Of course, since this object has not cleared its orbit, I suppose it must actually be an exodwarfplanet.

Dark Matter & Dark Energy - [Read More about Dark Matter and Dark Energy]

Dark matter is hypothetical matter that feels no effect from electromagnetism, so we cannot see it. Its presence can only be inferred by the gravitational influence it exerts. Galaxy’s do not rotate as expected from Newtonian dyanamics. The Coma cluster of galaxies also has properites that gravity cannot explain.

Dark energy is similarly mysterious but even less easy to understand. It is a kind of energy that permeates the whole universe, driving it apart and causing it to expand. These two things together purportedly make up 96% of the content of the Universe.

Physical cosmologists study dark matter and dark energy with great interest. Change their names to ‘gravity not doing it what it should’ and things can look slightly different. A branch of physics labelled MOND (MOdified Newtonian Dynamics) tries to explain the observational evidence without adding in unknown forms of matter and energy. There are also many scientists who feel that ‘dark energy’ gives the wrong impresion and that this stuff might be normal matter that we simply don’t see for some reason.

So either gravity is wrong or matter is. That is quite a dilemma for astrophysicists to resolve.

Gravitational Waves - [Read More about Gravitational Waves]

Now, I’ve gotten in trouble before for having a beef with gravitational waves, so I’ll try to be kinder here. Gravitational waves are fluctuations in the curvature of spacetime which transmit the energy of gravity and propagate its effects through the universe. Light’s energy is transmitted to us by fluctuations in the electromagnetic field, this would be an alternative spectrum of waves, detectable by completely different means.

The study of gravitational waves has received a nobel prize (1993, I think?) when they were indirectly detected in a binary system containing a pulsar. The orbital energy in the binary system was seen to decay in exact accordance with the theories of gravitational wave physics.

Einstein’s general relativity explains gravitational waves very well  - in fact if gravitational waves don’t exists there is a big problem. The problem comes along when you find out that no one has ever detected a gravitational wave. People have been trying for quite some time.

I often see graphs which explain this lack of detection. Basically gravity waves may just be too subtle to be detected by current methods. The answer is to build larger, more complicated observatories (in space preferably). The plans are already made. If they don’t find them then, either a new idea gets floated, or a new graph gets drawn and an even bigger detector is created.

I hope they find them before too much money gets spent!

The Higgs Boson - [Read More about the Higgs Boson]

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) had to be shut down for a little while and so its main target: the Higgs Boson remains an unknown and unverifiable character.

Imagine you had a really nice cake. You studied this cake for a long time and you managed to figure out exactly how it was made. You could tell me the proportions and nature of the original ingredients, the length of time for which it was baked even the exact colourings used in the icing. What you don’t know though, is the type of spoon that the cook used. Without knowing this you will never truly have understood how the cake was made - and you will never managed to recreate it. If it turns out that there was no spoon then your whole theory falls apart!

The Higgs Boson is that spoon.

Without the Higgs Boson the whole framework of our understanding of particle physics is incomplete. The LHC should be able to detect it. If it can’t, then there may be a problem and the standard model of patricles will need to be reconsidered. If it is found then we would have a complete understanding of the particles that make up the Universe. That would be profound and powerful. We may find out one way or the other in 2009.

Panspermia - [Read More about Panspermia]

How did life on Earth begin? Well one ides is that it came to our little rock from space. This notion is called Panspermia and it is actually as old as modern science. Early musings on evolution in the 18th Century considered that the original germs came from space.

Fred Hoyle (who died in 2001) and Chandra Wickramasinghe (who is now based in Cardiff’s astrobiology centre) were early proponents of Panspermia in its modern form. They also suggested that lifeforms continue to enter the Earth’s atmosphere, and that they might still cause epidemics and provide new genetic material for the planet.

The problem with Panspermia is that it solves a complicated problem (how did life spontaneously begin on Earth) with an even more complicated one (how did life spontaneously begin elsewhere and then travel across billions of miles of interstellar space). For this reason, many need a lot of convincing about the idea.

String Theory - [Read More about String Theory]

String Theory is the name given to a branch of physics and maths that aims to describe the Universe in terms of multi-dimensional vibrating strings. No this isn’t Pratchett. It would be a way to combine the as-yet irreconcilable theories of quantum mechanics and general relativity - this is something of a holy grail in modern physics.

String theory is a broad name for a collection of theories - some of which disagree with each other - but all of which boil down to the principle described above. The trick is, you cannot disprove string theory. You would need an experiment so large and powerful that it would require orders of scale larger than our Solar System. We are a very, very long way from achieving this.

The strings themselves would be so fantastically small as to be possibly prohibited from measurement by nature itself. Lengths and timescales so minute that we could never measure them.

One hope for string theory is that we may see evidence of hidden dimensions when the LHC begins operations. However this could also be evidence of other things, and not necessarily but a win for string theory.

For these reasons, many consider string theory not to be science, but rather mathematics. However, one day in the distant future we build the right apparatus and experimentally test this outlandishly cool idea. It may be right - or it may just be a mathematically self-consistent way to explain particle physics and gravity.

Summary

Popular ideas are not always good ones, nor are they necessarily bad. The work being done to advanced science in the five areas above is extremely important. However so is the work being done to provide alternative ideas and theories. Nothing in science is proven until it is proven.

Sometimes the thrill of uncovering the true nature of the Universe doesn’t quite last all day. Today… well it’s really boring and slow. I tried to work - I really did. I stared at a paper I am writing for at least an hour but nothing came out of my head and into the document. Wait, I lied; there was a spelling correction I think.

So why am I telling you this? You came here for astronomy news, right? Well sometimes my PhD is really very slow and for some reason, I need you to know that. Currently my university projects are:

• Editing conference proceedings for .Astronomy
• Pestering speakers to hand in conference proceedings for .Astronomy
• Writing a paper dealing with emission from infalling protostars
• Organising the Star Formation Christmas Dinner (a Mexican for some reason)
• Waiting for the response from a telescope proposal (I’ve managed to do this one all day!)
• Creating the new Observatory website
• Writing a cool web app that simulates an aspect of star formation

As you can see, there is plenty to do. I just can’t do it today. I can’t focus, I can’t think and nor can I write a decent blog post either.

Is anyone else out there having a witless day? If you are - may I suggest going home? It’ll be more productive. I have a meeting at 4 so am obliged to sit and wait. Maybe I’ll get so bored, I’ll actually do some work.

Update: Maybe not.

How We Got Online

We begin with a quick history lesson. This is merely to help place into context, some of the facts and figures I will be detailing.

1991: arXiv begins.
1993: Mosaic graphical web browser puts people online, at home.
1994: Netscape Navigator is released becomes standard web browser until Microsoft launch Windows 95 with Internet Explorer built in. Browser wars ensue.
1995: NASA ADS begins online.
1998: Google begins, rise of the search engine.
2000: Dotcom bubble bursts, paves way for new generation of technologies including blogging, social networking etc.
2002: Web becomes ubiquitous in Western culture. This date is obviously only approximate.

It’s All About Numbers: ADS

The ADS receives around 3,000,000 readers a month. These are papers actually read, not including hits that result in no followed link.

Over 1,000,000 unique users every month.

Around 30,000 regular users, who access the service more than 10 times a month.

Fig 1 - The way ADS is used. Data taken from January and February 2008. Shows the things people do with articles they find on ADS.

Fig 2 - The way ADS is found. Data taken from January and February 2008. Shows the ways that users find NASA’s ADS.

It’s All About Numbers: arXiv and astro-ph

arXiv receives around 1,000,000 website hits every working day.

More than 900 papers are submitted to astro-ph every month.

Submitting your paper in the final minutes before the 4pm deadline (US Eastern Time) will increase your citation rate.

Living in the United States increases your chances of achieving this effect.

Fig 3 - Shows the way different journals have adopted astro-ph by looking at the percentage of papers from those journals which are also published on astro-ph.

Fig 4 - The characteristic way that a paper gets read. Initially papers are read on astro-ph when they first go up. After they have appeared on ADS, users tend to prefer to read the refereed article there.

Fig 5 - Typical example from Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Papers published in 2007, that were also published on astro-ph received 2.4x as many citations as those that were not. This factor is called the astro-ph Impact Factor.

Fig 6 - Variation of the astro-ph Impact Factor over time for four different journals. Note that the trend is for astro-ph to become more influential as time goes by.

Fig 7 - Impact of astro-ph on Citations for Different Journals. These data points are the averages over the past six years.

Why is astro-ph Influential?

Dietrich (2008a) propose three mechanisms for the impact of astro-ph and other online archives.

Open Access - Because the access to articles is unrestricted by any payment mechanism authors are able to read them more easily, and thus they cite them more frequently.

Early Access- Because the article appears sooner it gains both primacy and additional time in press, and is thus cited more.

Self-selection Bias - Authors preferentially tend to promote (in this case by posting to the internet) the most important and, thus, the most citable articles.

You Can Game the System

Papers appearing at the top of the astro-ph listing each day are seen by more people and thus cited more often. The last submission before the 4pm (Eastern US) deadline appears most prominently in the next mailing and will be listed first. Thus, if you time it right, you can try to place your paper near to the top of the list! The result is that some authors tend to promote their most important works and, thus, most citable articles, by placing them at prominent positions. This not a strong effect but it is also not uncommon.

Being based in the USA the submission deadline preferentially puts those authors at the top of the listing whose working hours coincide with the submission deadline. This is also only a slight effect, and according to Dietrich (2008b) it is more than cancelled out by the author placement effect described above.

In Summary

In a few years, use of astro-ph will be almost universal. The astro-ph preprint archive has had a marked affect on the way academic papers are read and cited. Statistics appear to show astro-ph having an increasing impact, probably as more people use the service more often with improved Internet access.

ADS as a global service introduces biases toward submissions at particular times of day. astro-ph does not diminish readership for publications, nor does it significantly increase use of the ADS. Journals which use astro-ph the most do not see a significantly better impact compared with those that use it less. But all journals see an impact.

Submissions purposefully made near the deadline, artificially increase citation counts but cancel out geographical bias toward North America.

References

Dietrich, J. P., 2008a, “The Importance of Being First: Position Dependent Citation Rates on arXiv:astro-ph”, Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, Volume 120, issue 864, pp.224-228 - [Link]

Dietrich, J. P., 2008b, “Disentangling Visibility and Self-Promotion Bias in the arXiv:astro-ph Positional Citation Effect”, Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, Volume 120, issue 869, pp.801-804 - [Link]

Henneken, E. et al., 2006, “Effect of E-printing on Citation Rates in Astronomy and Physics”, Journal of Electronic Publishing, vol. 9. - [Link]

Hennken, E. et al., 2008, “Use of Astronomical Literature - A Report on Usage Patterns”, eprint arXiv:0808.0103 - [Link]

Metcalfe, T. S., 2005, “The Rise and Citation Impact of astro-ph in Major Journals”, Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, vol. 37, p.555-557 - [Link]

The Cardiff HAlf metre Newise Telescope (CHaNT) officially opens today. The new, half-metre telescope is big enough to see Andromeda’s companion galaxies, to study the red spot on Jupiter and to see stars which, frankly, I never thought I’d see from Cardiff.

…it would be possible to view a postage stamp being held up at Castle Coch from the roof of the university’s physics building in the city centre around six miles away.

It will be used by undergraduate students studying astronomy and astrophysics and we are hoping that some of those students will take some amazing images through the telescope in the coming months. A new observatory website will pop up by 2009 to showcase our new toy, and I will give details here on Orbiting Frog when that happens.

CHaNT has an interesting design. It is ‘not-quite-newtonian’ in that it has a spherical primary mirror and flat secondary mirror. Corrective lenses are then placed before and after the secondary mirror to account for spherical aberration. This means that the telescope is smaller than an equivalent newtonian design and thus is even more powerful than it appears!

The opening of the new telescope will take place today, Friday 24th October at 3.30pm in the School of Physics and Astronomy, Cardiff University. You can read more about the telescope here. You can also follow CHaNT on Twitter, if you’re so incline.

View Press Release | View BBC News Article

Instead of golden syrup you could use treacle or corn syrup: something gloopy and messy. For alcohol you can use almost anything from spirits to rubbing alcohol. If you’re a kid, please ask whoever is in charge before raiding the drinks cabinet (this is generally a good rule in life).

You will be putting all of these into one glass, so find a tall one that is reasonably straight-sided. The more angled the edges of the glass are, the more of each liquid you will need as you go along - this could get tricky. You’ll need about one sixth of a glass worth of each liquid, as shown above.

Start with the glass containing the syrup and carefully pour the dishwashing liquid into it. You want to pour down the sides of the glass if possible, this will help stop the two liquids mixing. For these two it should be easy enough as they are both fairly thick. Let the glass stand for a moment and you should see that the two liquids make layers in the glass.

Now we add the rest of the liquids, in the order shown in the image at the top. Pouring down the side of the glass may not be enough to prevent these remaining liquids from mixing. It helped me to use a teaspoon. Hold the teaspoon inside the glass just above the surface and pour gently into the spoon, allowing the liquid to pour over the sides. In this way, the liquid you are pouring is placed on top of the existing ones much more gently. Be careful and pour slowly and you should be fine. You can always practice your pouring in another glass if you want to.

Hopefully you will end up with a nice, layered glass of different coloured liquids. Why? Well it is all to do with density - the mass per volume - of the liquids. Liquids at the bottom have higher densities than those at the top. All liquids have different densities as well many other properties. We can explore some of them using our layered glass.

Take a chopstick, or similar stick-like object and insert it into the glass. Don’t disturb the glass too much though. See how the chopstick looks now. Each liquid bends the light coming through the glass in a different way. This is related to the density but is actually a property of all materials called the refractive index. In general the refractive index increases with density. It is a measure of how much light is bent as it passes through a material.

We can also explore two more properties of liquids: viscosity and miscibility. Take hold of the chopstick and stir the glass up. Stir well, but try not to spill the contents. Watch and feel how the liquids mix.

You’ll notice that it is very hard to mix the syrup and that you can also feel the washing up liquid dragging against your stirring. This is because heavy liquids tend to be viscous. Viscosity is the measure of a liquid’s resistance to you changing its shape. The syrup is highly viscous, i.e. it resists your chopstick very strongly. The water, alcohol and oil offer almost no noticeable resistance at all, by comparison. This is because they are all similarly viscous and we are all used to how water ‘feels’.

After you stop stirring the glass, wait a few moments for it to settle down again. Watch it during this time and you will see it appear to organise itself. Miscibility is the measure of how well two substances mix. Water and alcohol are miscible because they mix together just fine. You can see that they do not separate out again after you stop stirring.

Water and oil are immiscible. This means that they do not mix. It doesn’t take long after you stop stirring for the oil to float back to the top. Would you say that the washing up liquid is miscible with any of the others? I found it hard to tell because both it and the syrup were so viscous I could not stir them up very easily!

Liquids, and their many properties, shape all sorts of things in the world around you. Refraction, density, viscosity and miscibility are important in our everyday lives.

Anyone who has had to clean oil-based paints off a brush with water knows something about miscibility. If you have tried to hook something out of a pond or swimming pool who have experience the frustration of refraction. You also know that you float in the sea, this is because of the difference in density between the salt water in the sea and the water in your body. Have you ever had to wait for ketchup to slowly pour out of a bottle because of its high viscosity?

In astronomy you can see some of these properties in action. The planet Jupiter has a series of coloured bands running across its surface. The different fluids that make up Jupiter’s enormous mass do not mix well because of their make-up. The hydrogen- and helium-based fluids are thought not to be miscible and this is part of the reason that we see the striking bands or colour on the planet’s surface.

Refraction and density are a big problem when observing through a telescope. The air becomes unevenly heated and this creates patches of the sky with higher refractive indices than others. Pollution also changes the refractive index of the air. The result is a fuzziness that astronomers call the ’seeing’. Because of this, astronomers prefer to put telescopes high-up and away from cities with their hot buildings and smog.

Viscosity is important in simulations of planet formation. Disks around young stars are made up of different materials and if they get dense enough they will become highly viscous and drag against the force of gravity as it tries to force them around the central star. The result is that parts of the disk could be dragged inward and this could greatly determine the formation and evolution of planets.

You can click on any of the top-twenty words to see a few of the tagged posts. This is a really nice proto-tool (currently it is listed as being version 0.2), and I look forward to seeing how it develops.

I wonder if we will soon see ’spacebuzz’ making its way up the list?

To volunteer to make your mark and record your very own episode of this epic, podcast endeavour, you only need to register on the newly launched 365 Days of Astronomy website. After that, click on ‘Join In’ and follow the instructions.

365 Days of Astronomy represents a great challenge and it should be brilliant to tune in each day and hear something completely new and interesting. It is vital that as many people, from as many parts of the world get signed up. So ask your school, youth group, badminton club, football team, decorators and anyone else to take a look and think about having a go.

Podcasting is easier that you might think and to be part of this exciting global initiative would be something you’d remember forever. So whether you’re 1 or 100, 365 Days of Astronomy is waiting for you. The website will also be giving tips on podcasting and will be doing everything they can to make sure the process is reasonably simply and easy to do.

The Universe’s second season is again, excellent. You can think of this second set of documentaries as a more in-depth follow up to the first year. Topics include dark matter, the constellations, gravity and space colonization. (Is it an Americanism or a mistake that lead them to title one episode ‘nebulas’ and not ‘nebulae’?).

The great thing about The Universe is that it targets the age group most disconnected from science. As a group, older teenagers are looking away from science and school isn’t doing enough to keep them interested. Documentaries like this engage people at home and lead them out into museums, lectures and libraries.

You could go and buy this show on Amazon, or directly from The History Channel - or you could win a copy! I have one sealed copy of The Universe Season Two to give away. More than 14 hours of spacey goodness on 5 DVDs in a rather fetching metal case.

How do you win it? Simple really - you have to sign up to Twitter and start following Orbiting Frog. Shameless ploy to get more Twitter followers? Yes… and no. Twitter is becoming quite the hub of astronomy chat and news. At the recent .Astronomy Conference, it became obvious that Twitter, and services like it, were going to be very important in astronomy in the next few years.

So on October 31st, I will pick a random follower on Twitter (no space probes allowed!). They will be sent this great DVD collection, but more importantly they, and possibly many others, will have joined the conversation.

To sign up to Twitter, visit http://twitter.com and once you have start following me (http://twitter.com/orbitingfrog). If you already follow me on Twitter, you are automatically entered - how easy was that?

While you’re on Twitter you might want to take a look at several more users that may be of interest:

• Carnival of Space
• WETI
• Planck
• Astronomy Picture of the Day
• The Jodcast
• International Year of Astronomy
• The Mars Rovers
• Mars Phoenix Lander
• .Astronomy Conference

Also there are many fellow astronomy bloggers on Twitter:

• Space Disco
• Chris Lintott
• The Daily ACK
• Will Gater
• Star Stryder
• Astronomy Blog
• Bad Astronomy

If I’m missing anyone, please comment to add your Twitter feed. Good luck to those entering, and happy Twittering.

Just wanted to point out this wonderful xkcd comic. I like that it ends (or starts, if you like) with ‘folks’. This is why I love xkcd.

xkcd - A Webcomic - Height

With all of this in mind I think its time to admit that I cannot post as often on this blog. I will have to scale back a bit and so to prevent the blog from becoming filled with other material I have turned off the Skynote and Digg integration. These automated posts were great when I was blogging once a day, but now feel more like blog spam.

I will also be changing the blog’s design during October to match the new, slower pace and to emphasize the many projects I am also working on. I intend to make the Google Sky and Google Earth materials open source (oh no, I’ll have to comment my code) and to drop some new scripts down here for you to try.

All in all I think I have to take some good advice and make this site more about quality than quantity. Less blogging what has already been blogged and more on the stuff that’s new and directly from my brain to the server.

If you can join us over at .Astronomy this week (ustream worked yesterday…) then we’d love to have you. Other than that, I’ll see you in a couple of weeks via good ol’ Orbiting Frog.

Protons in 14,000,000,000,000 electron volt collisions

600,000,000 times a second

after travelling 26,659 metres

at 11,245 times a second.

10,080 tonnes of liquid nitrogen cooling

9,300 magnets

controlling collisions at 99.99% the speed of light.

All taking place at -271.3°C

and 10^-13 atmospheres.

It all turns on today with hopes of unravelling the mysteries of spacetime (and not spacetime itself as Radio 2 would have you believe - but as Brian Cox would say, they are “twats”).

Learn more right here.

To do this yourself, or to expand upon and modify this script, download the workflow file here.

To set this up to run everyday, open it up in Automator. Click ‘Run’ to test that the script works (warning: it could take a minute or two to process, but this ok). You might also want to to change the folder into which the picture files will be saved. Then chose File -> Save As and change the type to iCal Alarm.

When you save the file in this way, Leopard will open up iCal and let you change the usual event options. You can select the time the script should run and the repeat cycle (I’ve set mine to repeat each day at 9 a.m.).

Alternatively, you can save this as an application and run it when you like in the normal fashion. In fact you can do quite a few things with it, I’d be interested to know what people come up with.

Flickr user FlintstoneStargazer captured all 110 of the Messier Objects between March 7th and August 6th this year. They have all been compiled into a big mosaic. This is very cool - anyone else ever tried anything like it?

Finally my paper studying the Ophiuchus star-forming region is done and dusted and has been accepted for publication. Thanks to one of my intrepid co-authors, that paper appeared today on astro-ph, the preprint paper listing for astronomy and astrophysical theses.

We re-analyse all of the archive observations of the Ophiuchus dark cloud L1688 that were carried out with the submillimetre common-user bolometer array (SCUBA) at the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT). For the first time we put together all of the data that were taken of this cloud at different times to make a deeper map at 850 microns than has ever previously been published. Using this new, deeper map we extract the pre-stellar cores from the data. We use updated values for the distance to the cloud complex, and also for the internal temperatures of the pre-stellar cores to generate an updated core mass function (CMF). This updated CMF is consistent with previous results in so far as they went, but our deeper map gives an improved completeness limit of 0.1 Mo (0.16 Jy), which enables us to show that a turnover exists in the low-mass regime of the CMF. The L1688 CMF shows the same form as the stellar IMF and can be mapped onto the stellar IMF, showing that the IMF is determined at the prestellar core stage. We compare L1688 with the Orion star-forming region and find that the turnover in the L1688 CMF occurs at a mass roughly a factor of two lower than the CMF turnover in Orion. This suggests that the position of the CMF turnover may be a function of environment.

It is a study of star formation and prestellar cores, the objects that precede protostars. You can access the online abstract and get more information at arXiv.org or simply download the PDF from Orbiting Frog.

Telescope Limiting Magnitude = Visual Limiting Magnitude - 5*logd + 5*logD

, where d is the aperture of the human eye and D is the aperture of the telescope. So to give some examples, let’s consider a normal sky where the visual limit is around Mag 5.5 and you have a little 3-inch refractor telescope. We’ll use 3mm as the aperture of the human eye.

Telescope Limiting Magnitude = 5.5 - 5*log(0.003) + 5*log(0.07) = 12.3

So with a small refractor you can see down to a limit of about Mag 12. Pluto however is at Mag 13.8 so this would not suffice. Here is the maths for my own situation. Last night the sky was so dark I could make out Mag 7.0 stars, this is my visual limit and it is about right for very good observing conditions. The telescope I am using has a 9cm aperture.

Telescope Limiting Magnitude = 7.0 - 5*log(0.003) + 5*log(0.09) = 14.8

This puts Pluto into the realms of the feasible, which was great news since Pluto from my location is well above the horizon and unobscured by light pollution. Also, this week I have set myself the goal of observing all the planets, and Pluto - just for fun.

Pluto can currently be found in Sagittarius at the painfully dim magnitude of 13.8. Along with its sister body Charon and two satellites Nix and Hydra, it is a very cold, dark and far away place. Even the best images ever taken of Pluto reveal little more than a patchy ball of rock. I was unable to take a picture myself, far too dim, but Googling reveals a handful of amateurs have succeeded.

The image above is taken from Mauna Kea and the one below comes from an amateur named Bill Dirk.

If you want to try and see Pluto, I can now recommend a few things to help you along. Firstly, check that you have dark enough skies. This isn’t trivial, I have rarely had as good conditions as last night. Unless you have a very big telescope (more than 15cm) you’ll find Pluto is beyond your reach in anything other than exceptional skies.

Secondly, know where to look. Using the Meade with a good calibration means that getting into the general vicinity of Pluto is fairly easy. you need to know your stuff if you’re using a regular, manually guided telescope. Whatever happens, you need tracking, other wise the objects you find will vanish before you can see them at all.

Thirdly, get a good map of the planet’s location and memorize the patterns of stars around it. Once you’re looking at a star-field in the eyepiece, it will look the same as every other star field, unless you know what you’re after. Most planetarium software will give you this, the trick is figuring out the field of view you will be looking at through the eyepiece. I recommend using the 12DString FOV Calculator.

Finally, have patience. This will take time and several attempts. Even if you do find it, if you’re like me you’ll feel the need to verify everything twice anyway. But I think it was worth it!

Having finally seen Pluto I am now compelled to complete my planetary observation collection. All of the planets are visible during the night at some point from my current spot. I will not be here much longer so I need to get out and see them all. I have never yet seen Neptune or Uranus and I have only seen Mercury twice.

I’ll report back later in the week.

I am stuck and need some help in both taking and then processing the images. I know there are loads of photographic astronomers out there - I need you!

I’m using a Pentax digital SLR, which can perform exposures up to 30 seconds long. I don’t have fancy tripod but I do have a small, pocket tripod. Last night I tried out some different settings and ended up using either ISO 800 or 1600 speed and the full 30 seconds of exposure available to me.

I took, amongst other things, these three images. The first is the Plough, the second is the Summer triangle and the third is Jupiter, hanging nicely above the house.

What I need to know are what most people starting out would need to know I imagine: what are the best websites, tools and softwares packages that one should try to use when starting out? Do I need to be stacking these images to get the best results, if so how?

I have RAW image files for all of these, but what does that get me? Googling is a bit of nightmare, as all you really see are all the images everyone else has made - which are lovely (and intimidating) - but not useful in getting you there yourself.

All assistance much appreciated.

The skies here are big and clear and even these early Perseids look amazing. Getting the telescope out later for some real sightseeing.

You may have noticed that I have ‘fallen off the internet’ this week, as a friend of mine recently said in a text message. Well the reason is that I have been attending a meeting about star formation and the Spitzer Space Telescope.

I am part of the Gould Belt Survey team working with Spitzer legacy data. Currently I am sat in a meeting but I thought I would post an entry explaining my absence from the web, which will actually continue for the next couple of weeks.

I may still posts the odd cool Digg story and the Abram’s Skynotes will continue. In the meantime, keep the emails coming in and watch out for the space station in the next few days. there are some more good sighting awaiting all of us.