Blogs

Lots of cool astronomy news coming out of Washington this week!

See: NASA at AAS

December 23, 2009: The solar system is passing through an interstellar cloud that physics says should not exist. In the Dec. 24th issue of Nature, a team of scientists reveal how NASA's Voyager spacecraft have solved the mystery.

I purchased this telescope from BJ's just to see for myself how good it was.  It was cheap.  The sale price I got with a coupon was $40.  The scope comes with a dobsonian mount that is pretty good, but a bit lightweight.  That's suppose to be a selling point according to Celestron.  It moved very smoothly.  The scope comes with two Huygen eyepieces 4mm and 20mm or 75X and 15X.  I used both and at low power I had no problem, but the eyepieces are usually the weak spot of any telescope at that price.  I used my own 12mm plossl, 7.4mm Teleview and a 18mm

New observations reveal a dense ribbon structure that current models don't explain.

WASHINGTON – Astronomers have found 32 new planets outside our solar system, adding evidence to the theory that the universe has many places where life could develop.
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The artist's conception simulates an infrared view of the giant ring. Saturn appears as just a small dot from outside the band of ice and dust. The bulk of the ring material starts about six million kilometers (3.7 million miles) away from the planet and extends outward roughly another 12 million kilometers (7.4 million miles). The ring's diameter is equivalent to roughly 300 Saturns lined up side to side.

Thanks to the much-heralded International Year of Astronomy, this much we know: Galileo used a telescope to observe the moon in 1609. But the inventor of the revolutionary resolutionary device remains unknown, and its early history is muddied by simultaneous discoveries and competing claims.

A surprise in the upper atmoshere of the Earth
 
Another way of heating the earths atmosphere has been found... THis one is not due to the sun's heating of the earth by sunlight.