Triple conjunction in wonderful viewing conditions

I hope you've all been enjoying this view this evening! You can see Venus (top) and Jupiter (lower) against a well-lit young Moon. Tomorrow's show should be just as good if you missed it tonight!

Duck!

What will you be up to on the 1st April? This is not an April fool's joke, but one of the things that will happen to you that day is that you will be narrowly missed by a sixty metre long asteroid called 2012EG5. It will be travelling at about 8km per second relative to the Earth, and will pass us at a distance of about 150 000 miles. There is absolutely no danger from this encounter, but it is the sort of thing that happens all the time without anyone really noticing. Objects like this are classed as NEOs - Near Earth Objects, and they have orbits that bring them, unsurprisingly, near to the Earth from time to time. One day in the future a NEO might  occupy the same orbital position as the Earth, at which point interesting events would unfold fairly rapidly. Astronomers are sure (to a high degree of precision) that there is virtually no chance of the currently known 1301 potentially hazardous NEOs hitting us any time soon.

Excellent new animation from NASA

This video shows a recreation of the way in which the Moon is thought to have formed, and how it got all the features we see today.

ISSP session 2

The ISSP finished in high style today, with practical work on the scale of the solar system, impact crater formation and the real size of interstellar distances. I was thrilled to hear students using terms like "you can see the shockwave moving through the impact site" when we were recreating craters, and it was a great pleasure to spend time with so many intelligent, interested young people.

I hope very much to see some of you at our next observatory open evening!

Thank you for coming!

It was a bit cloudy, but at least it wasn't too cold! We got to see a few things on our target list, including Venus, which showed as a perfect half-moon shape, Jupiter and some fine cloud belts and Mars, with a brilliant white polar cap showing clearly against the orange desert soils of that cold, arid world.

In the photograph below, you can see the Cooke telescope pointing at Venus through the observatory hatch, captured in a one second long exposure.

The full Moon put in a showing, with this view as it rose on the eastern horizon.

Full Moon

There is something really magnificent about the sight of the full Moon sailing up into the sky. For thousands of years people have responded to this dramatic spectacular in the arts, with music, paintings, poetry and even architecture relating to the phenomenon.

Here is a lovely picture taken this week by Verena Kummel, showing clearly the ancient (three billion years old) dark seas overlaid with more recent impact craters.

Can you name the seas? In this picture you can find; The Mare Crisium, Mare Frigoris, Mare Tranquillitatis, Mare Serenitatis, Mare Fecunditatis, Mare Humorum, Mare Vaporum, Mare Imbium, Oceanus Procellarum, Mare Nubium, and many more!

Observatory session, Thursday 8th March, 7.30 - 8.30pm

If the sky is clear, I will open up the observatory on the date shown. Mars has just reached opposition, tucked under Leo's paws and should be a good object to look for, but the full Moon will make it hard to see much more than the brightest few stars otherwise. For the interested, I'll go through the basics of setting up the portable Meade telescope so that you can hire it if you'd like to, and we'll put it through its paces on setting Jupiter/Venus.

Finally, we can try to catch a glimpse of comet Garradd with binoculars, and have a go at taking a picture of it with the Nikon camera.

mail me if you can make it!

Eye witness account of last night's meteorite!

Large Meteorite Seen Over Bootham School

Late on the evening of Saturday 3^rd March, a meteorite could be seen making its way across the skies of Northern England. We were surprised and fortunate to catch sight of this phenomenon as we returned to the Fox boarding house after an evening activity in the Sports Hall.

It was like seeing a shooting star, but in slow-motion, in full-colour, and so up-close it felt almost within reach. You could say the head of the meteorite was the size of a football, with a blazing tail of orange and white fire. But perhaps it looked more like a Year-7 student, wearing some kind of jet-boots, like the hero in a sci-fi animation, coolly cruising across the night sky.

In any case, standing on the Fox quad, we saw the meteorite rise over one of the Maths classrooms and travel across Fox House, only to dive behind the Language department and disappear from sight. We almost expected a huge explosion upon impact somewhere on the other side of the river Ouse, but the meteorite continued on its way and is said to have been seen as far south as Devon.   

A sighting like this is very rare, perhaps once-in-lifetime. It was certainly strange and startling enough to leave us (two almost-adults) feeling boyishly exhilarated afterwards.

Daniel Gustafsson & Luke Highstead, Resident Graduates      

First session of this year's ISSP

It was very nice to meet all the young people who attended yesterday's meeting of the ISSP, and I was delighted to see so much enthusiasm shown by so many. We covered a lot of ground on the general theme of stars, but in summary yesterday's topics included;

• the constellations and how they change through the seasons,
• stellar spectral classes, and what the colours of stars can tell us,
• how to see sunspots using telescope projection,
• using transits to measure what time it is,
• and the stellar magnitude scale.

Here are just a few pictures from the session, and I'm sorry that not everyone is shown but I hope they help to remind you of what you did!

see you next week for the solar system, life in the universe and how we're going to find it!

A wonderful photo from one of our members

Verena Kummel captured this view of the Moon and Jupiter last Saturday evening from the Bootham grounds, using a long exposure and a brick wall to keep the camera steady. I am very pleased to be able to share it with you, as it really captures the beauty of the scene last week.

Any other submissions will be greatly appreciated!

see a comet this week!

Comet Garradd has been creeping through the inner solar system over the last few months, and its orbit has brought it close enough to the Earth to see with binoculars. You won't see much more than a pale smudge of light, but it is so easy to find over the next few nights that you really ought to give it a go.



For the next few days, the comet is very near the star beta Ursa minoris (Kochab), which is itself not far from the pole star. Use the star map on this blogsite to find your way to it.