Your eye on the sky in Lincoln

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International Year of Astronomy 2009

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Blogs, Information, Links and Archives

This is where you will find the latest blogs and information posted onto the website together with archive material from the past. If you have material that could be featured here please send it the the webmaster.

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14th August 2008

By Alan Dyer

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Lunar Eclipse

Eclipses come in pairs. Two weeks ago (has it been that long already?!) I chased a Total Eclipse of the Sun. Thousands of others did as well, traveling to the far ends of the Earth to stand in the Moon’s shadow, to witness the Moon cover the Sun. This Saturday millions of people will be able to watch the Moon itself disappear, into the shadow of the Earth.

The occasion is an eclipse of the Moon, when the Full Moon lines up directly with Earth and Sun, and passes into our planet’s shadow. Our three worlds were precisely aligned on August 1 to produce the total solar eclipse. Now, two weeks later the orbital angles are still lined up well enough to produce another eclipse, this time with the Moon on the other side of its orbit. Instead of it being between us and the Sun, blocking the Sun from our view, it is us, Earth, that is in the way. Earth will be blocking sunlight from hitting the Full Moon.

11th August 2008

Vern's Weblog

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Jupiter and Ganymede

Animation from about a half hour before red spot transit last night (11:57 pm) to half hour after. Images acquired with Celeston Nexstar11 with Phillips Toucam 840K at cassegrain focus. Mostly cloudless sky but only fair seeing, about 5/10 at start but deteriorated to maybe 4. Animated gif created from 24 videos (1800 frames), each stacked and aligned with Registax4.

North up and east to the left in the image more or less. Shadow from Ganymede is the black spot in the north of rotating to the right. I think red spot jr is there too, off to the lower right of the great red spot. Appears to be another one to the lower left of the GRS, not sure what that is, I’ll have to do some checking.

Transit of Venus 2004 On Tuesday 8th June 2004 the visible surface of the Sun was crossed by the planet Venus. This is a very rare event and was last seen in December 1882. The page has pictures of the transit, click on the pictures for larger images.
Building an Astrograph This article describes how to make an Astrograph that can be taken out into the country and used on a car roof, or any flat stable surface.
Space Station Viewing Times The International Space Station can sometimes be seen fom Lincoln. It appears as a bright star, moving across the sky from West to East, travelling faster than high flying aircraft and usually brighter than most stars.
Testing Telescope Optics Testing is usually carried out on a bright star at night. Before this is done, several conditions should be met.
Current Solar Activity Realtime graphs of Solar Activity including X-Ray Flux, Electron Flux, Proton Flux, Magnetometer and KP Index.