Astronomy Log

Every night when I am out in the garden, I hear rustling in the bushes of the hedgehogs doing the rounds looking for food. When I first heard the rustling in the dark I wondered what it was, but now I know when the hedgehogs are coming and going as they make a ’scraping’ sound with their spines under the back gate.

Boy do they move fast with those little feet, and they also scratch themselves a lot with their back feet, must be the fleas!

So here is an image of one of my friends the hedgehog, who visit me most nights, and whom I am now used to seeing and hearing!

My apologies to the hedgehog if the flash momentarily blinded you!

What a great night last night, a really clear night with the odd small cloud overhead. I decided to look for the Dumbbell Nebula M27 last night, and I had a rough idea where it was, but I managed to find it after about two minutes, sometimes the night sky seems very small, sometimes massive!

Well anyway, I managed to carry on taking pictures of the constellations and I managed to get Delphinus, Equuleus and Sagitta in this shot below:

I have drawn the outlines of Delphinus, Equuleus and Sagitta over the previous photo in the image below:

I posted last week about how you could get a free Sir Patrick Moore autobiography with 6 months of Sky at Night Magazine (see the post here), well today I took the plunge myself and ordered the magazine.

I went for the 6 month subscription for £18.95, on direct debit, but this does get me the free book and it allows me to try the magazine for 6 issues and then decide if I like it, if not then I shall just cancel my Sky at Night magazine subscription direct debit online and then perhaps try Astronomy Now for a year.

The free Sir Patrick Moore autobiography offer is still available with Magazine Group

Following along from my mapping of all the asterisms in the sky by just using my Canon DLSR with an 18-55mm lens, I have now taken Perseus and learnt how the asterism is constructed via its stars, I also managed to just get Triangulum and Aries in the photo as well.

Now the picutre below has the outline of the asterisms added:

Pathways to Astronomy (ISBN 0072922087). The beginning of the book contains some really nice pages of various parts of the night sky constellations in full colour and what interesting sights to look out for in the sky, including M101, M81, M82, M31, M45, M57, M16 and a lot more.

Pathways to Astronomy is split into five parts, these are the cosmic landscape, probing light and matter, the solar system, stars and stellar evolution and finally galaxies and the universe.

The cosmic landscape part covers the basics of astronomy including the geometry of the moon, sun and earth as well as lunar cycles and an introduction to astronomical formulae and functions.

Part two covers Newton’s law, orbital velocities, conservation laws, the electromagnetic spectrum, and Doppler shift, focusing light and how to observe space.

Part three covers the solar system including our solar systems planets including asteroids, comets and about impacts on earth.

Path four covers the stars and stellar evolution including giant and variable stars, exploding white dwarfs, neutron stars, black holes, star clusters and about the sun.

Part five covers galaxies and the universe including details on the gas and dust in the Milky Way and the mass and motions in the Milky Way. Dark matter, cosmology and astrobiology and the search for life elsewhere are also included.

Starry Night Pro on CD accompanied my copy of Pathways to Astronomy which is an excellent piece of astronomy software.

The appendices include a wide range of tables and information about astronomy formulae and tables giving you information on stars, satellites, the nearest stars and more. Also included is the table of periodic elements. The rear of the book also includes a glossary of astronomical terms together with a fold out map of the constellations in the northern and southern hemisphere.

Pathways to Astronomy are a very large and concise book on astronomy. At the end of each chapter there are key terms, questions for review, problems to solve and a set of questions to test your self.

Pathways to Astronomy contains some amazing full colour photographs of the solar system together with some really clear and concise drawings which help to explain certain topics. If you are after a really concise book on astronomy then Pathways to Astronomy is an excellent book and an excellent study guide book.

Pathways to Astronomy is available at Amazon

After using the BBC iPlayer for about two weeks now, I am finding it pretty good. So far I have downloaded The Cosmos which I forgot to record as well as a BBC Drama.

I managed to miss the first showing of The Sky at Night - Black Holes and Black Magic, now I know there are repeats of The Sky at Night during the week which is good (although The Cosmos is not repeated during the week), but I can’t wait for the repeat, so tonight I downloaded The Sky at Night onto my laptop to watch tomorrow.

The BBC iPlayer is a good idea if you have missed a show on TV and it’s not repeated, the only problem is that you can only download programmes transmitted in the past 7 days, I think they could do with setting it to 14 days or longer.

Just to let you all know I managed to find a subscription to BBC Sky at Night Magazine for £18.98 for 6 months, or £38 for 1 year + FREE Patrick Moore Autobiography.

The normal cover price of BBC Sky at Night is £4.25, but this offer makes it just £3.16 an issue plus you get a free book.

The offer is with Magazine Group and this offer is limited! Find this offer here.

This is an image of the moon I took on 31st August 2007. I took this through my telescope on my Canon 400D by the prime focus method, which is adding the camera directly to the telescope and I did not use any extra eyepieces, just the natural magnification of the telescope.

For the first night out in a long time, it must be about three weeks since the perseid meteor shower I managed to have a clear night, and get some photos.

It’s still really good fun to learn the various asterisms, and I try to find and learn new ones every time I go out.

This time I concentrated on Cygnus which is a cross type asterism which lives along the line of the milky way, close by in the photo below is also Lyra which I have visited many times with my telescope to see the Ring Nebula.

The following photograph has been amended to show clearly the outlines of Cygnus and Lyra, it also points out the stars - Deneb, Sadr, Albireo and Vega.