Category Archives: Astronomy
Gutenberg Gem: Half-hours with the Telescope by Richard A. Proctor
Today’s Gutenberg Gem is a neat little astronomy book, published in 1873 by Richard A. Proctor. It lists a number of half hour tours of the sky, each highlighting either a set of constellations or planets. It’s pretty brief, and certainly better modern guides exist, but it’s still a neat little thing to peruse through, for perspective if nothing else.
Half-hours with the Telescope by Richard A. Proctor – Project Gutenberg
Eggs Stand on End at the Autumnal Equinox
Well, it’s hardly surprising, given that you can (with a little effort) stand them on end pretty much every day of the year. But today’s Astronomy Picture of the Day features Bad Astronomy’s Phil Plait demonstrating that egg stability seems to be unphased by changes in the seasons.
Still, today marks the beginning of fall. If I was in someplace that actually had seasons, I’d be watching the leaves turn. No such luck.
Addendum: Bad Astronomy has a blog too.
Shane Ross on Dynamics, Control & Computation
In a thread on Slashdot on calculating spacecraft trajectories to Mars some helpful individual pointed at Shane Ross’ Dynamics, Control & Computation page. Lots of good information on celestial mechanics.
The Tears of Saint Lawrence
This weekend marks the annual return of the Tears of Saint Lawrence: better known to those of us in the amateur astronomy community as the Perseid Meteor shower. If you haven’t trekked out somewhere dark recently to gaze at the annual shower, try reading Sky and Telescope magazine’s coverage.
The sky will be moonless, so the view should be pretty good. Rates often hit one a minute. I’ve seen some amazing fireballs in the predawn hours of this shower, so get out and have a peek at one of the cool sights available from our small terrestrial vantage point.
Deep Impact, the Movie
Check out this movie of the impactor as viewed from the flyby spacecraft. Cool.
No Dinosaurs Left on Tempel 1
Tonight the Deep Impact space probe impacted Comet Tempel 1. I’m watching the coverage life on NASA TV. We can expect to see a photo from the flyby space craft to be all over the front pages tomorrow. Congratulations to all those rocket scientists. Cool stuff.
Tutorial on Deconvolution
By way of (gasp!) a useful Slashdot comment, here is a tutorial on deconvolution produced by the NRAO.
What can I say? I read stuff like this for fun.
Free Mag 7 Star Charts
A cool freebie: Free Mag 7 Star Charts distributed under a Creative Commons license. Can’t beat the cost!
Moon-Watching Mars Rover Catches Deimos Crossing the Sun
Space.com reports that the Spirit rover caught these photos of Mars’ moon Deimos crossing the solar disk: in other words, a Martian solar eclipse. Very cool. You can get a version of the loop here as an mpeg or here as an animated gif. Compare these to my crude transit of Mercury that I recorded back in 1999.
Cool stuff.
Porter Garden Telescope
Want to own a tiny bit of telescope making history? Check out the Porter Garden Telescope, which according to an email from the owner will be up for sale shortly. There is one currently on display at the Chabot Science Center as well, in case you don’t have the means to pick one up.
It is certainly possible to own a larger telescope, but it would be difficult to own one that’s cooler.
Iron/Nickel Meteorite Found
In itself, meteorites are not uncommon, but what’s pretty cool is that the Mars rover Opportunity managed to land close to a basketball sized one lying on the surface of Mars. You can read more in NASA’s press release.
CMU developed a project to find meteorites in Antartica using an autonomous robot that could search the frozen plains for these bits of stellar flotsam. Of course, there are other, more labor intensive ways to find Antarctic meteorites too.
Webcam Images From Titan
The ESA/JPL has released the tiny image you see to the right and provided us with some background, but this image is as big as it gets: you can’t seem to find a higher resolution image anywhere online. Sigh. Do they only have a camera phone onboard?
Huygens Down Safe, Pictures To Come Here
The ESA is reporting that the Huygens lander survived it’s descent to Titan, and is transmitting data. According to JPL, the first images should be received around 11:45 PST. Kick ass! As soon as pictures are available, I’ll link ’em up here.
Update: In what quite possibly have been the singularly most dull and boring press conference ever convened, a single image taken from 16km was released on NASA TV, followed by ten minutes of people talking about their feelings. Sigh. I’ll post a link to the real image when I find it: this was screen snapped from the RealPlayer stream on NASA TV.
Not much to see here, other than the fairly obvious rivulets which suggest erosion processes. I’ll post more when I’ve got more.
Cassini snaps pictures of Iapetus
The Cassini probe has taken some awfully nice pictures, including this one of the moon Iapetus. The equatorial ridge is really very odd.
The most unique, and perhaps most remarkable feature discovered on Iapetus in Cassini images is a topographic ridge that coincides almost exactly with the geographic equator. The ridge is conspicuous in the picture as an approximately 20-kilometer wide (12 miles) band that extends from the western (left) side of the disc almost to the day/night boundary on the right. On the left horizon, the peak of the ridge reaches at least 13 kilometers (8 miles) above the surrounding terrain. Along the roughly 1,300 kilometer (800 mile) length over which it can be traced in this picture, it remains almost exactly parallel to the equator within a couple of degrees. The physical origin of the ridge has yet to be explained. It is not yet clear whether the ridge is a mountain belt that has folded upward, or an extensional crack in the surface through which material from inside Iapetus erupted onto the surface and accumulated locally, forming the ridge. The origin of Cassini Regio is a long-standing debate among scientists. One theory proposes that its dark material may have erupted onto Iapetus’s icy surface from the interior. Another theory holds that the dark material represented accumulated debris ejected by impact events on dark, outer satellites of Saturn. Details of this Cassini image mosaic do not definitively rule out either of the theories. However, they do provide important new insights and constraints.