Soon I will be off on an observing run in Hawaii. I will be using the 15m JCMT telescope on Mauna Kea to take spectral line data using an instrument called HARP.
Since this will be my first professional expedition I will be taking lots of pictures and notes as I try to get to grips [...]
Astronomy Blog gives a great little overview of the upcoming meteor shower, including a top pic from Stellarium. I love this shower because I’m often in France for it where I can much better skies.
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The other day we were driving along and I found out that a friend of mine’s father is a commercial airline pilot. We chatted about it for a while – apparently his mother was an air hostess and that’s how they met – and I mentioned that he must have time travelled quite a bit.
I [...]
So I’m still musing about the reasons for studying star formation and so I have begun trying to think in a more positive way. This is what I came up with earlier today…
Star formation is a science at a turning point. It will not be long now before astronomers have the choice of several world-leading [...]
I’ve just spent the weekend in Rome. In fact I had one of the best holidays ever running around the Italian capital and generally being silly with my friends. We also visited the Vatican, naturally, and so upon returning home I thought I should do a Roman Catholic Orbiting Frog post.
So what did the Pope [...]
Big doesn’t quite cover this blog post.
For the past few weeks in my role as a demonstrator in the first year undergraduates lab, I have been supervising the experiment titled Large Scale Structure of the Universe. The experiment itself is a slightly painful exercise involving a series of simulated optical telescopes on an odd piece [...]
My friend Louis asked me the other day whether gravity is different at the equator than at the poles. This was in response to learning that the Earth is wider as the equator and not precisely spherical. Its a good question. He then followed it up with ‘how does gravity work?’ which is an even [...]
In my blog post on Meteorites I mentioned the Moon formation theory regarding what is known as the Giant Impact Hypothesis. This theory is widely becoming regarded as the best model science has for the Moon’s formation.
Regardless of the evidence for and against this model, here is how it works…
We set the scene around 4 [...]
A good, straightforward question – I like it. They’re round because they’re huge!
Basically the spherical shape of planets and stars comes from the fact that they contain so much mass that they have reasonably sized gravitational fields. The mass in any object pulls other masses in toward it. Just as you and I feel the [...]
Copyright © 2010 Robert J. Simpson. Twitter @orbitingfrog
