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Geminid Meteor Shower 2011

admin — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 20:20:05 +0000

The Geminid meteor shower returns every December, thanks to the Earth’s plowing through debris left by a boiled asteroid. The best time to watch is between 10 p.m. local time Tuesday, Dec. 13 and sunrise on Wednesday, Dec. 14.

This represents the view from mid-northern latitudes at about 9:00 p.m. local time around December 13.

“Observers with clear skies could see as many as 40 Geminids per hour,” predicts Bill Cooke of the NASA Meteoroid Environment Office. “Our all-sky network of meteor cameras has captured several early Geminid fireballs. They were so bright, we could see them despite the moonlight.”

The best time to look is between 10 pm local time on Tuesday, Dec. 13, and sunrise on Wednesday, Dec. 14th. Geminids, which spray out of the constellation Gemini, can appear anywhere in the sky. “Dress warmly and look up,” says Cooke. “It’s that simple.”

The source of the Geminids is near-Earth asteroid 3200 Phaethon. Most meteor showers come from comets, so having an asteroid as a parent makes the Geminids a bit of an oddball.

Science Week Talk about Phobos-Grunt Project

admin — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 20:52:27 +0000

The Phobos-Grunt received its first substantial funding in 2007. By the beginning of 2008, the Phobos-Grunt project was in an active development stage and it is set to launch by the end of 2011. If you would like to learn more the Planetary Society are presenting a talk in Dublin, Galway and Cork about the Russian Phobo-Grunt and NASA Mars Science Laboratory missions to Mars, launching on November 8th and 25th. Full details of these free talks can be found at www.planetary.ie/msl.

Supermoon

paul — Sat, 19 Mar 2011 15:45:23 +0000

The next full moon will be the largest in about 20years but it can be hard to tell the difference without a point of reference. Try to catch it near the horizon and don’t listen to any nonsense about it creating floods or volcano’s.

Enceladus

paul — Sat, 19 Mar 2011 09:38:20 +0000

The Cassini spacecraft watches over the northern latitudes of Saturn’s geologically active moon Enceladus while the planet’s rings peek through in the distance in this snapshot. What a great shot!

Enceladus

Flythrough the Saturn System

admin — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 23:04:35 +0000

outside in is a ground-breaking giant screen film animated from hundreds of thousands of still photographs and supported as a non-profit project funded by individual supporters. Using Cassini images this is a fly through the Saturn system which is truly amazing.

5.6k Saturn Cassini Photographic Animation from stephen v2 on Vimeo.

Journey through the Solar System

admin — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 09:54:53 +0000

The Solar System

When I heard that Kepler had some candidate planets in the habitable zone of their stars I wondered what it would be like in those distant solar systems. This got me interested in looking at some of the best images of our own planetary system and from that came this video. Please feel free to forward and share. This is a journey through our solar system throught the eyes of the spaceprobes whe have sent into space over the last 30-40 years.

Oldest Galaxy Record May be broken (Again)

admin — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 18:56:18 +0000

Hubble appears to have beaten the record for the oldest galaxy observed by over 120Million light years.

While there may be some confirmation to do on the discovery , the candidate Galaxy named UDFj-39546284, is seen as it was just 480 million years after the Big Bang at a distance of 13.2 billion light years away. Current theory suggests we shouldn’t find any galaxies more than about 13.5 billion light years away. So going from 13.1 to 13.2 billion light years represents a significant step closer to that ultimate limit. The results were published online today in Nature.

Image credit: NASA, ESA, Garth Illingworth (University of California, Santa Cruz) and Rychard Bouwens (University of California, Santa Cruz and Leiden University) and the HUDF09 Team.

Betelgeuse and 2012

admin — Sun, 23 Jan 2011 22:56:34 +0000

I was a little surprised to hear that there are reports regarding the possibility of the star Betelgeuse exploding in 2012. Surprised for a few reasons, but mainly that anyone thinks we could possible predict this to such a high degree of accuracy. Here is the link suggesting a twin Star could be visible from earth if Betelgeuse explodes in 2012 (not to mention how long that light takes to get to us!)
Two Suns? Twin Stars Could Be Visible From Earth By 2012 but in reality we don’t know when this star will go supernova

Betelgeuse as seen from Hubble

If you want to know the real deal try the following sites: Astronomer Phil Plait explains all on his Bad Astronomy site on Discover and astronomer and 2012 doomsday debunker Ian O’Neill can clarify everything for you at his post on Discovery Space.

Moonrise from space

admin — Sat, 22 Jan 2011 23:50:28 +0000

Moonrise as seen by astronaut Paolo Nespoli on board the International Space Station!

Paolo Nespoli has a Flickr page where he posts amazing pictures he’s taken from space. Click to see a much larger version.

Images of the the Orion Nebula

paul — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 14:10:56 +0000

The Orion Nebula (Messier 42, M42, or NGC 1976) is a diffuse nebula situated south of Orion’s Belt. It is one of the brightest nebulae, and is visible to the naked eye in the night sky. Here are some great images of the Nebula.

A colony of hot, young stars is stirring up the cosmic scene in this new picture from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. The image shows the Orion nebula. The young stars dip and peak in brightness due to a variety of reasons. Shifting cold and hot spots on the stars’ surfaces cause brightness levels to change, in addition to surrounding disks of lumpy planet-forming material, which can obstruct starlight. Spitzer is keeping tabs on the young stars, providing data on their changing ways.

Credit NASA/JPL-Caltech/J. Stauffer (SSC/Caltech)

The European Southern Observatory consortium’s Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA) in Paranal, Chile released the view of young stars in the Orion Nebula to demonstrate the compatibilities of the new telescope’s 13.5-foot-wide mirror.

Credit: ESO

This infrared image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope shows the Orion nebula, our closest massive star-making factory, 1,450 light-years from Earth. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Toledo

One of VISTA's first images shows the Flame Nebula, a spectacular star-forming cloud of gas and dust in the constellation of Orion Photo: EPA

This arcing, graceful structure is actually a bow shock about half a light-year across, created from the wind from the star L.L. Orionis colliding with the Orion Nebula flow. For more information on this image, see HubbleSite. Credit: NASA, The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

Phil Plait’s Bad Universe

paul — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 09:34:19 +0000

If you like Astronomy then you have probably heard about the “Bad Astronomer” Phil Plait. Phil is a skeptic and a scientist who spends some of his time debunking half truths and myths and tries to set the record straight in a fun sort of way. Well I’m a fan! So I thought I would point out that he has just announced a new series which premieres this Sunday night August 29, at 10:00 p.m. on the Discovery Channel. Here is a sneak preview

In his own words

“This first episode is about saving the world from asteroid impacts. In most science TV shows on this topic they’re heavy on the death and destruction, but pretty light on what we can actually do about them. But if you’ve read my book Death from the Skies!you know I’m all about getting off our collective butts and doing something. So in “Bad Universe” we go step-by-step, looking into what can be done to keep an impact from ruining our whole day.”

Here is a sneak preview. Nightsky.ie wishes him lots of success. More news about this here

This sums up for me what to expect from Phil. Cool stuff that’s really real….

Phil Plait: The Bad Astronomer

The Solar System is older than we previously thought

paul — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 14:39:41 +0000

The usual method for defining the age of the Solar System is to determine the time of the formation of the first solid grains in the disc surrounding the proto-Sun. Currently we date calcium-aluminium-rich inclusions in meteorites. A recently published study in Nature Geoscience has revised the current age of the Solar System to be .3 to 1.9 million years older than our currently estimate. While the timing may not seem like a big difference for something that is billions of years old, Bouvier said in New Scientist that it could make a difference when pinning down the conditions that led to the solar system‘s formation, and those needed for other life-friendly planetary systems to form. So how old are we talking about? The 1.49Kilo meteorite found in the Moroccan desert in 2004 suggests that the Solar system is about 4.56 billion years old.