Easy Astronomy Blog

What exactly is the definition of astronomy?

Astronomy can be defined like this :

The scientific study of the universe and the objects in it, including stars, planets, nebulae, and galaxies. Astronomy deals with the position, size, motion, composition, energy, and evolution of celestial objects. Astronomers analyze not only visible light but also radio waves, x-rays, and other ranges of radiation that come from sources outside the Earth’s atmosphere.

So basically, astronomy is the study of everything that is in outer space including stars, planets, constellations, comets, the solar system, etc. It is a fascinating science that more and more people are constantly interested in. These people are called astronomers. They observe outer space with tools like cameras, binoculars and telescopes.

If astronomy interests you and you don’t have much equipment to observe the night sky, you might be interested in taking a look at my Orion Skyquest XT8 telescope review.

I discovered an awesome website and wanted to share it with all of you. It is an online store focused exclusively on astronomy!

www.starrynightstore.com
There are all kinds of products from softwares to scopes to books and DVDs. Do not think this is a little creepy online store. These guys have a serious reputation and an excellent customer service. Shipping is very fast, your products are shipped the same day if your order is received by noon Pacific Time. And the best part is they have a 100% satisfaction guarentee. If you are not satisfied in anyway by your product within 30 days, just return it and you will receive a full refund.

Definitely visit and add to your bookmarks! www.starrynightstore.com

A small, dense object only 12 miles in diameter is responsible for this beautiful X-ray nebula that spans 150 light-years. At the center of this image made by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory is a very young and powerful pulsar, known as PSR B1509-58, or B1509 for short. The pulsar is a rapidly spinning neutron star that is spewing energy out into the space around it to create complex and intriguing structures, including one that resembles a large cosmic hand.

In this image, the lowest energy X-rays that Chandra detects are red, the medium range is green, and the most energetic ones are colored blue. Astronomers think that B1509 is about 1,700 years old and is located about 17,000 light-years away.

Taken from Astronomy.com

The dominant gas in Saturn’s atmosphere is hydrogen, but small quantities of helium and methane have also been identified. If life support on Saturn came into discussion, we’d have to agree that the conditions are very different from those on Earth. Saturn has a lower density than water; thus, were there a lake or ocean, Saturn would be vanished in it. Chances for life support remain standing in what Saturn’s moons are concerned, though, but research is in progress, and until more scientific evidence is obtained, everything is pure theory.

Saturn is a very windy place, which is definitely a feature to stand out; just think of wind blowing at about 1,100 miles per hour in in low and central latitudes. But at first glance, nothing seems as spectacular on Saturn as the ring system that surrounds the planet. There are three main ring sectors scientists have classified so far: we can actually speak of three rings in fact, with two brighter and one fainter. The spacecrafts that have studied Saturn and its orbiting celestial bodies indicate that there are thinner rings in the structures we perceive as large, and they are not continuous at all.

The very source of the rings of Saturn remains a mystery for the moment; what renders them so special is that many of them are smaller or larger icebergs, having a significant water quantity trapped in their structure. Other ring areas consist of dust mainly that present characteristics of electrostatic charging, thus enabling the appearance of spokes. Very fine dust particles connect to make these spokes, but they don’t last for long and disappear as quietly as they formed. Then, there is a close relationship between some of the rings and smaller Saturn moons that appear to have an impact on the dust presence in certain areas. Moreover, the revelations science had with the discovery of Saturn’s moons are neither the first nor the last, who knows what will show up next?

I had a request for more content on Picture of the day so I’m sharing some amazing shots with you here. Click the pictures to see them full size.

Orion’s belt

Explanation : Alnitak, Alnilam, and Mintaka, are the bright bluish stars from east to west (left to right) along the diagonal in this gorgeous cosmic vista. Otherwise known as the Belt of Orion, these three blue supergiant stars are hotter and much more massive than the Sun. They lie about 1,500 light-years away, born of Orion’s well-studied interstellar clouds. In fact, clouds of gas and dust adrift in this region have intriguing and some surprisingly familiar shapes, including the dark Horsehead Nebula and Flame Nebula near Alnitak at the lower left. The famous Orion Nebula itself lies off the bottom of this star field that covers about 4.5×3.5 degrees on the sky. This image was taken last month with a digital camera attached to a small telescope in Switzerland, and better matches human color perception than a more detailed composite taken over 15 years ago.

The next one is truely incredible

Saturn’s Hyperion: A Moon with Odd Craters

Explanation : What lies at the bottom of Hyperion’s strange craters? Nobody knows. To help find out, the robot Cassini spacecraft now orbiting Saturn swooped past the sponge-textured moon in late 2005 and took an image of unprecedented detail. That image, shown above in false color, shows a remarkable world strewn with strange craters and a generally odd surface. The slight differences in color likely show differences in surface composition. At the bottom of most craters lies some type of unknown dark material. Inspection of the image shows bright features indicating that the dark material might be only tens of meters thick in some places. Hyperion is about 250 kilometers across, rotates chaotically, and has a density so low that it might house a vast system of caverns inside.

Largest Full Moon of 2008

Explanation : As viewed from a well chosen location at sunset, October’s gorgeous Full Moon rose behind Mount Hamilton, east of San Jose, California. Captured in this lovely telescopic view, historic Lick Observatory is perched on the mountain’s 4,200 foot summit, observatory and rising Moon momentarily sharing the warm color of filtered sunlight.

Milky Way Road Trip

Explanation : In search of planets and the summer Milky Way, astronomer Tunç Tezel took an evening road trip. Last Saturday, after driving the winding road up Uludag, a mountain near Bursa, Turkey, he was rewarded by this beautiful skyview to the south. Near the center, bright planet Jupiter outshines the city lights below and the stars of the constellation Sagittarius. Above the mountain peaks, an arcing cloud bank seems to lead to the Milky Way’s own cloudy apparition plunging into the distant horizon. In Turkish, Uludag means Great Mountain. Uludag was known in ancient times as the Mysian Olympus.

Examining objects and phenomena in space such as nebulae, galaxies and comets is Astronomy. Some people do it for a living, others just to pass the time. Thus whenever an astronomy picture of the day is offered to people, they grab it. There are plenty of such pictures to choose from, and plenty of interesting objects out there to keep people looking.

NASA is a great source to find and astronomy picture of the day. There’s a new image there every day. There’s also another section that shows videos and images. This could be an excellent source for images and videos for your own daily updated site. November 5, 2008 showed a close view of Saturn’s moon Enceladus. The photo was taken by a passing spacecraft. The image is crisp enough to see a small bus, if there were one on the moon. One interesting characteristic of the ice on Enceladus is that it reflects 99% of the light that falls onto it. Talk about snow blind. The plan is that Cassini will take more images of this moon later in its mission.

June 16, 1995 the first astronomy photo of the day NASA was online. It was a what if image of the Earth posing as a neutron star. This photo was created by the computer. The most interesting feature is that the constellation Orion is visible twice. Even light from behind a neutron star is visible because the dense star bends the light all the way around it. That’s why some objects are seen twice.

September 8, 1995 was an amazing image of the central part of the Milky Way galaxy taken by NASA’s COBE satellite. This area is normally invisible because of the dust obscuring it. But COBE’s infrared imaging captured this amazing image.

The astronomy picture of the day was the same on January 1, 2000 and January 1, 2001. That’s because most people conceive the year 2000 was the first year of the new millennium. However the third millennium actually began on January 1, 2001. Instead of arguing NASA used both dates. http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap010101.html shows man’s view of the universe as it progressed from orbs that orbit around the Earth all the way to the Big Bang creating the universe as we know it.

It would be very hard to see each and every astronomy picture of the day. You’ll find them on NASA’s

Astronomy is a topic as wide as the universe that it seeks to discover. Limiting to star astronomy still leaves a lot of things to cover. It would take a lifetime just to learn about all the objects that orbit our own small sun. Some people, then, decide to become experts on the stars.

The closest star we know is our sun, about 94,000,000 miles away from our very own planet. Its heat is staggering when the quantity of heat the earth receives from it over this amazing distance is realized. 98% of the stuff in our solar system is in the sun. That includes all the other planets even with huge Jupiter and Saturn on our side. The sun could hold over 1.3 million Earths. The nuclear reaction at the Sun’s centre comes from pressure 340 billion times that at sea level on earth and temperatures of over 27,000,000°F. That would burn toast to a crisp instantly.

The sun is the most studied star we know. It would take 250,000 times longer to get to the next nearest sun. Star astronomy gets interesting when you consider all of those stars out there. A human can see about 5000 stars, all in our own Milky Way galaxy, from Earth. More of the 1×10^22 stars in the universe can be seen through a telescope. If you’re counting that’s a one followed by 22 zeros. In fact, even a small telescope opens the eyes of an amateur star astronomy enthusiast to hundreds of thousands of stars. Imagine that! Professionals using larger telescopes can see other galaxies that contain over 200 billion stars. Just counting that many is a lifetime of work.

Star astronomy experts have now proven that many other stars have planets. They know this first through measuring the wobble caused to stars by planets and other objects orbiting them. And in late 2008 astronomers finally took the first pictures of planets orbiting other stars, and even of entire solar systems. Maybe one of those planets contains intelligent life.

Will we have a run-in with Romulans next month? Not likely. But star astronomy will keep on going. Maybe it also continues somewhere on another planet We might be under observation from one of those distant planets!

I’m sharing with you here some interesting videos I found on the web

- A compilation of some of the most amazing pictures taken by the Hubble telescope :

- With the new year just arrived, 2009 is the international year of astronomy!

- Another amazing video explaining how the Hubble telescope allowed us to take the deepest images of the sky ever!

Astronomy is a serious science. Many people get involved with it when they are very young. Astronomy for kids is a thought provoking pursuit that can teach them about the sciences in general. For children, many parts of astronomy are magical and thus a huge draw. These include the solar system, planets, comets, meteorites, asteroids, stars, the sun, galaxies and of course our closest neighbor in space, the moon.

The Earth’s closest neighbor is the moon. It orbits our planet once every 27.3 days. Being so near, it has hosted the only human footsteps on a space object other than the Earth. One of the significant benefits of our relationship with the moon is the tides it causes. It’s one of the first objects that can spark a kid’s interest in astronomy because it can be clearly seen with the human eye.

Then there’s our sun. The gap between our home and the sun is very large. We are between 91 and 94 million miles from the sun. It’s not an inaccurate measurement, it’s because the Earth orbits in an uneven ellipse. If there were no sun, we wouldn’t be alive. The sun provides both light and heat to the planet. Most people don’t realize that the sun accounts for approximately 98% of all the mass in the solar system. What a hog.

Our sun and solar system reside in a galaxy called the Milky Way. It’s full of space stuff. Even with all this stuff to fill it, it’s mostly empty. At over 100,000 light years wide and 3,000 light years high, that means the galaxy contains a whole lot of nothing. We’re somewhere in the neighborhood of 30,000 light years from galactic central core. Even with all that space there are about 100 billion stars in the Milky Way. In fact the galaxy was named for the thick group of stars in the main portion of it. People thought it looked like a stream of milk, so called it the Milky Way. There are four types of galaxies : elliptical, lenticular, irregular and like the Milky Way, spiral.

You can find a wealth of resources for astronomy for kids on the world wide web. In fact there are so many star charts, charting programs, images, videos, and other resources that a kid would be a senior citizen before seeing all of it.

It is great that you have chosen to read this article. Carry on and find out more

Astronomy is a sincere professional business and enjoyed by enthusiasts as well as hobbyists. There’s lots of new information popping up every day. An astronomy magazine can be rich in information including great pictures, as well as guides to help with telescope use at home. It’s even better now that so much of this is also on the web.

A great astronomy magazine in Great Britain is “Astronomy Now”. It’s a magazine for everyone and it has been in publication since the late 1980s. A typical issue has dozens of features and even concentrated articles that delve deeper into specific subjects. Images that readers sent , star charts and book critiques are standard in every issue of this great magazine. And it is good to notice that the star charts presented on the site are far superior to those in the printed edition. Many variables can be set to view the star chart on a particular day or time. These charts are actually very useful.

Astronomy magazine’s website is probably the first website most people find when searching for magazines. This one has a wealth of information online. For example, there are images of the first visible light view of another solar system. Astronomy also features guides for kids who want to start learning astronomy, regular first time astronomers and people who want to see the night sky from a city setting. Many of the people who visit the web site also subscribe to the magazine.

“Sky and Telescope” is yet another amazing resource. It says it’s like having an astronomy professional person by your side. It would be nice to have Stephen Hawking with you when you’re looking at the universe. But information is only one aspect of this magazine, it also has wonderful images. In November 2008, for example, Sky and Telescope showed a stunning picture of a planet orbiting a distant star. This marks the first time ever a planet has been seen orbiting another star in visible light imagery.

So finally, a cheapskate may want to stick to the Internet where the information is free compared to paying for a magazine subscription. Either way, the information is always at your fingertips.

I hope you enjoyed reading this article and found the information useful and interesting.