Space.com- 6/28/13, Joe Rao

There's a giant scorpion hovering overhead, but have no fear. This creepy crawler is actually the constellation Scorpius. It's all sparkle and no sting.

In his book "The Stars in Our Heaven – Myths and Fables," (Pantheon Books, 1948) author Peter Lum writes: "The scorpion is essentially a creature of darkness, a furtive little animal that lurks in the shadows, hides under stones or in any dark crevice and cannot bear to face the light … only at night does it come out in search of its prey. Although seldom fatal (its sting) is extremely painful; hence the scorpion is usually disliked, feared and avoided by anyone who has ever come in contact with him."

Link: Space.com

EyesontheSky.com - 6/17/13

The last few days of spring are this week, and that means summer constellation observing!  The night sky has shifted from the area of sky we saw in spring, thanks to Earth's revolution carrying it another 90 degrees around the Sun.  The places many constellations in a better place to view both them and the objects they contain, such as Ursa Minor, Draco, Cepheus, Cygnus, Aquila, Lyra, Hercules, Scutum, Sagittarius and Scorpius.  Though some of these shapes have only 3rd magnitude or fainter stars, the brighter stars of summer can guide the way - such as the Summer Triangle asterism.  Learn all about the summer sky in this week's video.

Link: EyesOnTheSky.com

ScienceMag.org - 6/6/13, Yudhijit Bhattacharjee

Building a planet seems straightforward enough: Just take a disk of dust swirling around a young star, and let it sit. Micron-sized dust particles will collide and clump together, growing in size, until eventually, voilà! One planet. There's a problem, however: Astrophysicists have calculated that once clumps have reached a certain size, collisions with other clumps should smash them to smithereens. Or they should start drifting inward toward the star, where they can't grow further. How then can planets even form?

Astronomers who've imaged the dust disk spinning around a young star 390 light-years from Earth may have found an answer. Viewing the star using the newly unveiled Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in northern Chile, the researchers observed a crescent-shaped vortex of gas in the disk that appears to provide a safe haven in which a planetary seed can continue to grow. The vortex essentially creates a dust trap within which large clumps can get larger while avoiding drifting inward long enough to form the rocky core of a planet.

Nasa.com- 6/4/13

These delicate wisps of gas make up an object known as SNR B0519-69.0, or SNR 0519 for short. The thin, blood-red shells are actually the remnants from when an unstable progenitor star exploded violently as a supernova around 600 years ago. There are several types of supernovae, but for SNR 0519 the star that exploded is known to have been a white dwarf star — a Sun-like star in the final stages of its life.

SNR 0519 is located over 150 000 light-years from Earth in the southern constellation of Dorado (The Dolphinfish), a constellation that also contains most of our neighboring galaxy the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). Because of this, this region of the sky is full of intriguing and beautiful deep sky objects.

For more on this story please see NASA.com

Space.com- 6/3/12, Miriam Kramer

A newly discovered gaseous planet has been directly photographed orbiting a star about 300 light-years from Earth. Imaging alien planets is difficult, and this world may be the least massive planet directly observed outside of the solar system, scientists say.

For more on this story please see Space.com