Posts Tagged ‘NightSky’
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 [...]
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 [...]
Sailing on the lakes of Titan
Imagine sailing on a lake on the moon of Titan in a nuclear powered sailing craft with Saturn rising high in the sky above you. There is wind and rain, but its a chilly -180 Celsius where Ethane and Methane flow instead of liquid water in world which has been described as an eerie version of Earth. (more...)
Kids Space/Art Event – Dublin (Draiocht) Nov 14
For those of you with Children over 5.... Family day: Rockets, Stars & Planets Draíocht Celebrating 2009 as the International year of Astronomy, come and explore space with us through art - why not create a night sky of your own! Age 5 - 10 years, all children must be accompanied by an adult. No booking necessary, please wear old [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Using Satellites to check the cloud cover
So how do you check for cloud cover using an IR Satellite image? Turns out there are many satellites beaming information back to earth which is accessible via the internet. A great use for these images is to check the viewing conditions for viewing the stars. I've done a few searches and came up a website which stays reasonably up to [...]
Astonomy Picture of the day – Lagoon Nebula
Cool image of the Lagoon Nebula. Taken as part of the GigaGalaxyZoom Project.
Life after Hubble?
I recently blogged that the absense of Hubble would leave a huge gap in astrophography which didn't seem likely to be filled anytime soon. NASA however just released this amazing photo of M31 (Andromeda galaxy to most of us) showing over 20,000 UV light sources.The image was taken by the SWIFT spacecraft which was launched in 2004. It is the [...]