I bought a wonderful calendar for 2014 with pastel paintings of nebulae by the local artist Vanessa Sancho. I like the paintings so much that I still have the calendar. Alas, there wasn’t a 2015 calendar, but there will be one for 2016. Actaully make that October 2015 – March 2017. The caldendar is bilingual (English-Spanish) with gorgeous pastel paintings, plus moon phases, and dates for equinoxes, meteor showers…
Well that was an interesting talk. There have been no massive asteroid impacts in living memory, so it’s easy to forget that they exist. The scientists are pretty confident they’re tracking 96% everything over a kilometre in diameter. Those happen just once every 700,000 years, which is good because they hit with the equivalent of 60,000 million tons of TNT. The worry is the smaller ones. A 40m-wide asteroid…
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!
On Monday and Tuesday I showed a journalist around for the Tourist Board. On Monday night we went stargazing with Astrolapalma. I loved it. Agustín was very enthusiastic, and now I understand why people enjoy my enthusiasm so much. We started off just after sunset, and we had a lovely view of the old moon in the arms of the new. That’s the poetic name for when you can see…
Spring is obviously here. Some people look for the swifts returning or flowers blooming, but I know it’s spring when the solar telescopes start work after their summer break. It’s not very easy to see whether the Swedish Solar Telescope is working unless you’re close, but yesterday, the Dutch Open Telescope had the clamshell dome down and they were clearly open for science. It must be time to buy…
The Philae lander is SAFELY down on the comet, half a billion miles 28 light minutes from Earth. ( See Rosetta and the Comet) Yay for the European Space Agency – nobody’s ever done this before.