Dave's Universe - Astronomy Magazine - Interactive Star Charts, Planets, Meteors, Comets, Telescopes

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Dawn spacecraft motors toward asteroid Vesta

Posted 12 years ago by David Eicher

There’s exciting news from the solar system — NASA’s Dawn spacecraft, which is set to orbit the asteroid 4 Vesta, has captured images of the big rock on its approach. The photos, released today, show the asteroid, which measures 330 miles (530 kilometers) across, as a small disk from a distance of 752,000 miles (1.2 million km). When Dawn begins orbiting Vesta July 16, it will collect data from an altitude of only 1,700 miles (2,700 km), imaging the famous asteroid so that pl...

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The skies belong to everyone, part seven: Galaxies

Posted 12 years ago by David Eicher

In the past six parts of this miniseries, we’ve looked at all types of objects you can easily observe in the night sky — the Moon, planets, comets, stars, star clusters, and nebulae. In this final entry, we now turn to deep space, to galaxies far beyond our Milky Way. Our galaxy, a collection of at least 200 billion stars, is but one of at least 125 billion galaxies in the universe. We can’t see them all — most are too far away to be viewed by instruments other...

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The skies belong to everyone, part six: Nebulae and star clusters

Posted 12 years ago by David Eicher

So you bought a telescope to look at everything the universe has to offer. You’ve explored the various craters and maria of the Moon plus the planets, comets, and stars. What should you look at next? Stars form in groups as giant gas clouds collapse inward and compress the matter into dense, hot clumps. The process of stars exploding and creating gas clouds and gas clouds coalescing back into new stars is ongoing. So anyone with a small telescope can go outside anytime and observe cluster...

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The skies belong to everyone, part five: Stars

Posted 12 years ago by David Eicher

So you bought a telescope to look at everything the universe has to offer. You’ve explored the various carters and maria of the Moon plus all the planets and comets. What should you look at next?Looking beyond the family of the Sun, we take a long step into deep space. Stars, like people, come in many sizes, types, and ages. The majority of stars, in fact, are not alone. Just as the Sun has planets, some stars have other stars. Many of these double star systems are conveniently place...

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The skies belong to everyone, part four: Comets

Posted 12 years ago by David Eicher

So you bought a telescope to look at everything the universe has to offer. You’ve explored the various craters and maria of the Moon plus all the planets. What should you look at next? Every once in a while, and usually completely unexpectedly, a bright comet sweeps in near the Sun and becomes the sky’s most commanding sight — temporarily. There are also many periodic comets, including Halley, that return at regular intervals and whose orbits are well-known. In either case, bri...

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The skies belong to everyone, part three: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune

Posted 12 years ago by David Eicher

So you bought a telescope to look at everything the universe has to offer. You’ve explored the various craters and maria of the Moon, and some of the planets — Mercury, Venus, and Mars. What should you look at next? The solar system’s giant planet, Jupiter, is enormous — so huge it could hold 1,000 Earths. Jupiter is fascinating with a telescope or even with 7x binoculars. Its four brightest moons — Io, Ganymede, Europa, and Callisto (each as big as Earth&rsqu...

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The skies belong to everyone, part two: Mercury, Venus, and Mars

Posted 12 years ago by David Eicher

So you bought a telescope to look at everything the universe has to offer. You’ve explored the various craters and maria of the Moon. What should you look at next? Why not go after some planets? Seven planets are visible in backyard telescopes. The planet that orbits closest to the Sun, Mercury, is bright but never appears very far from the Sun in the sky. You must always look for it right before sunrise or soon after sunset. Mercury is small and distant enough that binoculars and telescop...

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The skies belong to everyone, part one: The Moon

Posted 12 years ago by David Eicher

So, you bought a telescope to look at everything the universe has to offer. There are moons, planets, stars, comets, nebulae, and galaxies, many of which are visible to users of small telescopes on any clear night. What should you look at first? There’s no better way to start in astronomy than with the Moon. The brightest and largest object in the sky, the Moon is covered with features easily visible in binoculars or small telescopes. You can actually see some lunar features with your una...

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Have a spare $100,000?

Posted 12 years ago by David Eicher

If so, you just might be able to win the bidding for Alexei Leonov’s flown space suit from the Apollo-Soyuz Test Mission, July 15–19, 1975. It’s just one item among many dozens of space-related memorabilia in an auction to be held May 5, 2011, by Bonhams in New York. This big space auction is loaded with unusual and one-of-a-kind items for the collector who has everything and misses the heyday when space exploration was more aggressively funded. Among the other treasures: the c...

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What kind of a thinker are you?

Posted 12 years ago by David Eicher

Every day you are alive on planet Earth, there’s a big philosophical question you have to deal with many times. How do you determine what is the truth? What thought process or processes do you use to decide what constitutes reality? Do you use different kinds of thought processes for different areas of your life? Four broad types of thinking exist. They stretch over a spectrum from simple to complex, from primitive to sophisticated, from employing “gut feelings” to analysi...

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The history of Astronomy magazine

Posted 12 years ago by David Eicher

Little did Steve Walther know that his brainchild would turn into the greatest magazine about astronomy in the world. At 29, the ambitious graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point launched a periodical about his first love, the stars. The premier issue, August 1973, held 48 pages and five feature articles, plus information about what to see in the night sky that month. Walther had grown up in the Milwaukee area and taken jobs in public relations after college, yet always dabbling in...

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Not so fast, New York Times

Posted 12 years ago by David Eicher

On April 4, 2011, the New York Times ran a story called “Black-Market Trinkets from Space” in which writer William J. Broad lashed out at amateur meteorite collectors and dealers for practicing their hobby. “An illegal sales market has boomed” in the wake of increasing interest in space rocks, claimed Broad. He quoted Dr. Ralph Harvey of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland as calling the meteorite trade “as organized as any drug trade and just as ...

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Celebrating Earth Day

Posted 12 years ago by David Eicher

You know, I noticed on the calendar when I came into work on Friday that April 22 was Earth Day. That’s great, and I fully support Earth as a good planet and a nice place to be. Sure beats the chills you would get on Mars, the trouble you would have breathing on Mercury, or the scorched hellfire that would consume you on Venus. And bringing attention to good causes is pretty fine, too, as long as it’s not a manufactured process, as it usually is, to sell greeting cards or solicit cas...