SPA Convention 2009 Lecture Tickets

I received my ticket to the Sir Patrick Moore lecture at the 2009 SPA Convention today. Sir Patrick Moore is not the one speaking but Dr Katie Joy is. The talk is entitled “The Past, Present and Future of Lunar Exploration”, a talk I am looking forward to.

I just really wanted to thank the SPA for doing such a great job of getting the ticket to me in the post together with a full agenda for the Society for Popular Astronomy Convention day at the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge on 7th March 2009, as all I did was send them an email!

So if you are interested in any of these talks:

• Introduction to Moon Dust and Meteorites
• Epic Moon: A History of Lunar Observation
• An Impact Cratering Tour of the Solar System
• Meteorites: Unravelling Cosmic Mysteries

as well as astronomy trade stands, tours of the on-site telescopes, then head along, as it’s all free.

Satellites Collide over Siberia

Just to put everyone in the picture, 2 satellites have collided 500 miles up over Siberia.

The collision involved an Iridium US commercial satellite, which was launched in 1997, and a Russian satellite launched in 1993 which was believed to be nonfunctioning and out of control.

The Iridium craft weighed 1,235 pounds, and the Russian craft nearly a ton.

“There have been four other cases in which space objects have collided accidentally in orbit”, NASA said. But those were considered minor and involved parts of spent rockets or small satellites. NASA also said “It was just a matter of time before a larger collision occured”.

I know a lot of people are looking for images of the actual collision between the two satellites on the internet, but I am sure there are none on the internet at the moment, please tell me if I’m wrong.

Although if we can locate and see the lost NASA toolbag in the sky, then I’m sure we may be able to track ad see parts of the two satellites if the pieces are large enough.

Want to Buy an SPC900 Webcam. But Where?

Exactly. It seems to me that Philips have stopped producing our beloved SPC900 Webcams. Amazon, Play and Pixmania used to stock them online, but no longer do. So what now? I suppose you could always look on eBay.

Does this mean that the price of second hand SPC900 Webcams will increase as they become harder to get hold of.

I did discover the new range of Philips SPC webcams and wrote a blog post about them. But is the SPC1300 or SPC1330 the new astronomy webcam? Do the old 1.25″ adaptors fit these webcams? Or do we need to get the glue out and try to fit the old adaptors to the new webcams?

The SPC1300 is a 2 Megapixel CMOS camera, the SPC900 was a 1.3 Megapixel camera.

If anybody wants to try the SPC1330 they are stocked at Amazon or Play.com – both offer Free Delivery.

Or will this see the end of us using Philips Webcams for Planetary Imaging, do we now need to go back to Logitech webcams?

Find Comet Lulin in Stellarium

I am starting to get quite excited about having Comet Lulin to image, so if your like me and want to know how to plan your observing or astrophotography then you’ll need to know how to find Comet Lullin in the sky.

I began using an old version of Starry Night Pro, but that would not show me the comet. So I decided to install Stellarium again on my laptop. By default Comet Lulin is also not in Steallarium, but I did find a way to map it into Stellarium.

Install Stellarium, if you have not already

Located the ssystem.ini file in the data folder where you installed Stellarium

Edit the file and place the following text at the end of the file:

[Lulin]
name = Lulin
parent = Sun
radius = 1000
oblateness = 0.0
halo = true
color = 1.0,1.0,1.0
tex_halo = star16x16.png
tex_map = nomap.png
coord_func = comet_orbit
orbit_TimeAtPericenter = 2454842.1414
orbit_PericenterDistance = 1.212289
orbit_Eccentricity = 0.999987
orbit_ArgOfPericenter = 136.8614
orbit_AscendingNode = 338.5353
orbit_Inclination = 178.3730
lighting = false
albedo = 1
sidereal_period =

Then save the file and re-start Stellarium

Use the search facility in Stellarium to locate the Comet Lulin

Lulin is also in the Meade Autostar database as C/2007 N3 Lulin, so if you are outside already it should GoTo it, otherwise just connect your telescope to a computer and do an update within the Autostar program.