but it’s also too early to write ISON off.
“We have a whole new set of unknowns, and this ridiculous, crazy, dynamic and unpredictable object continues to amaze, astound and confuse us to no end,” said Battems.
The more optimistic view comes in video from NASA and the ESA, in which a part of the comet appears to be brightening again after its closest approach to the sun:
Puzzability‘s Thanksgiving-week series concludes today:
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This Week’s Game — November 25-29
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With Thanks
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It’s all about the stuffing this week. For each day, we started with a word or phrase, added the six letters in the word THANKS, and rearranged all the letters to get a new word or phrase. Both pieces are described in each day’s clue, with the shorter one first.
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Example:
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Rosary component; what you might go to hell in
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Answer:
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Bead; handbasket
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What to Submit:
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Submit both pieces, with the shorter one first (as “Bead; handbasket” in the example), for your answer.
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Friday, November 29
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