Posts Tagged ‘astronomy’
Stunning Picture of the Night Sky by Axel Mellinger
It takes good equipment and great patience to take good pictures and this picture demonstrates plenty of both. This is an image of our night sky with the milky way as the center piece. It is an amalgamation of over 3000 CCD images. If you want details of the multiple locations used, PC it was processed on (Linux by the way) it is all here. Or [...]
IAS Public Star Party: Fri 30 Oct, Martello Tower car park | International Year of Astronomy in Ireland | Astronomy 2009
On October 30th the Irish Astronomical Society will hold a public star party at the Martello Tower car park in Sandymount at 8pm, someone will be there regardless of the weather. From 8.00pm till 10.00pm, at the Martello Tower Car Park (south side), Strand Rd, Sandymount, Dublin 4. See Location Map. No [...]
Organic Molecules Detected in Exoplanet Atmosphere | Universe Today
Organic Molecules Detected in Exoplanet Atmosphere | Universe Today Posted using ShareThis
32 ExoPlanets found by ESO
Already established as a formidable force in planet finding, the European Southern Obervatory has now found another 32 planets orbiting stars outside of our own Solar system. This brings the total numebr of planets discovered since the first was found in 1988, to over 400. Since Kepler was launched I was expecting the next big announcement to [...]
Whats the (dark) matter?
Sure you hear about this stuff, but what is it and what's the problem? I heard on a podcast a simple explanation! As we look at our galaxy we know it spins... But what we don't know is why it doesn't fling stars out of the edges as it spins ( like the force you feel on a merry go round). You might imagine the force pushing stars away from the [...]
Europa’s oceans have Oxygen – enough for life to exist.
Europa is a cool moon. Very cool if you consider that it has an outer core of solid ice a few miles deep. Below the ice there is liquid water. Lots of water... Twice the amount of all of the oceans of earth combined. Until recently, the main issue for "life on Europa" was that despite oxygen being present on the surface, it was not known [...]
No visible 10km Plume from LCROSS impact
According to NASA TV there was no significant visible plume from the impact of the spacecraft. There is good spectographic data and it does show Sodium a cause for some excitement as it wasn't expected. Regarding the spectorgraphic data, they are being cautiously optimistic despite the lack of a visible plume, but they point blank refused [...]
How to “Rent” a Telescope for online observation
Recently I was wondering how to see deeper into the night sky than was possible using my own Telescope. I had heard that it was possible to "rent" time on a Telescope so I decided to look into it and see what I could find. Ignoring some of the static webcams out there I was looking for something that would help me see something interesting and [...]
LCROSS Impacts!
Moments ago LCROSS impacted into the moon. I watched it live on NASA live streaming...Will take a while to get any details...will keep you posted
Telescopes on Twitter
Twitter is trivial, annoying and pointless. Really? I suppose you have to figure out what it might be good for. For me, the idea that you can have SMS style news feeds from Spacecrafts and Telescopes is pretty amazing.
Image of the LCROSS Lunar Impact site!
In less than 24 hours the LCROSS will smash into the Cabeus crater 100km from the Lunar south pole. I've already blogged that the idea is to smash into the Lunar surface with one part of the spacecraft, and have the second part fly through the resultant 10km cloud of debris and gather data to see what it found below the surface of the Moon... [...]
Spitzer’s warm images
The Spitzer spacecraft was designed to take infrared pictures of the cosmos. From its launch in Aug 2003 until May 2009 it has manged to take some amazing pictures of the universe. To accompish this it use a coolant which kept the Telescope IR instruments at a chilly 30 degree Kelvin so that its own instruments would not interfere with the [...]