Tonight: A Line of Planets
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.
Try This
Make Your Own Spectrometer
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
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!
The Font Sizes of the Planets
A nifty graphic showing the sizes of the planets, moons, comets, asteroids and plutoids in relative font sizes. Best viewed very large!
Wordle
Wordle is a website that lets you create word clouds of text. I have been playing with astronomy and astrophysics text to see what comes out the other end. Some of them are very pretty!
Solar Eclipse 2008
August 1st 2008 will see a solar eclipse visible across much of Asia, Europe, the Middle East and some portions of North America. The eclipse is often being called the 2008 Olympic Eclipse because it comes just days before the commencement of the Summer Olympics in Beijing.
Listen to Gravity
Gravity waves can be interpreted as sounds. Here are some of the gravity-sounds that would be made by black holes, pulsars and other massive objects.
Air Pressure and Coke Cans
Another physics experiment you can perform in your kitchen. This time let’s crush a can using just pressure. We will create a vacuum and then see how powerful air pressure can be. Oh and we crush things!
Making Craters with Down2Earth
Here is a great astronomy website for some fun this weekend called Down2Earth. You input some parameters and then simulate an asteroid impact on Earth. You can select the asteroid’s size, speed, density and target material. Try it out! (Screenshots inside).
