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The Best Star-Gazing in the World
by Kathryn Whitbourne | September 9, 2011
If you’re into star-gazing, you can’t do better than Mauna Kea. The highest mountain in Hawaii boasts of pollution-free air, cloud-free skies and a very dry atmosphere which becomes important when measuring infrared radiation from heavenly bodies. Some 11 nations have telescopes there and the combined light-gathering power is 15 times more than that of [...]
Supernovae are among the most powerful events in the universe. These dying stars can burn as bright as a billion suns. They outshine whole galaxies and birth the beginnings of new cosmic bodies. So what happens when you give one access to a grand piano and a stand-up bass?
Enter astronomy graduate student Alex Harrison Parker from Canada’s University of Victoria. Parker took three years worth of supernovae observation data (covering four sections of the sky) from Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope, sped the video up to 15-days-per-second and assigned each super nova a note. Let’s watch.
Ah, the music of the spheres! I’ve blogged previously on the sonification of space physics data, ranging from stuff as low-key as the SolarBeat flash-based music box to the University of Sheffield’s own “solar music.” Now here’s another one.
NPR’s Studio 360 recently aired an excellent story on a blind astrophysicist named Wanda Diaz which really drives home some excellent points about how we listen to the cosmos. You can stream the full audio piece (as well as a short excerpt of astronomical data converted into synthesized music) right here at the Studio 360 home page. Here’s an excerpt:
It’s been a fun week full of astronomy! We started out learning how to enter the world of amateur astronomy (that was by joining the awesome Atlanta Astronomy Club in my case) and then we discovered how to find an ideal site for setting up our telescopes. Next we learned some important lessons about looking at the sun, and a little background on the practice of astrophotography. But now that the sun has (figuratively) set on astronomy week, it’s time to discover how to undertake the age-old tradition of star hopping.
Everyone knows you’re not supposed to stare at the sun for too long. Even at 1 AU (about 93 million miles), the sun can really sear some retinas after more than a few moments. But after you arrive at a star party and have gotten set up — which you should do while there’s still some light out so you get everything properly prepared and your telescope has a chance to adjust to the ambient temperature — you might hear a repetitious chorus of “When is it going to get dark?” and “What time is it?” (Full disclosure: This impatient litany could very well be coming from me. Sorry.)
Surprise! It’s a themed week. And today’s astronomy-related topic is about choosing a good site for night sky stargazing, which is no straightforward task. There are a number of factors to consider; darkness and cloud cover are simply the two most obvious. Other less apparent conditions to take into account include transparency (a measure of how much water vapor and other particulates are in the air), seeing (which is an estimate of air turbulence), light pollution and conditions on the ground.
I can’t recall if I ever mentioned it in a post, but for my birthday a few months back my boyfriend got me a telescope. A pretty flipping sweet telescope if you ask me, but of course I’m a bit biased. Anyway, we’ve taken it out a couple of times since then, but it became clear pretty quickly that we didn’t actually know how on Earth to use the thing for much beyond checking out obvious easy-to-find stellar objects like Jupiter and its moons. But that’s going to change, because recently we got a firmer toehold in the world of amateur astronomy.
Tonight is a once-every-few-centuries event – Winter solstice lunar eclipse
by Marshall Brain | December 20, 2010
Tonight’s lunar eclipse is going to be unique, and this NASA article paints a nice picture of what we should see: Solstice Lunar Eclipse Why red? A quick trip to the Moon provides the answer: Imagine yourself standing on a dusty lunar plain looking up at the sky. Overhead hangs Earth, nightside down, completely hiding [...]
Like most things in the universe, stars begin as particles floating around in massive clouds of dust and gas. But what forces these particles to coalesce and form a star? Tune in and learn more about the birth of stars in this podcast.
On Halloween back in 2001, somebody set fire to St. John’s Anglican Church in Lunenberg, Nova Scotia. This wouldn’t be particularly noteworthy in itself, as people do set fire to churches from time to time, and especially on Halloween, a tradition that traces its roots back to our beloved Detroit. But this particular act of arson uncovered a mystery that was recounted on the CBC recently.
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