The full moon rise

The moon tonight
Originally uploaded by Andyrob

Full moon rises over London

harvest moon in the Wairarapa hills

harvest moon in the Wairarapa hills
Originally uploaded by dubh

Aurigid Meteor Shower Viewing

Aurigid Meteor Shower Viewing
Originally uploaded by retro traveler

Astronomy for beginners with Google Sky

The new addition to Google Earth contains much of interest to Astronomy for beginners, and is a gret complement to Stellarium

Here's a video which gives a taste of the software:

Aurigid meteor shower - Astronomy for beginners report

Astronomy for beginners is very excited that sight reports of vivid meteor activity on September 1st were received from Arkansas, Arizona, Colorado, California, Ohio, Oregon, Texas and western Canada. That list will grow as photographs, video and eyewitness reports are accumulating all the time.

Lunar eclipse astronomy for beginners - No moon tonight...

That's no moon...
Originally uploaded by retro traveler

Astronomy for beginners youTube Video of Stellarium

I needed to record a screencast video of Stellarium for Astronomy for beginners today. Then I thought I might as well upload it to youTube so here it is on the blog as well. The compression probably kills it, but you can get a general idea of what the desktop planetarium can do for you.



The Stellarium software is describe further down

Astronomy For Beginners on Flickr

With an ordinary camera, the amateur astronomer will be able to take quite respectable pictures of objects in the night sky and then post them to the Astronomy for beginners Flickr group. The camera can be either digital or film, but must have a 'manual' setting so that longer exposure times can be catered for. A tripod of some sort will also be necessary, and a remote shutter is handy to prevent camera shake causing blur.

Already I have received some feedback explaining the twin comet tails in more detail, or rather correcting the way I had written it in the Comet Facts article.




Driftwords explains:

One tail is neutral particles (dust) and the other consists of electrically charged gas (plasma). The charged particles (the "ion tail") are affected by the magnetic field of the sun, which is typically directed across the path of the comet, whereas the neutral particles simply show where the comet has been.

It's like a long steam train. The carriages behind the loco simply follow the track, whereas the smoke from the engine will be carried sideways by the wind as well.

Astronomy for beginners Wiki

Here on the astronomy for beginners blog, should you as a reader, wish to respond to one of the articles then you can do so by leaving a comment on that post. Just click where it says "0 comments" or "3 comments" or whatever, and start writing. But if you wanted to write an article yourself then you'd have to start up your own blog. How many blogs do we need about astronomy for beginners?

Additionally, if you spotted a mistake in my writing, or an incorrect fact, there's not a lot you can do about it. You could point it out by leaving a comment as above, or you could email me, but it may well be something reasonably trivial and you decide it's simply not worth the bother. The moment passes.


So I've started up an Astronomy for beginners wiki over at wikispaces. This is not meant to replace or detract from the blog, it's just a complementary addition.

On the wiki you can just click the "edit page" button and change the text right there and then. You can also create new articles of your own, and link pages together using wikitext links. That's enough about it for now. If you have any queries you know how to ask.

Astronomy for beginners - Comet Facts

Comet Facts

I've gathered a few comet facts to publish here on astronomy for beginners. Of course comets are often only visible for a short number of days in a normal year, but when a particularly important comet passes by then it makes for quite an astronomical occasion.

Fact1: A comet is a conglomerate of particles bound together by ice (not necessarily H2O water ice, it could be dry ice (CO2), for example)

Fact2: When a comet approaches the sun the ice melts and releases the particles from the main body.

Fact3: The tail of a comet always points away from the sun.

As the picture below shows, there are in fact two tails, both curved, and they are 30 MILLION kilometres long. That's a lot of fine particles. The theory is that the solar wind is responsible for the blue gas and gravity alone for the larger particles.

LunarPhase Pro