fletch Posted December 25, 2014 Share Posted December 25, 2014 I enjoyed the Geminids - even with all the light pollution around Atlanta they were still a good show. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
High and Wide Posted January 20, 2015 Share Posted January 20, 2015 This is incredible Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
siddious Posted January 20, 2015 Share Posted January 20, 2015 That is pretty awesome Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Phil Posted January 20, 2015 Author Share Posted January 20, 2015 Amazing. Just amazing. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Keirik Posted January 22, 2015 Share Posted January 22, 2015 Calling all amateur astronomers! Grab your best binoculars and scout out your favorite star-gazing spot, because next week, you’ll have the extremely rare opportunity to watch a very large asteroid make its way past Earth. At about a third of a mile in size, the asteroid 2004 BL86 is slated to come within approximately 745,000 miles of our planet next Monday, Jan. 26. That may sound like a huge distance, but it’s the closest a space rock will come to Earth until 2027 — and the closest 2004 BL86 will get for at least 200 years — offering scientists an exciting opportunity to get a good look at such a large asteroid without posing any threat to the planet. It's an opportunity for space enthusiasts as well, as the asteroid is predicted to be visible in the Northern Hemisphere, through little more than a small telescope or a quality pair of binoculars http://news.yahoo.com/asteroid-to-pass-earth-closely-next-week-195200761.html Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Phil Posted January 22, 2015 Author Share Posted January 22, 2015 I hate when events like this come around, because the light pollution in NYC makes it so difficult to really appreciate events like this. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Keirik Posted January 28, 2015 Share Posted January 28, 2015 Paris (AFP) - Astronomers said Wednesday they had found the first-ever ringed planet beyond our solar system, a super-world with a girdle of halos 200 times bigger than Saturn's. Called J1407b, the giant has a disk of 30-odd rings which is so vast that, had it been around Saturn, it would have dominated our night sky, the proud discoverers said. "It'd be huge! You'd see the rings and the gaps in the rings quite easily from Earth," Matthew Kenworthy of the Leiden Observatory in The Netherlands told AFP. "It'd be several times the size of the full Moon." Kenworthy and Eric Mamajec of New York's University of Rochester trawled through a database of millions of stars photographed by telescopes around the world in an exoplanet search project called SuperWASP http://news.yahoo.com/faraway-planet-lord-rings-152706151.html Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Albatrosss Posted February 3, 2015 Share Posted February 3, 2015 What a sight that must be Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
I am Scags Posted February 3, 2015 Share Posted February 3, 2015 This is incredible So amazing. To even try and comprehend the vastness of the universe and space is mind blowing. And that is only THE nearest Galaxy to ours, 1 out of the billions of others out beyond that. I wish I could find it but I always love the little diagram that highlights the small little space of our own galaxy and how in that little window that is all the stars we can view in the night sky with our naked eyes. Dumb question, the vast gaps between galaxies, like for example the Milky way and Andromena, is that just open space or are there stars out there as well that are not a part of a galaxy? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RangersRule2 Posted February 5, 2015 Share Posted February 5, 2015 I hate when events like this come around, because the light pollution in NYC makes it so difficult to really appreciate events like this. Come on out to the suburbs... And check out NEAF: http://www.rocklandastronomy.com/neaf.html Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RangersRule2 Posted February 5, 2015 Share Posted February 5, 2015 So amazing. To even try and comprehend the vastness of the universe and space is mind blowing. And that is only THE nearest Galaxy to ours, 1 out of the billions of others out beyond that. I wish I could find it but I always love the little diagram that highlights the small little space of our own galaxy and how in that little window that is all the stars we can view in the night sky with our naked eyes. Hubble Deep and Ultra-Deep Fields. Dumb question, the vast gaps between galaxies, like for example the Milky way and Andromena, is that just open space or are there stars out there as well that are not a part of a galaxy? Mostly empty space.....you do NOT see random stars.....globular clusters orbit above and below the galactic plane. GC's are anywhere from thousands to millions of stars. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Keirik Posted February 19, 2015 Share Posted February 19, 2015 Almost a quarter of a million humans had the guts to apply, and now, two years on, the names of 100 hopeful space explorers who are still in the running for a one-way ticket to Mars have just been released to the public. We?ve known for some time that we are exhausting our planet and that Earth?s limited resources cannot sustain our ever-burgeoning population. And while various possible ?solutions? have been thrown out, such as building sustainable floating cities in the ocean, migrating to Mars seems to be the most popular idea. The proposal may seem radical and maybe even unfeasible to some, at least within this half of the century anyway, but there are people who think it?s doable, including big names in space travel like SpaceX?s Elon Musk. In fact, there?s even a project that?s already taking steps toward getting humans to the Red Planet within the next decade, called Mars One, and they?ve been gradually whittling down the Homo sapiens they think would be suitable to help establish a permanent settlement. Since the application process opened in 2013, more than 202,000 aspiring astronauts applied to the nonprofit foundation to help make this dream become a reality. This was rapidly slashed to just over 1,000 in the first round, then to 660. Now, after online interviews with Mars One medical director Norbert Kraft, these have been culled to just 100. http://www.iflscience.com/space/mars-one-mission-whittles-potential-candidates-down-final-100 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Phil Posted March 3, 2015 Author Share Posted March 3, 2015 Scientists say they are hugely excited to learn the origin of two bright spots on the surface of Ceres. The US space agency's Dawn probe is bearing down on the dwarf planet and on Friday will be captured by its gravity. That will allow the satellite to spiral down in altitude in the coming months, to take ever sharper images of the spots, which sit inside a wide crater. The striking features could be where an impact has dug out surface deposits and exposed the dwarf's interior layers. But deputy project scientist Dr Carol Raymond cautioned that the resolution of Dawn's imagery was not good enough at the moment to make any definitive statements. -- http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-31702639 -- NASA just released numerous images patched together as a GIF: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Phil Posted October 15, 2015 Author Share Posted October 15, 2015 Boyajian wrote up a paper on possible explanations for the star?s bizarre behavior, and it was published recently in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. But she also sent her data to fellow astronomer Jason Wright, a Penn State University researcher who helped developed a protocol for seeking signs of unearthly civilization, wondering what he would make of it. To Wright, it looked like the kind of star he and his colleagues had been waiting for. If none of the ordinary reasons for the star?s flux quite seemed to fit, perhaps an extraordinary one was in order. Aliens. Or, to be more specific, something built by aliens ? a ?swarm of megastructures,? as he told the Atlantic, likely outfitted with solar panels to collect energy from the star. To be sure, both Boyajian and Wright believe the possibility of alien megastructures around KIC 8462852 is very, very remote. It?s worthy of hypothesis, Wright told Slate, ?but we should also approach it skeptically.? Yet compared to the vast majority of supposed sightings of signs of extraterrestrial life, this one has some credibility. Here?s why: KIC 8462852 was discovered through Planet Hunters, a citizen science program launched at Yale University in 2010. Using data from the Kepler Space Telescope, volunteers sift through records of brightness levels from roughly 150,000 stars beyond our solar system. http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/10/15/the-strange-star-that-has-serious-scientists-talking-about-an-alien-megastructure/ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Keirik Posted October 15, 2015 Share Posted October 15, 2015 ^ I was reading about that yesterday. I suppose it's interesting, but the most wild hypothesis usually is the least likely to be true. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mentosman42 Posted October 16, 2015 Share Posted October 16, 2015 Tell that to Einstein ;) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Keirik Posted October 16, 2015 Share Posted October 16, 2015 For every Einstein there are a million Ancient Alien believers lol Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Phil Posted October 16, 2015 Author Share Posted October 16, 2015 No doubt it's a wild hypothesis, and I won't believe in aliens until I see them, but I also refuse to accept the notion that in a universe this vast that this is the only planet with life. It's just so unbelievably odd for that to be the case. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tonybologna Posted October 16, 2015 Share Posted October 16, 2015 I thought the reason they're seriously considering this is because it actually explains the situation better then anything else they came up with. Not that it makes the alien hypothesis likely, but it makes it more likely than any other explanation they've come up with. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Phil Posted October 16, 2015 Author Share Posted October 16, 2015 Correct, though still "wild" in its own right. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Respecttheblue Posted October 17, 2015 Share Posted October 17, 2015 ^ I was reading about that yesterday. I suppose it's interesting, but the most wild hypothesis usually is the least likely to be true. Ditto and ditto the other day. maybe catastrophic crashes in the asteroid belt, maybe a giant collision in the planetary system that spewed debris into the solar system, maybe small proto-planets shrouded in a Pig-Pen-like cloud of dust. But every explanation was lacking in some way, with the exception of one: Perhaps a family of comets orbiting KIC 8462852 had been disturbed by the passage of another nearby star. That would have sent chunks of ice and rock flying inward, explaining both the dips and their irregularity. It would be “an extraordinary coincidence,” as the Atlantic put it, for that to have happened at exactly the right moment for humans to catch it on a telescope that’s only been aloft since 2009. “That’s a narrow band of time, cosmically speaking.” Then again, KIC 8462852 itself is extraordinary. Of the 150,000 or so stars within view of the Kepler Telescope, it is the only one to flicker and dim in this unusual way. Almost kinda shameless piece of writing for the WAPO. It was full of typos the other day too, at least they cleaned it up since. Don't get me wrong I'm not anti the idea of possibilities -- heck I used to have the house full of Macs hooked into SETI over a decade ago — I'd think it likely at some point for there to be even weirder life forms than those that dwell way below the surface of the ocean ;) if those aren't weird enough for ya, given the enormous size of the universe. But, they have these more plausible hypotheses, but no, they have to go with the wildest: a swarm of megastructures. Can't believe the WAPO dabbles in this. I'd be more than happy to listen to it in an insomniac night on Coast To Coast AM, for frivolous entertainment, but not in the WAPO. Glad to find this thread though. I used to go star watching a lot while walking the dog -- took a few years off while my neck was super bad. Now I just need a new prescrip as my eyes are fuzzier. Western Nassau County is not the greatest for seeing a lot of things with the naked eye, but there's plenty to get you well started on your knowledge of various stars and constellations. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Respecttheblue Posted October 17, 2015 Share Posted October 17, 2015 Wasn't such a bad night for dog walking and star-gazing -- usual suspects -- the summer triangle Deneb, Vega and Altair is prominent but well on the slippery slope to sliding off the WNW horizon one of these days. And when it's gone, well I'll look forward to it's return with warm weather again next year. Capella and her constellation were about 45 degrees up in the NE sky like an expensive diamond necklace on display on black velvet. Pleiades I can just about make out with my glasses on. They are fuzzy now. Almost used to be able to make out all individual stars in Pleiades with a bit of effort, not so any more; definitely time for a new prescription. And Perseus is still easy enough to check out without having to lie on one's back. A lot of trees around so many others are cut off from view. I used to come in and check out sky and telescope after a walk, and one of the other online astronomy magazines, but the app Skeye, or whatever it's proper name is, does a nice job as a cheat sheet. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tonybologna Posted October 19, 2015 Share Posted October 19, 2015 For some reason the one constellation I always spot without even trying is Cassiopeia, that damn M/W in the night sky pops out at me like no other. And when I try to get people to see it they can't sometimes. But I struggle with the dippers sometimes. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Phil Posted October 22, 2015 Author Share Posted October 22, 2015 http://www.iflscience.com/sites/www.iflscience.com/files/styles/ifls_large/public/blog/%5Bnid%5D/sn-mikyway.jpg?itok=HZeiCoUD So, yeah. This image is pretty big. Astronomers have stitched together a high-resolution view of the Milky Way, which measures an astonishing 46 billion pixels and comes in at 194 gigabytes. Yikes. Fortunately, you don?t need to download the whole thing to observe it. A handy online tool lets you browse and scan the entire image to your heart?s content, which includes the entire ribbon of our galaxy as seen from Earth. The image, created by observations taken over five years, spans a 1,323-square-degree area of the sky, which is 6,500 times bigger than the full Moon appears in the sky. The image was created by a team of astronomers from the Ruhr University Bochum in Germany and described in a paper in Astronomical Notes. They used an observatory in the Atacama Desert in Chile to create the image, stitching together multiple images of the night sky as part of the Galactic Disk Survey (GDS). The image itself had to be divided into 268 sections. http://www.iflscience.com/space/46-billion-pixel-view-milky-way-largest-space-image-ever-created Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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