For the last few days, Venus and Jupiter have been very close together in the evening sky. I wanted to take photos on Wednesday and Thursday, but it was cloudy. I wished I’d asked to go up to the observatory, above the clouds. Lucky me, I got permission to go there on Friday evening to take photos. I’m really glad I made the effort.
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…
Asteroid Day is the anniversary of the Tunguska event in 1908, when a huge asteroid exploded over Siberia. There will be a free public event on Tuesday 30th of June at 19:00 at Palacio Salazar in Santa Cruz de La Palma. SCHEDULE: 19:00 – Welcome & keynote lecture 19:10 – Talks given by astronomers Speakers: Elena Nordio (Ad Astra La Palma) Vania Lorenzi (Telescopio Nazionale Galileo) Massimo Cecconi (Telescopio…
Remember Rosetta, the spaceship orbiting a comet and the lander that bounced into the shade? The lander wasn’t getting enough sunlight to power it, so it went into hibernation in November last year. Now that the comet is nearer the sun there’s more light, plus the comet’s evaporating away and the valley’s less deep now. Philae’s woken up, and ESA are hoping to get their mitts on all that…
I had too many blogs. There was the La Palma blog, and the personal blog with the writing stuff, and one about astronomy and one about El Hierro. Plus there was my bookshop and my main site (or at least it used to be my main site, but it was very neglected and old-fashioned.) All this took up far too much of my time and interfered with writing. So I…
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!