News and Updates about Astronomy

Who uses Yahoo! Image Search, you ask? Scientists apparently.

Right now, Jupiter and Venus are rising in the early morning hours just before dawn. I went outside on the morning of the 4th of July and saw Jupiter and Venus right next to each other with the Pleiades (The Seven Sisters) just above them and knew that the next morning I was going to have to get up early and set up my tripod to try and capture what I saw. I used my Panasonic GH2 with the stock zoom lens set to about 40 to 50 mm equivalent and with the aperture open to about f/5. I set my ISO to...

The annular solar eclipse was amazing. It was so much fun watching the sun transform from a thin crescent to a ring and then to a thin crescent going the other direction. I'll be posting up the pictures used to make this video in various resolutions on my photography website over the next few days, all of the way up to the full 16 megapixel ultra-detailed images.

It's taken me several weeks to figure out the  Meade Coronado SolarMax II 60 Double Stack telescope that I bought to produce a timelapse video of the solar eclipse but I'm pretty happy with the images I can produce now.  Here's hoping for clear skies tomorrow!

Where would you end up if you dug a tunnel in your backyard straight through the Earth?

So, I managed to take some pics last night of the supermoon. I was dropping someone off at LAX right around perigee, so all of the images I took off the side of the road were horrible, since there were tall buildings everywhere and nothing but street and parking lot lights blocking my shots.

The peak of the Lyrid meteor shower of 2012 was the night of Saturday, April 21, and I went to Whiskeytown Lake near Redding, California and took about 1,000 pictures. I used 3 Panasonic GH2s with various lenses and edited all of the shots together to make the time-lapse video below. You really have to watch it in full screen at 720p or 1080p HD in order to appreciate it.

Water covers approximately 70 percent of Earth's surface and the human body contains up to 78 percent water, depending on body size. Yet, water seems to be taken for granted here on Earth. But if you travel to an orbital altitude of about 250 miles, water starts looking pretty interesting. Especially to astronaut Don Pettit on-board the International Space Station.

You're probably already impressed at someofthephotos amateur astrophotographers can capture with their 16-megapixel digital cameras. I know I am. That's why I'm beefing up my camera skills, so I can also take some amazing pictures of our skies above. But if you can take photos this good with a 16-megapixel camera, imagine what you could do with something a little bigger, say, 3.2 billion pixels! That's a whopping 200 times more pixels!

So, I got this email today from Groupon claiming today is Earth's 400 birthday. Groupon is known for their humor, but how (and why) did they pick today as Earth's 400th birthday?

Are you a big astronomy enthusiast? Do you have some amazing astrophotography pictures you'd like to share? If so, become a contributor over here at Astronomy World!  We are looking for new moderators, along with contributors, to post pictures and videos, write tutorials and astronomy-related news articles, and even share updates on how your observing went!

There isn't much going on this week, but be sure to try viewing the Spica-moon conjunction. It will be hard to view with the full moon, but it will be spectacular if you can snag a peak.

This morning, NASA launched the five suborbital sounding rockets from Virginia as part of ATREX (Anomalous Transport Rocket Experiment). Each rocket was launched 80 seconds apart and released chemical tracers that created "milky, white clouds at the edge of space." Now, I've seen plenty of bullet tracers in my life, but these are far more poetic. Take a look at the time-lapse video and see for yourself.

Again, there are tons of events this week, and as usual, most of them are caused by Jupiter's moons. But there is some happenings with Venus, too, so don't miss out.

Seeing an aurora in person is one of the most amazing spectacles you could witness in the skies above. But what about the skies below?

I came across these beautiful wallpapers while browsing +Guy Kawasaki's Google+ stream. Basically, someone combined Calvin and Hobbes with the OS X Lion desktop wallpaper to make some truly fun artwork. Click on the link for access to the full-resolution wallpapers.

This year is a leap year, which means today is leap day! I will be explaining why this happens and some special conditions below in the AON. Plus, there is a new feature this week—elongation! Be sure to check it out below.

I'm starting a series on the top astronomers, with probably about eleven astronomers that I will be covering overall. So, let's start out from the top, with the top most important astronomer. In my opinion, Galileo Galilei is the top astronomer.

There's not much going on this week in the skies above, but there are a lot of conjunctions to take a peek at! And of course, there's the comet Garradd that's still showing its tail to us down here on Earth, so make sure to catch it before it's gone. The rest that's going on this week:

The Garradd comet has just about reached its absolute peak! By the way, I took those pictures below of the moon through my iPhone using an adapter. Pretty cool, right?

What happens when you combine a passion for astronomy and a love of wine? Cabernet that's out of this world. Literally. It's called Meteorito, and has a berry, nutty flavor with just a hint of iron and nickel. The wine was made by oenophile and amateur astronomer Ian Hutcheon, who runs his own vineyard and established an observatory in Chile called Centro Astronomica Tagua Tagua.

Since the first time we've been to Mars, the question was 'Did there used to be life here?'. That all changed for the better when NASA told us that the Opportunity rover found signs of water- the essential part to life. NASA officials on Wednesday said the rover discovered a mineral vein of gypsum running along the rim of a crater called Endeavor. The gypsum was deposited by flowing water billions of years ago. The vein is about 20 inches long. They found it while studying a rock called Tisdale...

This week's AON might be a little short, but finally, the Garradd comet's peak has come! I picked the Garradd comet to follow because it's a bright and easy-to-follow comet. Be sure to observe it! If you need help finding it, you can find more information here.

Perhaps my only reason to stray from my democratic roots... Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich wants to send Americans back to the moon. And that's not all. In a direct quote, Gingrich promised: "By the end of my second term, we will have the first permanent base on the moon, and it will be American."

NASA reports that the sun erupted late last night with a large solar flare—an M8.7 class flare. The classification is calculated according to the peak flux of 100 to 800 picometer x-rays near Earth measured from the GEOS weather satellite. There are 5 letter classifications for solar flares, each with a linear 1-9 number scale of severity. M is the fourth most powerful class, with X leading the way. But last night's earth-directed coronal mass ejection (CME), captured by the Solar Dynamics...

Remember—winter is the perfect time to observe! There are a lot of events going on this week, so pull out that observing chair. Here they are:

This week's AON has lots of conjunctions—be sure to observe them! Here it is:

Recent research published in an issue of Nature suggests that there are actually more planets in our universe than stars. Using the Milky Way as the focus, the researchers found that each star has an average of about 1.6 planets in orbit around it, which suggests that extrasolar planets (exoplanets) outnumber stars, bringing new hope for the search of extraterrestrial life.

If you slept in during the peak of the Quadrantid meteor shower this morning, don't fret, because plenty of early risers did manage to wake up—with their cameras. Even if you did wake up and managed to withstand the cold morning air, you might not have seen anything. Cloud cover could have made it impossible, as well as bright city lights. But some stargazers made it their mission to photograph the Quadrantids, and lucky for you, they did.

More than 100 missions targeted at Earth's moon have been launched by space explorers since the late-1950s. NASA landed a total of 12 men on the lunar surface, collecting more than 800 pounds of moon rocks and lunar soil samples. But still, the moon remains a mystery, especially its formation. NASA's new mission aims to find out exactly how the moon came to be with the Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory, or GRAIL, part of NASA's Discovery Program.

There are a lot of events going on this week! As I mentioned last week, there will be new features from now on. Check them out in the info section below!

This week's AON may be a little short, but the ones to come will be packed full with information. I am really hoping for the skies to clear so I can observe soon!