Easy Astronomy Blog

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.

I already had an article about different astronomy softwares here but I just found a very special one.

LunarPhase Pro is a utility for Windows which provides a range of information on the Moon and, to a lesser degree, the Sun, graphically displaying the current phase of the moon and lunar data, in real time. Lunarphase Pro (LPP) needs about 35Mb hard disk space for its installation. The recommended minimum amount of RAM on a PC is 128Mb (this will display the Moon in medium resolution graphics) but 256Mb is required for high-resolution displays. A 500Mhz or faster PC is recommended but some screen load times on calculation-intensive screens will be slow on less-specified PCs.

The initial window is clean and uncluttered. The ’skin’ is chrome-like, it is impossible for the user to change this to give a more conventional Windows ‘feel’. The number of buttons on the toolbar is small; however one of the buttons is entitled Display Menu of Other Functions. This gives an extensive list of other functions, all which really deserve their own icons. While this would increase the ‘busyness’ of the Window, I feel it would be preferable to the current situation. In general, I think that while some users might be unhappy with the non-standard appearance of the User Interface, this departure from the standard Windows ‘look’ looks very high-tech.

Lunar Phase Pro is primarily a planning tool for lunar observers and offers an enormous amount of information to assist the observer in this regard. Obviously, it graphically displays the current phase of the moon in real time and displays the times and dates of the major lunar phases for the month. However, it also provides much more information for planning your next night of moongazing, including the real-time position of the moon in both RA/Dec and Alt/Az coordinates, a calendar of lunar phases for each day in the selected month and monthly lunar libration diagrams. It is also possible to display a Lunar visibility diagram for the month showing when the moon is above the horizon and the brightness of the Moon. In addition, the software calculates and displays Moon’s Rise, Set and Transit times. If you see an interesting feature under a particular illumination condition, it is possible to find times and dates when this feature will be under similar illumination, taking into account libration effects. Far-side and North/South Polar features can also be viewed and identified.

Lunar Explorer

Clicking the Lunar Explorer button is the gateway to the mapping functions of this software tool. If you want to take full advantage of the features here, you should activate Use OpenGL and High Resolution Graphics in the configuration screen.

The appearance of the Moon is very realistic once your PC has sufficient graphics capability (which shoudn’t be a problem for modern PCs) to take advantage of the maps. Maps can also be oriented to match the view through your telescope or binoculars. Zooming and panning is smooth, although when you zoom in to the maximum, the image quality suffers a little. A new feature added to Version 3 of the software is diplaying very high resolution Moon charts. These have to be downloaded from the internet (LPP handles all of that for you) but you can save them for later viewing through the software. All maps in LPP can be printed out if you need to take something out to to the ’scope.

One very nice feature is that the software allows you to produce a high resolution animation of lunar libration showing how the moon wobbles over the course of a month. If you don’t know what libration is, click this button once and all will be revealed!! It’s a pity that the feature only runs for 1 month, it would be nice if it ran until the user decided to stop it. The Lunar Explorer also lists which lunar features are currently on the moon’s terminator. The utility includes Rukl Chart outlines and a list of features on the chart, a feature which will become of more importance with the imminent re-issue of these charts by Sky and Telescope. Once you have entered the details of your telescope/ eyepiece combination it can emulate the view through your instrument. It is possible to link images to specific lunar features and record your observations in the software in order to keep a permanent record of your observations (there are over 800 observing notes provided with LPP to get you going). Not only is a visible view of the Moon provided, you can choose to view 3 mineral maps, a gravity map and a Clementine image, a nice touch for educational purposes.

So Lunar Phase Pro is a great observation planning tool for lunar observers or imagers. The utility can teach you a lot about how the Moon orbits the Earth. In addition, it provides near photo-realistic views of the Lunar surface via the Lunar Explorer utility and these can be printed as custom built maps. Support for the software is excellent and the author, Gary Nugent, is very responsive to requests for enhancements.

So get your copy of this excellent software now :
Lunar Phase Pro

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.

Astronomy is a fun science filled with many astronomy fun facts. Information such as though a planet’s orbit other stars, were the way galaxies are made up, is included. Bees facts can be entertaining and enlightening.

Astronomy fun facts about our own star, the sun, are almost endless. It’s somewhere between 91 and 94.5 million miles away from our home planet. Scientists are not lazy. The Earth’s orbit isn’t circular. The distance varies depending on where the Earth lies in that orbit.

Astronomy fun facts about our average sized sun’s size. It’s contains 98% of all the stuff in the solar system, even though it’s not large for a star. That means the earth, even with massive Jupiter on our side, is only 2%. Over 1.6 million earths would fit inside this star. The sun blows its solar wind out to 50 times the distance between the star and our earth.

What about astronomy fun facts that don’t have to do with the sun? Isn’t the moon interesting? It’s the only non-Earth object upon which man has walked. And one human man actually traveled to the moon but never left it. Dr. Eugene Shoemaker didn’t make the cut for astronauts. But when he died he was cremated and his ashes spread over the moon in 1999.

The moon abounds with more astronomy fun facts. In a famous nursery rhyme a cow jumped over the moon. Believe it or not, as of 1988, 13% of people still believed the moon is made of green cheese. And finally the suits worn by the moon walking astronauts weighed 180 pounds on Earth but only 30 pounds on the moon. That is a big difference.

There are astronomy fun facts about faraway objects too. Stars bring the past to life. It can take millions of years foe light from some stars to reach us. Some of those stars you see may really be images of stars a million years old that aren’t even there in the present. The number of stars in the sky is a one followed by 22 zeros. Oh boy that’s a lot.

There are even more astronomy fun facts. But this article has to end. So get out there and learn about astronomy.

Astronomy today is a serious science as well as a hobby enjoyed by many people. Every day something new happens in the world of astronomy to gather the attention of millions of fans around the world. It can also be great fun. So let’s get right to the cutting-edge in astronomy.

Astronomy today on any given day might have news of meteors. As 2008 came to an end, meteors certainly were in the news. In November, the Taurids and Leonids were active in the night sky. Gemenids peaked in December, but unfortunately, it was also the time of a full moon making them almost impossible to see. No need to worry. Meteor showers can continue for as long as four weeks. That is two weeks before and two weeks after the peak. So there’s a lot of nice clear time to view these falling chunks of space fragments.

In 2008, a return to the moon was on people’s minds very often in astronomy today. As a matter of fact, many countries would participate in this exciting undertaking. The goal may be to establish a moon base or even a colony on the moon. Think of it. Space 1999, a TV show from the 70s, may just be about to become a fact.

Astronomy today in 2008 often included concerns over falling space debris in the form of a discarded ammonia tank. It had been discarded into space where it orbited for many months. But eventually its orbit decayed. There was some worry that large chunks would fall, or that some parts would strike in populated areas. But thankfully that didn’t happen.

Hubble was likely the biggest news in astronomy today in 2008. Damaged in October, it was finally repaired his temper. Then the Hubble took the first ever visible light image of a planet orbiting another star. What a busy year for one piece of technology.

All in all, astrology today is an ever expanding subject. The Internet is an awesome source for this kind of information.

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