Tag - astronomy

Hrm … sorry, but I don’t really care what astronomers say. I still think Pluto is a planet.

Some astronomers are still sane:

Although yesterday’s decision was reached by a majority vote, some of the most senior scientists involved are dismayed. “We now have dwarf planets which are in fact not planets. I consider this a linguistic catastrophe. I think the union is going to get a lot of flak for this, in doing it in such a muddy way,” said Owen Gingerich, chairman of the IAU’s official planet definition committee.

“It’ll cause a rewrite of the textbooks. I think a lot of the astronomers at the meeting were really just trying to correct the mistake made in 1930,” he added.

Others, however, are saying things like don’t worry, be happy, Pluto is still “interesting to study.”

But Iwan Williams, president of the IAU’s planetary systems sciences and an astronomer at Queen Mary, University of London, was happy with the decision. “It was a clear majority and Pluto is still an interesting body to study,” he said.

The current silliness is just a continuation … a few short days ago, they were going to call Pluto and Charon, its moon, both planets. Ah well.

Don’t worry Pluto. We still love you.

OK, so this is seriously cool: one man basically inventing a new kind of telescope virtually by himself.

One quote I particularly like:

I didn’t want to be influenced by what others had done, so I purposefully didn’t look for other designs until I had come up with one on my own.

There’s a major conjunction just after sunset tonight: Jupiter, Venus, and the moon.

I’ll have to see if I have a good line-of-sight … if I do, I’ll try to take some pictures and see if any work out.

Whoa. Very, very, very cool – a rotating chair that holds your binoculars and tilts back so you can stargaze in comfort.

I saw it first here, and there’s more info at the manufacturer’s site.

From that site:

• Comfortable: A reclining chair supports your entire body
• Fun: Counterweighted mounting bar holds your choice of binoculars
• Simple: Convenient joystick gives instant control of speed and direction
• Precise: Built-in green laser lets you quickly select and view any object
• Rugged: Base is made of case aluminum and rotates on Teflon® bearings
• Portable: Carry it anywhere — Covenient setup requires no tools

(By the way, I noticed that the company that makes this also makes a very cool laser that would be great as a star-pointer.)

Well, an hour of sky-gazing later, I’ve seen two meteors.

One was spectacular, one rather barely visible; both were very, very brief. Both were beautiful, but I didn’t see anything near 100 an hour, or even 10 an hour.

I just came back from an exhilarating night-time walk.

The night is the best time to walk: cool, quiet, and, if the sky is clear, there’s a vast celestial show playing on the biggest screen you’re ever gonna see.

Even in my rather light-polluted environs, the Milky Way was clearly visible. The familiar Big Dipper was huge and obvious; other constellations known, guessed, and imagined were bright and glorious.

To put the icing on the cake, I saw a a shooting star – a meteor. Wow! I have to say I feel really blessed whenever I see a meteor because so many of them are so incredibly brief … a few seconds and that’s it. Turn your head and you’ve missed it. This one was bright, but lasted only about 2-3 seconds before it burned down to nothing.

Perhaps it’s a percursor of the Perseids, which are due to peak in just a few days.

My only problem tonight is that I’m now too invigorated to go to bed!

I went out star-gazing last night with some astronomical binoculars I purchased a month and a half ago.

We’ve been having the most incredible beautiful clear sunny days here … and clear sunny days mean clear night skies – an amateur astronomer’s delight. I made my way down to McDonald Park, a nice reasonably-dark-sky site near Abbotsford that the Fraser Valley Astronomy society has worked to keep dark.

I’m just starting out in amateur astronomy, so I made a classic rookie mistake: not checking or remembering the position and phase of the moon. It was almost full, and VERY bright. Seriously, it was bright enough to cast high-contrast shadows. It was bright enought to read by.

Still, I had some fun scanning the brigher objects in the night sky, such as Orion. It always amazes me that so many people have no clue where the Orion constellation is or what it looks like. It’s so clear, so bright, and so obvious, that if it is once pointed out to you, you will recognize it for the rest of your life.

Look for this pattern in the night sky:

Three bright stars make up Orion’s belt. He’s a hunter, and his left shoulder is Betelgeuse, a red giant star that is the 12th brightest in Earth’s night sky. His right leg is Rigel, even brighter. And to the right an arc of stars shows the position of his bow.

Once you see this pattern, you’ll never forget it. But you’ll only see it in winter, at least if you’re in the Northern hemisphere, since that’s when our part of the planet points in his part of the Milky Way galaxy.

I also looked for a time to the north, trying to pick out comet Macholz, but with no success. I’m not sure if that was due to a mountain range between me and the northern horizon, or just my inability to pick it up.

And, of couse, I had to spend some time just ogling the moon – so bright in my binoculars that my eyes almost started watering. The huge rayed crater Tycho was spell-binding. (Go to this picture, look at the bottom part of the moon, and see the large impact crater with rays springing up across a quarter of the moon’s surface: that’s Tycho.)

It was short but sweet … next time I’ll have to time it better and get a darker sky.