Blood Moons

The Moon blood red because it's completely inside the Earth's shadow.
August 21, 2015

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…

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“Astrofest La Palma” opens the doors for registration.

Nightscape conference poster
August 1, 2015

  From 25th September 2015 to October 9th, the island of La Palma in the Canaries will host Astrofest, a festival of astronomy, with activities for all ages and knowledge levels. There will be an international conference for astrotourism professionals, a spectacular total eclipse of the moon, an international conference for nightscape photographers, and a night photography masterclass. You can find more details and register for all these events at…

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Happy Star Wars Day

Saturn's moon Mimas and the Death Star from Star Wars
May 4, 2015

    That’s no moon! Actually wait, yes it is. It’s Mimas, Saturn’s 7th biggest moon. The bit that looks like the lasar is the enormous crater Herschel (named for John Herschel, who discovered Mimas in 1789.) Mimas is 396 km in diameter, which is about half the diameter of Earth’s moon. May the 4th be with you!

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Sunset at the Roque de Los Muchachos

Gran Telescopio Canarias at sunset, Roque de Los Muchachos observatory
April 29, 2015

  The Roque de Los Muchachos is a spectacular place to watch the sunset. For one thing, you’re usually above the clouds (which is one reason the observatory is there.) In fact, sometimes the clouds are so much lower than the Roque that the sun sets well below you. This means that your shadow on a wall is taller than you, and the shadows of your legs go on forever….

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Our Solar System, to scale

Josh Worth has created what he calls a “tediously accurate scale model of the Solar System: If the moon were only 1 pixel There’s lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of empty space out there. Josh Worth ha creado lo que él llama un modelo de “escala tediosamente exacta del Sistema Solar: Si la luna…

March 8, 2014
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Monday’s eclipse seen from a plane

Solar eclipse seen from a plane
November 7, 2013

  This was photographed from a plane flying at 13,300 m going 800 km/h, 960 km southeast of Bermuda. In order to get the eclipse to one side of the plane, they flew across the path of totality, rather than along it. This required split-second timing, since the shadow on the moon moves across the Earth’s surface at 12,800 km/h. The photographer, Ben Cooper, isn’t sure whether this is totality…

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