Society for Popular Astronomy

aha

The launch of GOCE has been postponed until October 5. It has the potential to produce flares similar to those of the Iridium satellites. Am confused. It says here it was launched from Russia in March but the solar panels will not align fully until this week. A very interesting piece of kit, with B...

Nice to see that amateurs are still detecting valuable science in our solar neighbourhood.

An ironing chair - Lidl have them for a tenner from time to time.

The neutron stars lose energy via gravitational radiation. If you concentrate hard, Wikipedia has a succinct answer.

What I don't understand about space expanding, Joe, is why we are not expanding too. After all, we are in and of space like everything else. Is there something about baryonic matter that excludes it from expanding in the same way that the space vacuum does and at the same rate? My understanding is ...

I have to say that if I were blind I would find it all very frustrating! If I couldn't see the moon or a planet, I wouldn't really want to have someone else's description of it. Not really. Think about it. Written astronomy can be very captivating. Who can not be affected by the words of Apollo 14'...

So if anything whilst all the tight fisted astronomers are waiting for equipment prices to drop (how long is it expected that prices will drop ?) meanwhile some equipment makers will go out of business. So in the long term astronomical equipment prices will increase and people will have even less s...

joe wrote:I wonder what happened to exoplanet CoRoT-Exo-7b, which orbits a 12th mag star in Monoceros, is 1.7 Earth masses and was the feature article in the latest S&T magazine?

I suspect it's still there

Interesting piece about unusually low sun activity levels, the Maunder minimum and whether we're heading for another one. Maybe demand for solar telescopes will drop and they'll be going cheap?

Anyone heading to Italy this Spring/Summer is highly advised to pop in to Florence. I just came back from a weekend away and visited a thing touted as a Galileo exhibition . Well, it finishes with Galileo but is much much more than that. I have never seen such an extensive collection of historical a...

Robin Scagell wrote:Currently it is a bit like Ellen MacArthur in the Southern Ocean taking a nap on the basis that there is probably nothing to run into her.

Bit like nuclear submarines in the Atlantic, then

Well, apparently this particular debris field is huge. Apparently the Iridium constellation cost about $6 billion to put up, so if one of these 66 odd satellites is lost, that's about $ 90 million gone. Of course future value is a different calculation, but in any event I'd have thought you'd get qu...

Has anyone seen the stuff from Cochrane's? Their orrery is £20

There are a few other suppliers with orreries & other fun solar system models. Try searching for astronomy educational supplies.

Deimos wrote:Except, there are some issues with 0.10.1 on OS X (when moving the sky using the mouse)

Use the £$%^&* keyboard