2011 – Hubble Space Telescope releases new image of spiral galaxy NGC2841, which lies 46 million light-years away in the constellation of Ursa Major (The Great Bear). The image was taken in 2010.
2004 – 90482 Orcus discovered by Michael Brown of Caltech, Chad Trujillo of the Gemini Observatory, and David Rabinowitz of Yale University. Orcus is a plutino, locked in a 2:3 resonance with Neptune. Like Pluto, except that it is constrained to always be in the opposite phase of its orbit from Pluto. Orcus has a large Moon, Vanth. Orcus was the Etruscan god equivalent of the Roman Pluto.
Orcus and Moon Vanth
2007 – Themis Launch : Understanding Space Weather. Aurora Observer.
1996 – Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) launched from Cape Canaveral. It would conduct the first long-term, close-up study of an asteroid. The mission aims to answer fundamental questions about the nature and origin of the many asteroids and comets close to Earth’s orbit.
1965 – Project Ranger: The Ranger 8 probe launches on its mission to photograph the Mare Tranquillitatis region of the Moon.
1959 – Project Vanguard: Vanguard 2: The first weather satellite is launched to measure cloud-cover distribution.
1600 – Giordano Bruno burned at the stake (b. 1548), Dominican and Philosopher, who challenged church
doctrine on the origin and structure of the universe, is burned at the stake in
Campo dei Fiori. His major metaphysical works, On the Infinite Universe and
Worlds and The Infinite (both 1584), drew heavily from Hermetic gnosticism and other works on magic and the occult. Bruno held that there are many possible modes of viewing the world. He was first to propose modern Cosmic Theory.
Birthdays
1723 – Tobias Mayer, German astronomer and academic was famous for his studies of the Moon. (d. 20 February 1762)