Ever since people looked at the stars, they have given bright stars (and groups of stars) names. In the western world a lot of those names are arabic names that have been around for millennia. In science, stars are generally referred to by a Bayer Designation (a greek letter and the constellation name) or a catalog number. About a decade ago, the International Astronomical Union , which is the…
So, N years later, how is that going? It was going pretty well, but then there was a pandemic with lock-downs and curfews, which rather restricted access to dark skies.The obvious fix was to obtain access to dark skies, by way of a holiday house in the Wimmera. In the mean time there were also a bunch of revolutions in astronomy, mostly to blame on open hardware. That means it is now possible to…
It s been a while since I did a blog, so after twiddling the way the front page of the site displays, it s time to post a new one. The attached photo is of my favourite dark nebula, "The Dark Doodad". What looks like a long thin nebula is apparently a sheet over 40 light years wide that we happen to be seeing edge-on. On the left you can see a few dark tendrils that are par of the coal sack…
It s been a good three years now since I swapped my HP laptop for a Macbook Pro. In the mean time, I ve started doing a bit more astrophotography and of course the change of operating system has affected the tools I use to obtain and process photos. Amateur astronomers have traditionally mostly used Windows, so there are a lot of Windows tools, both freeware and payware, to help. I used to run the…
From time to time you see photos pop up on the internet that show off bits of the northern sky. A good example is a montage of the Moon and Andromeda that show what size Andromeda would be in the sky, if only it were actuallty visible to the naked eye. Bad Astronomy did a blog post on that one and explained that though the image is fake, the relative sizes are pretty much correct. However, that s…
Like many people, I love the beautiful images we receive from space telescopes and spacecraft that orbit other worlds in the solar system. Also like many other people, I expect, I never really stop to think how we get those images, just assuming they get sent to earth via some magic space internet. However, there is no internet (magic or otherwise, yet) in space and getting the data to create…
A few weeks ago I noticed a retweet by ESA , asking for expression of interest from space enthusiasts to attend and social-media (verb) the inauguration of a new antenna at their New Norcia deep space tracking site in Western Australia. That site is used to communicate with deep space missions such as Rosetta and Gaia . After some um-ing and ah-ing, I decided to apply. After all, when I m on…
At last week s telescope driver training I found out that Melbourne contains a 1 to 1 billion scale model of the solar system . It s an artwork by Cameron Robbins and Christopher Lansell . The Sun is located at St Kilda marina and the planets are spaced out along the beach and foreshore back towards the city. Since the weather was lovely today, I thought ... why not? The guide says you can walk…
I trek out to a fairly dark sky site on the odd Friday evening to partake of some amateur astronomy at an observatory in the Dandenong ranges. A few weeks ago, we decided to have a go at locating what was then a fairly dim object, C/2014 Q2. We found it with binoculars and in a relatively small (10") telescope. I d just gotten a tripod-mounted motor drive for my DSLR, so of course we decided to…
A while ago, I was contacted by MobileZap , a reseller of mobile phone accessories and asked if I was interested in reviewing an iPhone zoom lens attachment. Unfortunately the widget only attached to the iPhone 5S - mine s a 5c - so I wasn t able to. I also mostly do wide angle photography (landscapes) so a zoom lens would be sort of wasted on me anyway. When browsing the website, I did stumble…