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Space and Astronomy Thread |
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#2151 |
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Join Date: Jul 2007
Location: Zummerzet
Posts: 293
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Quote:
They certainly did
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#2152 |
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Forum Member
Join Date: Dec 2004
Location: Closed
Posts: 7,796
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Live audio feed of meteor 'pings' available at http://spaceweatherradio.com/
There's a bit of a whistle noise which fades in and out, but I've definitely heard a few in the last hour or so. Should be quite noisy at Perseid peak tomorrow night. ![]() http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/s...r-Britain.html |
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#2153 |
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Forum Member
Join Date: Nov 2004
Location: Solihull
Posts: 7,269
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Sat in a hot tub in the Elveden Centreparcs on the night of the 12th and watched the Perseids. Despite only having a small section of sky to see we counted about 6 very bright meteors and by sheer chance the ISS - not a bad night's observation! If only all astronomy could be done in such conditions
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#2154 |
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Guest
Join Date: Jun 2010
Posts: 3,812
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Nice work, I sat out after the closing ceremony and watched for an hour, counted up to 3 per minute at one point. It’s been good weather recently, starting to get back into observing. From my garden I have trees blocking all views to the east up to and altitude of 20 degree, finally Andromeda has started breaking above that and I’ve been getting some great views of M31, managing to pick out dust lanes and see it's companion satellite galaxies. Going for an depth view of Perseus this week if the weather’s good, there’s a huge concentration of galaxies lurking in there...albeit 250 million light years away so they’re nothing more than a smudge!!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perseus_Cluster |
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#2155 |
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Forum Member
Join Date: Apr 2005
Location: Crawley, West Sussex
Posts: 9,295
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Near-Earth Asteroid:
According to SpaceWeather.com Quote:
A relatively large asteroid, just discovered on August 28th, will fly past the Earth-Moon system on Sept 14th only 2.8 million km (7.4 lunar distances) away. 2012 QG42 is about as wide as three football fields and comes to us from just beyond the orbit of Mars. Astronomers who are now monitoring the space rock say it shines about as brightly as a 15th magnitude star.
Do not be led into thinking that you will be able to nip outside and see this thing whizzing by. Despite the possible impression given by the wording, a 15th magnitude star is in fact very faint indeed and you would need a fairly large telescope to stand any chance at all of even glimpsing this relatively distant object.
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#2156 |
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Forum Member
Join Date: Jan 2006
Location: Sitting at my PC
Posts: 9,435
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Hello stargazing chums. I have been wanting a telescope for some time and , having been given some Amazon vouchers for my birthday, I am going to buy one. But which one? My budget is less than 200 of your Earth pounds but I want to be able to see stuff.
I am also a complete beginner, only having had a pair of binoculars to use up till now. I broke the thingy that fits the binoculars to the tripod recently so I havent been able to use them because you can't see anything if you hand hold them
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#2157 |
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Forum Member
Join Date: Jun 2006
Posts: 19,566
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Quote:
Hello stargazing chums. I have been wanting a telescope for some time and , having been given some Amazon vouchers for my birthday, I am going to buy one. But which one? My budget is less than 200 of your Earth pounds but I want to be able to see stuff.
I am also a complete beginner, only having had a pair of binoculars to use up till now. I broke the thingy that fits the binoculars to the tripod recently so I havent been able to use them because you can't see anything if you hand hold them ![]() |
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#2158 |
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Forum Member
Join Date: Jul 2003
Location: Stoke-On-Trent
Posts: 7,158
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35 Years Ago today since the launch of Voyager 1
Interresting Presentation at JPL today to celebrate the Program. http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/25191976 |
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#2159 |
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Forum Member
Join Date: Jun 2004
Location: location location
Posts: 28,248
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#2160 |
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Forum Member
Join Date: Jun 2004
Location: location location
Posts: 28,248
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Stellarium. Watching humanity's satellites drift past (CO-56) or just hang there (AO-40).
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#2161 |
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Forum Member
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Storbritannia
Posts: 28,916
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Quote:
Hello stargazing chums. I have been wanting a telescope for some time and , having been given some Amazon vouchers for my birthday, I am going to buy one. But which one? My budget is less than 200 of your Earth pounds but I want to be able to see stuff.
I am also a complete beginner, only having had a pair of binoculars to use up till now. I broke the thingy that fits the binoculars to the tripod recently so I havent been able to use them because you can't see anything if you hand hold them ![]() |
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#2162 |
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Forum Member
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Storbritannia
Posts: 28,916
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News Updates...
Dark energy camera snaps first images ahead of survey
The most powerful sky-scanning camera yet built has begun its quest to pin down the mysterious stuff that makes up nearly three-quarters of our Universe...The goal is to discover the nature of dark energy, which is theorised to be responsible for the ever-faster expansion of the Universe. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-19634700 NASA's Dawn probe has departed the giant asteroid Vesta and is now on its way to Ceres, the largest asteroid "As we respectfully say goodbye to Vesta and reflect on the amazing discoveries over the past year, we eagerly look forward to the next phase of our adventure at Ceres, where even more exciting discoveries await," said Robert Mase, Dawn project manager, based at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov/feature_sto...arts_vesta.asp http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceres_%28dwarf_planet%29 Astronomers see bright impact on gas giant Jupiter Amateur astronomers in the United States of America have reported a bright fireball in the Jupiter clouds tops as a result of an apparent impact. The first to see and report the event was amateur astronomer Dan Peterson from Racine, Wisconsin, who just happened to be observing the gas giant through his 300-mm LX200 'scope when the fireball burst into view. http://www.astronomynow.com/news/n1209/11jupiter/ Another Atlas 5 readied to launch mini space shuttle United Launch Alliance's Atlas-Centaur rocket has been put together for deploying the Air Force's third Orbital Test Vehicle flight, a mission that will demonstrate the reusability of the X-37B spaceplane when it blasts off Oct. 25. http://spaceflightnow.com/atlas/av034/stacking.html |
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#2163 |
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Forum Member
Join Date: Jul 2003
Location: Stoke-On-Trent
Posts: 7,158
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#2164 |
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Forum Member
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Storbritannia
Posts: 28,916
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Quote:
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#2165 |
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Forum Member
Join Date: Jul 2005
Posts: 7,683
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According to my notebook....
18th July 2011.... Russia launches a telescope that will be 1000 times sharper than Hubble..... quite an extravagent claim to make... I wonder, did things work out that way ? |
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#2166 |
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Forum Member
Join Date: Apr 2005
Location: Crawley, West Sussex
Posts: 9,295
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Possible bright comet end of next year
Apparently a new comet has just been discovered which may become quite bright towards the end of 2013. There is not enough information yet available for them to make any definitive predictions so we will have to wait and see.
Rather technical announcement here. |
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#2167 |
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Inactive Member
Join Date: Jun 2006
Location: ♫ At The Keyboard ♫
Posts: 11,556
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Quote:
Apparently a new comet has just been discovered which may become quite bright towards the end of 2013. There is not enough information yet available for them to make any definitive predictions so we will have to wait and see.
Rather technical announcement here. http://www.popastro.com/news/newsdetail.php?id_nw=142 http://astrobob.areavoices.com/2012/...-in-fall-2013/ http://astronomynow.com/news/n1209/25comet/ http://www.skymania.com/wp/2012/09/c...013.html/6978/ |
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#2168 |
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Forum Member
Join Date: Nov 2008
Location: London
Posts: 4,020
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Quote:
According to my notebook....
18th July 2011.... Russia launches a telescope that will be 1000 times sharper than Hubble..... quite an extravagent claim to make... I wonder, did things work out that way ?
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#2169 |
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Forum Member
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Storbritannia
Posts: 28,916
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Draconid meteor shower reaches its peak tomorrow...
This shower is a moderate shower and can produce a reasonable amount of meteors. It's worth looking for them tonight and the next couple of nights: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draconids
The relatively poor Southern Taurids shower peaks on 10 October and the moderate Delta Aurigids shower peaks on 11 October. More info below: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Taurids http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_Aurigids List of forthcoming meteor showers ...and now for more astro news: Australia unveils powerful radio telescope Australia has launched one of the world's fastest telescopes tasked with surveying outer space and probing the origins of stars and galaxies. The Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (Askap) in Western Australia's outback has 36 antennas with a diameter of 12m (40ft) each. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-19840545 A curious cold layer in the atmosphere of Venus But in a new analysis based on five years of observations using ESA's Venus Express, scientists have uncovered a very chilly layer at temperatures of around -175 degrees C in the atmosphere 125 km above the planet's surface. The curious cold layer is far frostier than any part of Earth's atmosphere, for example, despite Venus being much closer to the Sun. http://www.astronomynow.com/news/n1210/02venus/ SpaceX Dragon set to blast off to space station A privately owned rocket was poised to blast off Sunday night on the first of a dozen space station supply missions under a mega-contract with NASA. It will be the second time that the California-based SpaceX company tries to launch a Dragon capsule to the International Space Station. Last May, a test flight went well. Now the real work is about to begin under a $1.6 billion contract between NASA and SpaceX. This will be the first of 12 resupply missions under that contract. http://www.foxnews.com/science/2012/...space-station/ NASA wants to send astronauts beyond the Moon Top NASA officials have picked a leading candidate for the agency's next major mission: construction of a new outpost that would send astronauts farther from Earth than at any time in history. The so-called "gateway spacecraft" would hover in orbit on the far side of the moon, support a small astronaut crew and function as a staging area for future missions to the moon and Mars. At 277,000 miles from Earth, the outpost would be far more remote than the current space station, which orbits a little more than 200 miles above Earth. The distance raises complex questions of how to protect astronauts from the radiation of deep space — and rescue them if something goes wrong. http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/...charlie-bolden NASA's Swift Satellite Discovers A New Black Hole In Our Galaxy NASA's Swift satellite recently detected a rising tide of high-energy X-rays from a source toward the center of our Milky Way galaxy. The outburst, produced by a rare X-ray nova, announced the presence of a previously unknown stellar-mass black hole. "Bright X-ray novae are so rare that they're essentially once-a-mission events and this is the first one Swift has seen," said Neil Gehrels, the mission's principal investigator, at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "This is really something we've been waiting for." http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2012...lack_Hole.html |
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#2170 |
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Forum Member
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Storbritannia
Posts: 28,916
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Successful launch of SpaceX's Dragon capsule
A commercial cargo ship rocketed into orbit Sunday in pursuit of the International Space Station, the first of a dozen supply runs under a mega-contract with NASA. It was the second launch of a Dragon capsule to the orbiting lab by the California-based SpaceX company. The first was last spring.
http://www.boston.com/business/techn...oPM/story.html http://www.itwire.com/science-news/s...-space-station (launch video) |
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#2171 |
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Forum Member
Join Date: Jun 2004
Location: location location
Posts: 28,248
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That smooth SpaceX launch? Turns out one of the engines exploded
I think that's a feature not a bug, an awesome example of engineering fault tolerance.
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#2172 |
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Forum Member
Join Date: Nov 2009
Location: Southampton
Posts: 11,805
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Very good thread. When I help run church camps in the summer, they're in the country side and we get the clearest skys around there! Just beautiful.
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#2173 |
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Forum Member
Join Date: Jul 2003
Location: Stoke-On-Trent
Posts: 7,158
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Voyager: To the Final Frontier
BBC Four, tomorrow night at 9pm. Quote:
This is the story of the most extraordinary journey in human exploration, the Voyager space mission.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01nj48v
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#2174 |
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Inactive Member
Join Date: Jun 2012
Location: Josameto
Posts: 5,231
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Here's something to drive the conspiracy nuts crazy. MSL Self Portrait.
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#2175 |
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Forum Member
Join Date: Nov 2008
Location: London
Posts: 4,020
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Quote:
Here's something to drive the conspiracy nuts crazy. MSL Self Portrait.
That was the first thing I thought when I saw that 'photo', who's going to be the first to ask "Who took it?".
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That was the first thing I thought when I saw that 'photo', who's going to be the first to ask "Who took it?".