[av_video src=’http://vimeo.com/112644328′ format=’16-9′ width=’16’ height=’9′] When Venus is in the western sky after sunset, it is known as the evening star. It is a time when Venus is most prominently seen. For most of 2015 Venus will be quite visible in the evening as it approaches greatest elongation in May.
My God, It’s Full of Stars
One of the more difficult ideas to grasp in astronomy is the sheer scale of the cosmos. Even as a professional in the field it’s much easier to focus on numbers and data than really step back and appreciate scale. Every now and then there is an image that forces you contemplate scale, such as the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. Now NASA and ESA have released a new image of the Andromeda galaxy. It is the most detailed image of Andromeda ever made,and you can check it out in this video.
Newtonmas
It’s often said that Isaac Newton was born on December 25, 1642. That’s true in the fact that Newton’s birth is indicated as that date in historical records, but it is more accurate to note that Newton was born on January 4, 1643. That’s is birthday in our modern Gregorian calendar. At the time of Newton’s birth, England used the older Julian calendar, hence the difference in dates.
More Power
This month I’ve upgraded my home computer. My new desktop has faster processor, double the storage space, and quadruple the RAM as my venerable old laptop. I don’t upgrade very often, so when it happens there’s a very noticeable uptick in computing power. It’s something we’ve become rather accustomed to. With each new phone, computer or tablet we have more power at our fingertips. This consequence of Moore’s law has also revolutionized the way we do astronomy.
High Noon
Normally we think of “noon” as being when the clock reads 12:00 pm, but in astronomy noon can also mean when the Sun is at its highest point in the sky, or when it transits the meridian (the middle of the sky). These aren’t quite the same thing.
The Last Astrologer
On this day in 1546, Tycho Brahe was born. Like countless sky-watchers before him, Tycho was an astrologer. He was born in a world before telescopes, where the stars were thought to be fixed an eternal, making their daily motion (along with the Sun, Moon and planets) about a divinely fixed Earth.
Starry Hunter
As we edge toward the winter season, the constellation of Orion becomes prominent in the night sky. A favorite of many, Orion is distinctive because of its three belt stars, which makes is easy to locate in the night sky. It’s a particularly bright constellation, with seven first and second magnitude stars.
Clockwork Twin
The Antikythera mechanism is a strange astronomical calculator. It was discovered in a shipwreck off the Greek island of Antikythera in 1900, and is astoundingly complex. It was a bronze clockwork device with at least 30 gears, and looks like something from the 1400s. But recent research indicates that it likely dates earlier than 200 B.C.
All Alone in the Night
Although we think of deep space as being dark, that isn’t entirely true. The universe is filled with a background glow of radiation. The most famous is the cosmic microwave background, which is the remnant glow of the big bang. There is also the x-ray background, caused by things like active galactic nuclei, the radio background. This week new research on the infrared background has been published in Science, and the results are somewhat surprising.