Probably want to take your chance of viewing this tonight or tomorrow night as the weather takes a turn for the worse after that:
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+1 for the “Science and shit” category.
Papster? Thoughts?
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I’m always fascinated by the night sky but don’t really know my way around it. Whenever I get the heads-up (an appropriate term) at this time of year I usually sit out and watch if the weather is good. Apparently Wednesday night is going to be clear and with no moon it should make viewing quite easy as long as you’re not in a area with a lot of light pollution.
It keeps changing as I spend half the year below the equator and the other half north of it confuses the fuck out of me .
North star, pole star, Dog star, Sirius, Dark star, which is real these days?
Originally posted by @lifeintheslowlane
I’m always fascinated by the night sky but don’t really know my way around it.
There’s a great book for just this, Lifer. It’s called ‘Turn Left At Orion’. I highly recommend it. It covers naked eye objects as well as binocular/small telescope objects. It’s really very good:
I follow a guy called VirtualAstro on twitter, he always gives a heads up about ISS passes and meteor showers and stuff like that.
I love the night sky and the shit that goes on with it but have never managed to get into stargazing. Really do need to buy me a decent telescope!
A few years ago in Turkey we used to lie on the (flat) roof and night and watch the shooting stars for hours. The was hardly any light pollution where we were as we were well out of town and the sky was amazing.
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Yeah I know I should go to all these websites and read books and look at star charts and memorise all the stars positions in relation to other stars in the night sky but at the end of the day/night, will my life be any richer? I don’t think so.
I went to Lowell Obseratory the last time we were in Flagstaff and took the guided tour and lecture. In Tenerife earlier in the year I went on an evening lecture up in Las Cañadas caldera at the base of Mount Teide and stood in the open as the night sky revealed itself as the sun went down. I do try to remember all the easy pointers but none of it really sticks because all I really want is to be awestruck.
Like SoG all I want to do is to sit under the stars on a warm evening watching shooting stars and to be fucking amazed and humbled by the awesome enormity of it all and to realise there are billions of other worlds and civilisations out there.
Plenty of free stargazing apps for iphones etc that identify stars. Haven’t used any myself but understand they are very useful.
Google star map used to be fucking awesome, it’d use your phone’s sensors and wherever you pointed the phone it’d show you what stars were there. Unfortuantely it seems to have been pulled for some reason.
I worked for ESA during my industrial year, simulating the damage done to the ISS by micro-meteorites and space debris, so I got well into the whole near Earth and space thing then. Part of my job was also timelining the various meteor showers and where they came from.
One thing I did learn was how fragile the ISS really is.
When we get wound up about Saints latest signing or result, it is always good to look out into space and realise how effin insignificant we all are.
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Spent yesterday evening sat on the veranda watching this. Now I now what I was watching! Very little light pollution here in French Polynesia so it was awesome.
I shall return with more red wine this evening.
Originally posted by @lifeintheslowlane
Yeah I know I should go to all these websites and read books and look at star charts and memorise all the stars positions in relation to other stars in the night sky but at the end of the day/night, will my life be any richer? I don’t think so.
I do. I’m not the kind of person to hang off Feynman’s every word but he’s right here:
We bought my Dad a telescope for his birthday a couple of years ago, and looking at the moon close up or Jupiter so it actually looks like a planet, not just a star, is just awe inspiring.
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Originally posted by @TheCholulaKid
Originally posted by @lifeintheslowlane
Yeah I know I should go to all these websites and read books and look at star charts and memorise all the stars positions in relation to other stars in the night sky but at the end of the day/night, will my life be any richer? I don’t think so.
I do. I’m not the kind of person to hang off Feynman’s every word but he’s right here:
Don’t get me wrong “Cholula” …I love the whole Cosmos thing, I do “get it” I can’t get enough of it…it’s just knowing and memorising the positions of arbitrary configurations of stars seems to me so prosaic in the poetry of the night sky…I have no real need for it. For example this is posted as the most important image taken by the Hubble telescope…do I need to know where this is in the night sky to appreciate it? No. I think this is totally humbling…
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Cloudy last two nights so night light show 
Today is overcast too. Pah.