January 2009
25 posts
1 tag
Sidewalk Astronomy Tonight
If any of you are in and around Birmingham (UK) tonight head down to Centenary Square (you know by the International Convention Centre and at the bottom of Broad St) and you will find a bunch of astronomers with telescopes…
Constellation Stories: Leo the Lion
I think its time for a little story telling, it was a while back that I did one on Andromeda, so here is another one on Leo…
In a town some way to the south-west of Corinth is a small town called, Nemea. Unfortunately, for the people of this town a lion with two mouths lives in a cave. It has been taking the local townspeople for a while now and their numbers have been dropping...
Solar Eclipse Images →
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Harriot’s Moone Catalogue
I came across this interesting article reproducing Thomas Harriot’s Moon catalogue the other day, tis quite interesting bringing an interesting historical perspective.
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Hubble snaps image of a nebula within a cluster
Now this is a rather cool image… and why we would miss Hubble (in a non scientific mind set).
Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)
The unique planetary nebula NGC 2818 is nested inside the open star cluster NGC 2818A. Both the cluster and the nebula reside over 10,000 light-years away, in the southern constellation Pyxis (the Compass).
Above It All: A Satellite's-Eye View of Pres.... →
Astronomers crack lunar mystery with ancient rock →
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Birmingham IYA events...
Things to watch out for…
Sat 31st Jan – Birmingham Astronomical Society - Sidewalk astronomy outside the International Convention Centre in Birmingham Sat 14th Feb – Canon Hill Park Astronomy Day March 9th – David H. Levy Talk at the University of Birmingham titled: “Poetry of the Night: A marvellous union between science and literature” March 14th – Pi Day - the Mathematics of...
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Space has never been closer
A number of observations made by instruments on a US air-force satellite (U.S. Air Force’s Communication/Navigation Outage Forecast System (C/NOFS)) have shown that the boundary between the Earth’s upper atmosphere and space has moved to extraordinarily low altitudes. The transition between the ionosphere and space was found to be at about 260 miles altitude during the night-time,...
"Missing" Moon Linked to Major 1761 Eruption? →
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Chandrayaan-1, new images of the Moon
A bunch of images have been released from the Chandrayaan-1 lunar orbiter mission, which was the first Indian Space Research Organization’s (ISRO) spacecraft to orbit the Moon. Chandrayaan-1 was launched from India on Oct. 21, 2008 and began orbiting the moon Nov. 8. The latest are the first images from NASA’s radar instrument which is enjoying a ride on the back of the...
Light pollution forms 'eco-traps' →
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Apollo Rock Reveals Moon Had Molten Core →
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Earth as an extrasolar planet
I’ve been occasionally asked what would an alien race think of our solar system. I normally first point out that the Sun, though, rather important to us would not be of huge astronomical significance to some alien astronomer. Though, actually thinking about it the Sun wouldn’t be a bad candidate to go extrasolar planet hunting. It is a rather small star and so you might be able to pick...
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Thomas Harriot and the Moon
It seems that a bunch of media sources are getting excited to hear that Thomas Harriot beat Galileo to make the first recorded telescopic observations of the Moon. They should have asked us astronomers, we have been saying this for ages! :-D
Though, its interesting stuff and so IYA (the International Year of Astronomy) starts of with a nice controversial, get people talking topic. It is...
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Mars in high resolution
A bunch of new, and totally stunning images, have been released by the NASA High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) which is in orbit around Mars. The latest show gullies on the dunes of Russell crater in the highest resolution ever.
This image represents part of the dune field present in the north-east portion of Russell Crater. Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona
The...
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I was asked, "is this real?"
In the Shadow of Saturn; Credit: Cassini Imaging Team, SSI, JPL, ESA, NASA
Indeed, it is though it is a combination of images. The idea of mosaicking, or composite making is used all the time in astronomy. Essentially its normally better to take two 5 minute exposures of some object than one 10 minute (for a number of reasons, that I can go into if we want).. but its scientifically fine...
Tuning in to the cosmic radio →
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Biggest Full Moon of the Year
The biggest full Moon of the year is coming this weekend, i.e. the Moon is at its closest point to us (at its perigee). This means that the Moon will appear as much as 14% wider than the Moon at its furthest from us. It will appear around 30% brighter too. For more take a read of Science@NASA.
365 Days of Astronomy Podcasts.. →
should make some interesting listening…
If Brown Isn't a Colour, What Colour are Brown... →
Interesting artilce on the “colour” of brown dwarfs - I’m generally more interested in the radio emission from these objects but its important to build up a large physically understanding of these objects and I guess colour, like in most astronomy is useful…
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The Quadrantids
A couple of days ago, well last Saturday (January 3rd), the Earth passed through the dusty debris left behind from the shatter comet 2003 EH1. This is the origin of the Quadrantid meteor shower. It actually produced a slightly unexpected number of around 150 meteors per hour at the peak! Some wonderful images can be seen over on spaceweather.com.
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First stars “powered by dark matter”
I recently heard a talk about the idea of Dark Matter in stars (by Dr Malcolm Fairbairn of UCL, titled “Dark matter burning stars”, it was a very good talk and opened my eyes to some stuff I hadn’t thought about before) and a couple of days ago on the arXiv physics blog poped up a rather interesting entry titled “First stars “powered by dark matter”. The basic idea is that...
UK Disaster Monitoring Constellation
Satellites that have been built in the UK are now used to aid the victims of natural disasters, such as the devastating cyclone that hit Burma last year and the large earthquake to hit large areas of China. The UK DMCii supplies high quality images from the Disaster Monitoring Constellation, this is a series of satellites that were design to respond to disasters. Sounds like good news to me, of...
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Astronomy Picture of the Day
I realised that I should have mentioned this webpage earlier… I’m sure if you are interested in astronomy them you already know of APODs existence but if you don’t and are just getting into astronomy then APOD is one for you. Well, its one for anyone who is interested in astronomy - you get a different fantastic image of the Universe with some rather detailed description every...