Cecilia Payne deserves to be far more famous than she is. She discovered what the stars are made of. Cecilia was born in Wendover on May 10, 1900, so she’d be 116 today. Her father died when she was just 4 years old. She won a scholarship to Cambridge university to study botany. She switched to astronomy after a year after attending a lecture by Arthur Eddington and passed her exams,…
Happy 30th birthday to the Observatory at the Roque de Los Muchachos! The official inauguration was in 1985, attended by the royalty from Denmark, Holland, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom, and heads of state of Germany and Ireland. At that time there were only six telescopes on La Palma; now there are 17 of them. To celebrate, the Canarian Astrophysics Institute has a free exhibition in Santa Cruz…
In the early hours of September 28th there will be a particularly spectacular lunar eclipse when the moon will be 10% closer to the Earth and larger than usual – a super moon, in fact. A lunar eclipse happens when the Sun, Earth and Moon are in a straight line, so that the moon passes through the Earth’s shadow. If you were standing on the moon when this happened, you’d…
Sorry for the hiatus: I got overtired and had a lurgy. Now that I have a bit of time and energy, I went to see what’s been happening with the New Horizons fly-by of Pluto. The space craft zipped by the dwarf planet over a month ago, but while it was passing, it was too busy taking photos and measurements to send much back to Earth. Then NASA and JPL…
Total Lunar Eclipse April 15th 2014, as seen from the Mount Lemmon SkyCenter. SkyCenter.Arizona.edu In the early hours of September 28th the moon will plunge into the Earth’s shadow and turn blood red. It’s a perfectly normal event, produced by the combined orbits of the earth and moon and the effect of the Earth’s atmosphere bending the sunlight like a lens, but it’s dramatic and spooky, and if you didn’t…
The Perseid meteor shower is already here, and it will reach its peak on August 12th as the Earth passes through the dust left by comet. If you want to photograph shooting stars, use a wide angle lens with a large aperture, set the ISO to 800 or higher, and use a tripod. It’s no good chasing meteors around the sky – chose one spot and stick to it. It…