Astronomy

[WeisserWolf]

for me, astronomy is a very interesting thing. i love it. i read nearly every day about so interesting astronomic things, and can´t get enougth of them.
often i look, for many hours through my telescope in the sky..

anyone else have this hobby?

[Wolfboy]

Don't have a telescope, but watching the stars at night and let my mind wonder is something I love to do
I often go sit (especially in the summer) in a meadow nearby at night watching the stars watching me

[Stuart]

Been an astronomy buff since I was 12. I've been collecting meteorites for years, and thanks to my geology degree, I've given lectures to astronomy clubs across the country on meteorites & planetary geology.

Its a fantastic subject.

[davelemmo]

Ive been an astronomy enthusiast for several years, and I have a couple of friends who share the same passion.

[Cabding]

im a huge nerd so of course this is an interest of mine. where i live now there is a plague of light polution so the only lights i see in the sky are of planes. i love reading/watching things about the cosmos.

[Nude_not_rude]

I have an interest in Astronomy, but never spent a decent amount of time with it. I too like to go to the country and lay down and look at the stars in the night, and have come close to buying a telescope in the past, but it's really not practical in the city. I have a couple of  astronomy apps on my phone which are fun to play with. They are called GoSkyWatch, Star Walk and NASA.

[Stuart]

So who here has actually seen Mercury? I've seen it once, its a devil to find, especially in hilly parts of the world.

And is you have, did you use one of these smart phone apps to do it?

[Jann]

So who here has actually seen Mercury? I've seen it once, its a devil to find, especially in hilly parts of the world.

That is because it is quick, silver, and runs downhill to hide in the bottoms of valleys. 

[Stuart]

And is you have, did you use one of these smart phone apps to do it?

I didn't want a smart phone until I saw this, now I badly want one!

[WeisserWolf]

for searching things i want to see, i use a software on my laptop. called stellarium. it´s small, very good and free.

[simonalexander2005]

Don't have a telescope, but watching the stars at night and let my mind wonder is something I love to do
I often go sit (especially in the summer) in a meadow nearby at night watching the stars watching me

Same with me - I don't regularly go looking for constellations, etc - but when something big is happening i'll go watch, and I love being outside on a cloudless night watching the stars and moon

[bluetrain]

I would REALLY love to be an amateur astronomer. Only I have to amass the amount of money necessary to buy a telescope and read the books.

[Jann]

My honey takes "Sky & Telescope" and has a good pair of binoculars fitted to a really solid tripod but the "seeing" around here isn't very good much of the time (we get a lot of fog) so he hasn't invested in a real telescope.  Like me he is a "big picture" stargazer, fascinated by the starry sky but not much interested in trying to be an amateur astronomer.  We prefer to lie out on a blanket and watch the stars overhead, pointing out constellations to the nieces.  Besides, he has lived in parts of the world where there wasn't an artificial light for a hundred miles in any direction and his description of the night sky under those conditions nearly defies belief . . . imagine driving across the desert by starlight alone.

Meteor showers are my favourite thing to watch.

[niv]

Ever since I was 8 years old, I've been fascinated about astronomy.
I'm the guy who is trying to see very faint quasars with his telescope. On vacation of course, because where I live you won't see much.

This topic makes me remember to design a controller for my mount so that I can start doing some fancy astrophotography stuff. Really looking forward to that ^^

[ToneBender]

I've always loved astronomy - star gazing to be more specific and I'm interested to know if anyone else is also.

Planet orbiting nearby star is blue, like Earth
 
But other than its colour, the gas giant HD189733b is nothing like Earth
 
CBC News
Posted: Jul 11, 2013 11:22 AM ET
Last Updated: Jul 11, 2013 11:18 AM ET
 



The planet, seen in an artist's conception, doesn't have any oceans. Instead, the blue colour is caused by dust, made of glass, swirling violently in the planet's atmosphere, where winds are whipping by at about 7,000 kilometres per hour. (European Space Agency)

Mega-planet's ingredients point to solar system like oursNewly discovered planet is tiniest one yet
 
The colour of a planet outside our solar system has been observed for the first time – and it is blue like Earth.
 
The blueness of HD189733b, a gas giant that orbits a star just 63 light years away, was detected by the Hubble Telescope, an international group of scientists reported Wednesday in a news release from the ESA/Hubble Information Centre and in a scientific paper posted online. The peer-reviewed article has been accepted for publication in the Aug. 1 issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters.
 
The colour does not indicate that the planet has oceans. Instead, the researchers report that it is due to a dust — made of specks of glass — in the planet's violently stormy atmosphere that scatter blue light.
 
"This planet has been studied well in the past, both by ourselves and other teams," said Frederic Pont, a University of Exeter researcher who leads the Hubble observing program, in a statement.
 
"But measuring its colour is a real first — we can actually imagine what this planet would look like if we were able to look at it directly."
 
The colour was not imaged directly by the telescope, but detected with an instrument called the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph, which measures the levels of different colours of light in the Hubble's field of view, including the light reflecting off the planet.
 
As the planet passed behind its star over the course of each orbit, the spectrograph showed that the level of blue light decreased.
 
"From this, we can gather that the planet is blue, because the signal remained constant at the other colours we measured," said Tom Evans, a University of Oxford researcher who co-authored the paper, in a statement.
 
Aside from not having oceans, the blue planet has many other features that make it uninhabitable. It belongs to a special class of gas giants called "hot Jupiters." As such, it has a temperature of over 1000 C on the side that faces closest to its star and 7000-kilometre-per-hour winds in its atmosphere that may cause it to "rain" glass sideways. The planet is located so close to its star that the star's gravity keeps the same side of the planet constantly facing it (as the Earth's gravity does to the Moon), while the other side is in perpetual darkness.

Glass storms with 7000 km/hr winds.