It's been back to snow showers the past couple days, though only about a half inch each day. Yesterday's high T was 33 F, a return to reality after 10 straight days of high Ts ranging from 48 F to 63 F.
It will be a struggle to get above freezing today too, but it doesn't look like there will be new snow flurries.
Hard to imagine, sense it's high eighties here. 
The Lunar Research Orbiter looked back home recently:
Cool pic!
It's been back to snow showers the past couple days, though only about a half inch each day. It will be a struggle to get above freezing today too, but it doesn't look like there will be new snow flurries.
Very close to the statistical April 24th, last day of snow! 
Yeah, if there isn't any more snow that will be pretty close to a bullseye as far as an average annual date. Of course, it'll be several more weeks before it's known for sure when the season's last snowfall was . . .
Northern Maine and Vermont has been getting snow this week. 
I think Stacy Keech has gone too far. (Ref--"Storm Wars"/movie)
Here's a fun article (moderately long) on Rube Goldberg-- both the man and the annual competitions.
http://www.theverge.com/2015/4/22/8381963/rube-goldberg-machine-contest-history-ideas
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I haven't read any good news yet on the snafu with yesterday's launch of the Progress cargo spacecraft headed for the ISS. At last report it still was not responding to sent commands. Worse yet, video shows it spinning in an unplanned rotation that they might not be able to correct even if communication is regained. The ISS has reserve supplies for now, but was already running a little lower than ideal because of last October's failed supply mission.
The Progress spacecraft was initially scheduled to dock with ISS only 6 hours after launch, but the problems cropped up almost immediately after it reached orbit and deployed its solar panels. The backup mission plan has a 2-day delivery route/schedule, which is technically now in effect though the spacecraft orbit may not be correct for that now.
Not long after I wrote the previous post the controllers of the Progress supply craft announced they had exhausted all avenues and the cargo ship was being given up as lost. It will reenter the atmosphere and burn up, though likely not entirely. It's not known whether there will be any possibility of controlling the descent to the point of ensuring reentry over open ocean.
Today the latest New Horizons images of Pluto were released, which are now the most detailed ever obtained. They are still very low resolution, but variations in surface albedo can clearly be seen.
For the next few weeks it should just get better and better until New Horizons is snapping images for a few seconds from less than 10,000 km above Pluto's surface. Recall this image from an earlier post-- it shows Manhattan as it would appear if imaged by New Horizons from the equivalent distance of the Pluto flyby. Now all we have to worry about is the lack of light at Pluto. 
There are still visible ice floes out front for this last day of April, but there's not much left. However, I was in Petoskey (northwest coast of the lower peninsula) yesterday and the bay down there on the northeast coast of Lake Michigan is still full of ice.
The sign out in front of the hydroelectric plant in the Soo flashed both the air temperature and the temperature of the water in the power canal, which is draining right out of the east end of Lake Superior. Not surprisingly the water T was 32 F .
The MESSENGER spacecraft is on its final orbit around Mercury and will strike the surface later today at about 3:26 p.m. EDT. The impact will be at about 14,000 kph and is expected to make a crater about 16m in diameter. On its last perigee pass MESSENGER skimmed only about 300m over the surface. It will have completed 4,105 orbits of Mercury when it impacts.
EDIT: I'm off by a day! Impact was Thursday (yesterday at 3:26 p.m. EDT), everything else written above should be right. Sorry!
Ground controllers for the failed Progress supply mission have determined that signal from the spacecraft and the upper stage rocket was lost 1.5 seconds before the planned separation of the cargo carrier from the upper rocket stage. The U.S. military's Joint Space Operations Center reports they are tracking 44 pieces of something in a debris field around the Progress vessel and the 3rd rocket stage, leading to speculation that a collision or explosion may have been at the root of the mission failure.
Progress is expected to fall out of orbit around May 5-7.
Could you imagine looking at the sun from Mercury? 
Charlie Chaplin and the eating machine was good.
Charlie Chaplin and the eating machine was good.
Yeah-- I love his expression the first couple times the automatic napkin/blotter goes to work.
True. :)))))))
There's a webpage set up now to display raw images from New Horizons' Long Range Reconnaissance Imager. Latest image posted is from 3 days ago (images aren't sent from New Horizons right away because other instruments use the communications bandwidth too), taken from a range of 88.6 million kilometers.
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/soc/Pluto-Encounter/
The Lunar Research Orbiter looked back home recently: