400 years ago Galileo Galilei made himself a telescope and looked up at the stars only to find that Saturn was not quite circular, Jupiter had moons and the Moon was covered in creaters. To celebrate the anniversary of this event, the year 2009 was deemed the International Year of Astronomy 2009.
As part of IYA2009, a team [...]
I have just found myself in possession of a DVD called Eyes on the Skies. I watched a few minutes of it just now and it looks very interesting. It seems that anyone can get a copy. Eyes on the Skies is a book and a movie that is freely available for public events carried out by [...]
Next week is Moonwatch week and if you’re holding an event locally you might want to use one of these posters to advertise it on your front gate or local lamp posts. A Twitter success story.
I have updated and expanded the collection of ISS- and Hubble-spotting Twitter feeds. You can get the low down on these transit-predicting feeds on my Over Twitter page, which also now features a map showing the list of current feeds and the next expected transit information.
Stuart (Astronomy Blog) has been busy since the .Astronomy Conference and has come up with a rather nifty tool called Spacebuzz. This one-page website uses blog tags to compile a list of the current hop topics in the astronomy blogosphere.
I was tinkering about earlier and created this automator script, which changes my desktop image to be today’s APOD (Astronomy Picture of the Day). This is Mac OS X only.
Tonight, July 5, look west and you’ll see a temporary “Belt of Three Stars”. Saturn, Mars and the star Regulus are sitting by Leo in a chance alignment that literally will only happen tonight. Very cool.
Spectrometers are used, like prisms, to spread light out into the component colours. This enables us to understand the compositions of everything from stars to streetlights. Here I show you how to make your own spectrometer and give you a few examples of what you can see with it.
Black Hole Hunter is an online game. This relates to a post of mine from last week about the sounds of gravity waves. If you like listening to white noise and looking at graphs then this is the game for you!
Copyright © 2009 Robert J. Simpson. Twitter @orbitingfrog
