‘Latest News’ Archives
Blackrock Castle Observatory – Enjoy a Cosmic Christmas at the Castle
OK this is pure advertisement for some friends! But since its for the cause of Education and Astronomy in Ireland I've no apologies.... Should be fun, head along if you can. Look here for a recent review of the BCO.
A Tribute to Images of Mars – we’ve come a long way since 1965….
I can't speak for everyone, but I find it hard to appreciate, to really appreciate the stunning images we have at our fingertips of Mars. We have successfully sent probes/orbiters/landers to Mars that take hi-resolution images of Mars rivaling those taken of Earth by satellite. Sure there have been failures in our mission to Mars, but the sheer [...]
A Glorious Dawn – by symphony of sound
Here are two more "Music" video from symphony of science. "A Glorious Dawn" features Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking and "We are all connected". My preference is certainly the first. I wanted to briefly mention the technique used which is called Pitch correction. This allows for the correction of intonation of an audio signal. This is primarily [...]
Minor setback as CERN cuts power to part of the LHC
theregistry.com reported on a failure at the LHC which occurred at 1:23 a.m. Geneva time at the Meyrin site and caused a power cut across the site, shutting down the main computer center among other things and causing an abrupt cessation of operations. The good news is that -1.8 degrees above absolute zero temperature of the magnets was [...]
13 reasons why Astronomy is so cool
Why is astronomy so cool? When you look at some of the concepts being wrestled with in cosmology and astronomy it is truly mind boggling. I decided to write this article after watching the video at the end of this article. I wanted to expand on the video with some additional facts and give pointers to sites that discuss the ideas further for [...]
LHC sets new world record
The Large Hadron Collider sets a new world record. The LHC is now the world's highest energy particle accelerator, having just accelerated its twin beams of protons to an energy of 1.18 TeV on Monday morning exceeding the 0.98 TeV world record held by the U.S. Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory's Tevatron collider since 2001. This is a mere [...]
Nova Eridani? Probably not…
Originally believed to be a possible Nova, a variable object was discovered by K. Itagaki and imaged by Joe Brimacombe . Below is the latest quote from the AAVSO. You can get more technical details from Universe Today. Possibly interesting observing for those in Photometry...I must admit I thought of Blackrock Observatory when I read this [...]
Cassini/IBEX redefines the shape of the Heliosphere
Only a short month ago I posted an article discussing our current understanding of the shape of the Heliosphere and how the Sun keeps up safe from cosmic rays. The Heliosphere is the area around the Sun that repels the majority of dangerous cosmic rays. It is actually a bubble produced by the Solar Winds emitted from our Sun. A slight aside, but [...]
Future concepts in robotic based explorers
With all of the trouble with stuck Martian rovers I was pleased to come across some articles discussing some possible future designs of interplanetary explorers. On Mars one of the primary issues is the lack of speed of a rover due to the difficulty in traversing quite a varied landscape. The rovers typically move a hundreds of meters per day, [...]
A quick look at the LHC
The Large Hedron Collider is perhaps the largest physics experiment ever run on the planet earth. In their own words "LHC - the aim of the exercise: To smash protons moving at 99.999999% of the speed of light into each other and so recreate conditions a fraction of a second after the big bang. The LHC experiments try and work out what [...]
What if the Earth had rings like Saturn? Lets take a look!
This animation was done by Roy Prol, and it shows not only how the rings would look from space, but also the view Earthlings would have of the rings. Its a really good video, and just makes you wish that somehow we could have the beautiful rings of Saturn over head. Of course we would potentially need a few ice moons replenishing it..... Well [...]
Leonids – video and image in case you missed it
If like me you missed the meteor shower due to late night viewing and bad weather, you might like to see what you missed. Apparently there was good viewing in Asia, and a few members of my facebook page said there was a good show in Australia and parts of the US. Here is a video posted to YouTube. Some comments suggest its fake, but I'll let you [...]