Astronomy

I read this article late last night: Device Makes Radio Waves Travel Faster Than Light! If this is true it has great consequences for the world of science. My question is: if you sent a message faster than the speed of light would it get to its destination before your original message was sent? Interesting! I think I’ve been listening to too many Quantum Physics lectures!

Hi. Suppose I ought to introduce myself. I've always had a passing fascination with astronomy, but lately I'm developing a more serious interest. I've come to understand the role it played in the Renaissance, and continues to play in the enlightenment of humanity. Seems like the least I could do is learn my constellations.

My first question is pretty simple and practical: Which brand of handheld laser pointer should I buy? I'd like to have one to help show off my recent findings to friends (I'm sure they'll find all this absolutely fascinating) and amazon and ebay are just crawling with a variety of devices at prices from $10 to $200. Reading the reviews doesn't seem to show any relationship between price and quality.

Call me naive, but I feel like I can trust the feedback of an astronomy group on LJ. Anyone got feedback on a laser pointer they'd like to share?

Thanks

I took out my telescope to watch the Moon set behind the mountains to the west. It was kind of cool this time because far away little clouds that were low on the horizon floating about in our Earth’s thick atmosphere would drift across the shimmering Moon. Then I trained my scope on the constellation Cygnus the Swan that lies amidst the wisps of stars and dust of the Milky Way. In Cygnus shines a double star 380 light years away called Albireo. One star appears blue and the other gold. I had it in my eyepiece and it held me there fascinated by its beauty. After that I caught Jupiter rising in the east and could just make out a few bands on its surface. What a wonderful night!

Come celebrate the 40th anniversary of our moon landing. Dr. Buzz Aldrin will be there to talk about his experiences.

Find out more about what's going on in the Space above your head in LA at space_above_la

( One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind! )

I started to watch “Impact” on ABC, but after the first five minutes of the show I was convinced that they had Paris Hilton and her little dog as science advisors. The show opened up with folks watching a meteor shower with telescopes! I do take my telescope out when I watch showers but that’s to look at stars or other celestial objects but not meteor showers; a few times by accident I did have a meteor zip past my telescope lens. Then the Moon gets hit by a brown dwarf! Chunks of the dwarf fall to earth in solid form and a scientist tries to pick it up! Brown dwarfs are between one and eighty Jupiter masses whose small mass failed to ignite and burn hydrogen by way of fusion reaction. Also we would detect something so massive coming our way because it would most likely affect the orbits of the planets. I threw up my arms in disgust, turned off the TV, grabbed my binoculars and went outside to gaze at the night sky. While I was doing my sky gazing I listened to Astronomy Cast - Questions: An Unlocked Moon, Energy Into Black Holes, and the Space Station’s Orbit, which made for a wonderful night of observing.

Come join OASIS, the Greater Los Angeles Chapter of the National Space Society, at space_above_la to find out where the REAL stars are in LA!

We hold lectures, visit various aerospace facilities in the LA area and go stargazing (yes, there really are places where you can still do that).

Come find out what's going on in the space above your head in LA!

While at work today, I was thinking about the science behind the data and graphs for the project that I'm working on. I managed to come up with a beginning stanza of a poem, and it grew from there. I thought you might find some amusement in it as I did.

( Click here to read the poem )

Universe Today: Follow Apollo 11 from 40 years ago on Twitter today!

From the Earth to the Moon and back again!!!

• Name ApolloPlus40
• Location The Moon
• Web http://blogs.natu...
• Bio Nature News twitters the Apollo 11 moon mission as it happened -- 40 years on

1,133 Followers

Life can be a challenge even in the best of times. We live out our lives on a speck of dirt on the outskirts of a galaxy, one among billions of galaxies, in a universe so vast that it boggles one’s mind. Yet we strive for an understanding of our place in it and search for answers to the unknown and the unknowable that makes our lives much more interesting to live.

I then went on my evening walk listening to an astronomy lecture on Gamma-ray Astronomy: Astronomy Cast - Ep. 136: Gamma Ray Astronomy. (For now on I’m going to include links to the lectures I listen to and also post what I learned from the lectures here.) Gamma rays are highly energized electromagnetic radiation possibly created by the merger of two black holes, or neutron stars merging with black holes, massive black holes at the center of active galaxies, or cosmic rays colliding with matter like space dust. They are so powerful that they pass through spacecraft, can destroy or change DNA, and can kill you! Lucky for us our atmosphere blocks most but the higher energized Gamma Rays. We have satellite Gamma ray telescopes that pick up all but the highest energetic ones. These can be picked up by land based telescopes because they collide with particles in our atmosphere where these telescopes can observe the remains of the collisions; kind of like the collisions in a particle collider. There's more to the lecture but time grows short. I hope I got this right and I’ll have to do a lot more study of them. Please feel free to correct any errors or add to this post, that way we all learn.

Ground control to Major Tom, Duncan Jones (aka Zowie Bowie) talks about his amazing new movie called Moon, which was screened recently for NASA -- at their request. Mining Helium-3 of the dark side of the moon might sound far-fetched, but it's actually something NASA's working on. Just watch this film before you volunteer for the low-gravity mining job though, since all might not be as it seems.....

When asked about the NASA screening in an exclusive interview, Duncan told SuicideGirls:

"We did a screening at the NASA Space Center in Houston and the beauty of it was that it wasn't a PR stunt, we didn't organize it. There's a professor at the Space Center who does a lecture series and he asked me if I wanted to show the film. He'd been reading online that we'd done this film about Helium-3 mining and that's something that people at NASA are working on. We went down there and we did the screening, it was a fantastic experience, and we did a Q&A afterward. They asked me why the base looked so sturdy, like a bunker, and not like the kind of stuff they are designing that they are going to transport with them. I said "Well, in the future I assume you won't want to continue carrying everything with you, you'll want to use the resources on the moon to build things" and a woman in the audience raised her hand and said, "I'm actually working on something called Mooncrete, which is concrete that mixes lunar regolith and ice water from the moon's polar caps." So, it was great - they basically started talking amongst each other and I just sat back and watched them. It was truly an amazing experience."

The full interview can be found HERE.

Hello. Are right ascension and declination things a star gazer can actually use to find sky objects? I ask because every book (I mean every single last one) at the library says what the celestial sphere actually is, but not how you take the coordinates, go outside and find something. So, are RA and Dec. used that way, anyway? Many thanks.

Fill in your information and your name will be included with others on a microchip on the Mars Science Laboratory rover heading to Mars in 2011!
http://marsprogram.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/participate/sendyourname/

"Thank You
Robert Deloyd
for your participation.
Your Name is heading to Mars!
Certificate #: N2M400143914"

COOL!!!
//bob

 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1172205/Saturn-close-Sensational-cosmic-images-bring-ringed-planet-life.html

I am looking for four separate whole-sky star maps with each of the four types of deep sky objects (nebulae, open clusters, globular clusters, galaxies), and also showing the Milky Way and ecliptic. Something like this one or this one (both on Wikipedia), but I'd like (a) more than just the Messiers, more like the NGC list, and (b) four separate diagrams, one for each type of object. I tried looking at Google Sky and Stellarium to see if I could make my own, but neither can zoom out sufficiently to create a whole-sky map.

The purpose for this is a lesson on how looking at the distribution of the different types of objects allowed astronomers in the late 1800's and early 1900's to start determining where they were located in our galaxy. I want to be able to show each type of object separately so they don't get confused by looking at only some of them, and so students with color blindness aren't confused by red and green. (At least 1 in 10 men are color blind!)

Anyone else got better Google-fu than me and can find four separate maps? This falls under fair use (for educational purposes) and I always credit my source, so if possible I'd rather use an existing one than take the time to create a new one.

Spent Good Friday at the St. Louis Planetarium.  Found the star show to be most interesting.  I struggle with the names of the constellations.  Is there something wrong with me or does anyone else have trouble seeing Orion the Hunter out of the smattering of stars, or any other constellation?  I can see the Big Dipper and, of course, the Little Dipper, but for the life of me I can't see the dog-gone bear in Uris Major or Minor.  I wrote about this experience in my journal.  Does anyone have suggestions on how I can identify the constellations by name?  I'm a newbie,  so be kind. 

I'm teaching a conceptual astronomy class this semester and I'm working on a new lesson where my students will create an HR diagram. I'm looking for a table of B and V magnitudes (or else temperature and luminosities) of around 100 stars, preferably in the same cluster. Google's not turning up much for me. AdsAbs finds a few HR diagrams but I'm not clear from the abstracts whether any have the data tables (and I don't have access to the full papers). Anyone got some data I can borrow or a link to such data?

Hi. I am a writer of science fiction and my novel is set on the moon.  I need some help with a calculation. If someone could point me to a moon calculator or instruct me on how to calc. that far into the future I would greatly appreciate it.

Can anyone tell me what phase the moon will be in on June 5th, 5030 on the near-side. I need to know if the moon will have sunlight falling in Mare Frigoris or if it will be night-time.


http://www.timeanddate.com/calendar/moonphases.html?year=2009&n=0

This moon calculator I found online won't go high enough.

Thanks in advance for any help.

Hi everyone! Happy Year of Astronomy... if you are interested in getting an awesome telescope for INSANELY cheap check it out: http://www.galileoscope.org