Work has finally started on the Large Size Telescope. The first stone ceremony was held on October 9th. This week the bushes have been cut down ready for the bulldozers to move in. Like the MAGIC, the LST will be a huge Cherenkov telescope (looking for gamma rays from space) with a mirror 23m across. The larger mirror will enable it to see fainter Cherenkov light, and therefore lower energy particles….
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,…
Well, I saw it! It was cloudy at low altitudes, so I was glad I’d joined the bus going up to Pico de La Cruz with a group of about 16 people from Astrofest. Since buses get a lot more expensive after midnight, the organiser was persuaded to have the bus drop us off shortly after 11 pm, so it would be “home” by midnight, even though it meant a…
The Canarian Tourist Board will be live streaming tonight’s lunar eclipse at http://www.thebestclimateintheworld.com/geminidas Just to remind you, the moon is at almost its closest approach to the Earth, so it’s will be a supermoon – noticeably bigger than usual. There are two parts to the Earth’s shadow: the penumbra is the outer part, and the umbra is the much darker inner part. Penumbral Eclipse begins 28 Sep, 00:11:47 The penumbral…
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…
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…