Recognise this constellation?
Despite some pretty awful weather my son and myself managed to make it down to Astroblast yesterday. The new venue (Bedford School) was tricky to find — we managed to end up at what appeared to be the back gate, all locked up with a view of some of the fun in the grounds, d'oh! — but overall it was a pretty straight run down.
Thankfully the rain didn't put too much of a downer on events and we had a fun time visiting the planetarium and especially the rocket building workshop put on by Out of this World Learning (if you ever get the chance to see them in action, do it, they made the whole thing loads of fun and my son really enjoyed himself — so did I come to think of it <g>).
Like with last year I took my camera and I have a small selection of photographs on my main website.
Back in May this year I noted that the Sun appeared to have gone quiet again, as of 2008-05-08 I'd not observed a sunspot since 2008-03-31. At that time the quiet period hadn't been quite as long as the one I'd observed towards the end of last year but it turned out to be a very long run of a blank Sun (as seen on the days I observed and with my equipment).
Finally, today, I had my first view of a sunspot since the end of March this year. New active area 1005 had two small spots visible.
It's quite nice to see a little blip on my sunspot graphs. They were starting to look a little boring. ;-)
Yesterday I was reminded that next month is Astroblast 2008. This year, rather than being held at the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge, it is being held at Bedford School.
Having attended in 2006 and 2007 I'm hoping I can make it along again. The past two years have been very enjoyable events.
Well, that's it, the Large Hadron Collider is up and running. They've had two beams go all the way round (one clockwise, one anticlockwise). Thanks to the webcast I've been able to follow it pretty much all day (twittering as I went).
It's been absolutely fascinating. Like I said over here, I wasn't old enough to remember it (or, indeed, at the exact time, wasn't even anywhere that had a TV) but I imagine this is what watching the Moon landings must have felt like.
Although, of course, no actual collisions have happened today (and won't happen today) so I guess the "main event" hasn't really happened yet. As such, perhaps today was what watching Apollo 10 felt like?
No matter, I think this is one of those "I remember where I was/what I was doing" days.
Now that Stuart has blogged about the AVM microformat generator I thought it time to upload a little hack I did for GNU emacs when he first pointed me at the generation tool he'd written.
The tool is called avmmf.el (download it here) and it adds a command to GNU emacs (avmmf-insert) which prompts you for an object, talks to the AVMMF generator, gets the resulting code and pastes it into the current buffer. I'm thinking it might be handy if you're writing some (X)HTML by hand.
2008 AUGUST 16 -- PARTIAL LUNAR ECLIPSEMore details over here.
Webcast live from Peter Grego at St Dennis, Cornwall
I will be producing a live webcast of the partial lunar eclipse on the evening of 16 August on my website www.lunarobservers.com. The webcast takes place from 19:30 to 22:45 UT (8:30 to 11:45 pm BST). Images are updated every 20 seconds when live (640x480 resolution). The umbral phase of the eclipse lasts from 8:36 until 11:44 pm BST. If the event is clouded out a real-time computer simulation of the eclipse will be broadcast.
No, really, that's not a typo. Keep an eye out for Comet Perseid.
;-)
Seen via a post on the SPA BB.
Do you have one or more RSS feeds whose content is related to astronomy? If so Dr Pamela Gay would like to hear from you.
And, just as important:
If you are a content provider, can you please put out a request on your feeds, your Facebook, and your twitter, to help me find the hidden content providers – the grad students telling their stories of the stars and the research scientists silently slaving over their blogs – so that I can help get their voices heard in the Portal to the Universe.So, if you're reading this, and you've got a way of shouting about this.... do so. Go do it now.
Via this tweet by Will Gater: 50th Anniversary of NASA.
The music is good enough (I'm finding that I'm tending towards the 1970s, which is kind of funny given that I turned 12 in 1979 — Pink Floyd and Neil Young just work <g>) but the thing really worth watching is the Ares I animation you get when you click on the Ares rocket in the 2000s.
Go play with it. It's fun.
Just to add a little to my log of today's eclipse, a short photo diary of the session:
The session didn't start out too well, the Solarscope went flying in the wind so I had to come up with a method of making it heavier. I knew all those old power supplies would come in handy one day:
I've now uploaded my observing log from today's eclipse. There's a handful of photographs in there too. Nothing too special, just captures of the view as seen via the Solarscope.
I'll probably get around to uploading some more elsewhere at some point. I'll post here when I do.
Well, that's it for me. The earlier fair weather turned increasingly cloudy and, at around 10:50 BST, I was pretty much clouded out.
I had a reasonable run though. Managed to see the very start of the eclipse and got a good, albeit short, view around mid-eclipse. You can see the updates I made over on Twitter and Plurk (the latter being a new one to me but I thought I'd give it a go to see what it's like).
I'll try and type up my log later on. I've also got a bunch of photographs which I took on my Canon PowerShot G9. Once I've downloaded them and processed them they'll appear in the photography section of my main site and also over on my Flickr stream.
With about ½ hour to go to the start of the partial solar eclipse I've got mostly clear skies with just a few little fluffy clouds floating about.
Fingers crossed things go better than back in March 2006.
I'll try and make frequent updates over on Twitter.
If you're in London tomorrow, and have some free time in the morning, this might interest you:
The society have got permission to take a few telescopes along to Hyde Park in London, near Speakers' Corner, to view the partial eclipse on Friday morning, which is between 9.32 and 11.03 am BST, with mid eclipse at 10.16. The Sun will be about 20% covered (see separate thread for what this means).
Any members who care to join us will be very welcome, though we only have permission for a few small telescopes so we don't need any more. It is possible that the media will be there as well as we are sending out a press release.
Anyone out there own a Canon EOS 400D (AKA Digital Rebel XTi, AKA EOS Kiss Digital X) and have access to any of the following cities: Abu Dhabi, Athens, Baghdad, Beijing, Berlin, Buenos Aires, Cairo, Copenhagen, London, Moscow, New Delhi, New York, Paris, Rome, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo. Washington D.C., Wellington (NZ)?
If so, this thread on the SPA BB might be of interest to you.
This post has just turned up on the SPA BB.
The UK's Federation of Astronomical Societies will be holding its 2008 convention on September 20th 2008 at the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge.
