Koppernigk

From Flammarion to the year 2100

A guide for observing with binoculars

Something I emphasize often: astronomy is a hobby for everyone and every moment. You are certainly not restricted to sitting in cold and crisp nights under a twinkling dome of stars, hunting for galaxies and nebula's (although that is a very pleasant albeit cold pastime Astronomy is there for you with books, pictures, the Internet and - if you want to observe - your eyes, maybe added by simple binoculars. The fun of the small, specialized pictures lies in the familiarity with the big picture.

When you go outside, you'll notice that patience pays off. The longer you sit and stare, the more stars and details you see. Recognizing constellations, identifying stars, and eventually all from the top of your head, is fun enough. To help you with those simple instruments (although some binoculars aren't simple at all) there are a lot of books and websites to help you get started. I rely on Universe Today, with this review of Stephen O'Meara's book, "Observing the Night Sky with Binoculars – A Simple Guide to the Heavens".

Antimatter

A nice review of the book Antimatter  by Frank Close (Oxford) on Centauri Dreams the blog of Paul Gilster.

Science Fiction

It's not exactly science, but sometimes it's almost science, and somethimes it becomes real science: science fiction.

A New Scientist Special can be read here.

Our expanding universe

You might wonder what the image below depicts. It's a page of a book I once got from a friend. When his father died, it came up from his library. Knowing my interest in astronomy, the book - luckily - ended up with me, and not at the second hand bookstore or the old paper shredder.

The picture shows a page from a book from 1923, which is an adaptation of Flammarion's "Les étoiles et les curiosités du ciel" ("The stars and the wonders of the heavens"). Flammarion lived in the second half of the nineteenth century and the start of the twentieth. He was an author interested in many scientific subjects - even to the scientific study of spiritualism, and founder of the first French astronomical society.

This books loosely connects all the wonders of the night sky. You see a picture taken with the 100 Inch Hooker-telescope at Mount Wilson. The text describes the size of the Andromeda nebula, which should, according to the author, possibly be classified as a "star cluster". The size and distance, as the book tells us, is even more staggering. Rough estimates give it a diameter of 200 to 300 times the size of the Solar system, already a giant at 8 billion kilometers in distance.

The quote shows us how rapidly our view and knowledge of the universe has changed and expanded. At 2 million light years the Andromeda galaxy might well be more like 200 million times the size of the Solar system our year 1923 book was making us believe. That's less than a century ago.

It leaves you wondering where we are in another 100 years. Most likely I will not be around by then, so keep an eye on it for me.

Science and Fiction?

Maybe you just like science, or astronomy, or just to read a nice story about something happening in space. But maybe you're a geek like me, and like science fiction as well. And have a PDA, laptop or PC to read eBooks on. In that case no doubt you know Project Gutenberg, the huge online collection of - over 17,000 - free eBook texts, consisting of works of fiction and non-fiction past their copyright date.

Good thing is the sheer volume of books, bad thing is the fact that you either have to download text files or html. But if you want preformatted Gutenberg eBooks, Manybooks.net might be something for you. It has a large science fiction section with authors like Marion Zimmer Bradley, Murray Leinster, classics from H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, Edgar Rice Burroughs and E.E. Doc Smith; H. Beam Piper, Fritz Leiber, Frederik Pohl, Clifford Simak, A.E. Van Vogt, Keith Laumer - enough to cater anyone's taste. Multiple formats: eReader, Mobipocket, Plucker, PDF, iSilo, Kindle, Sony, Rocketbook and many more. Some classic SF form the '50s when space cadets soared into space with their rockets, and Moon and Mars bases were just around the corner.

What's that you say? No real "human-in-space" content in this post? Not quite. Click here and here and you'll see why. Well - it's a start.

Ten years of Hipparcos and Tycho

"It has been ten years since the release of the Hipparcos and Tycho catalogues, the first astrometric catalogues produced from observations in space. The Hipparcos catalogue has since been re-processed and fine-tuned, providing the best map of our galaxy to date.

ESA’s Hipparcos (High Precision Parallax Collecting Satellite), launched in 1989, was the first, and so far only, space-based astrometry mission. Designed to determine the position and distance of more than 100 000 stars, its accuracy exceeded ground-based observations by a factor of 10 to 100. The mission also collected data on the proper motion and variability of stars and identified multiple star systems.

Hipparcos was managed and run exclusively by ESA and a consortium of European scientists. It resulted in the Hipparcos and Tycho catalogues which were first published in 1997. The catalogues provide information fundamental to all subjects in astronomy and remain unrivalled to this day.

The Hipparcos catalogue contains about 120 000 stars and can be used to study not only individual stars, but also the behaviour of stellar groups as well as the formation of our galaxy. The Tycho catalogue, an unplanned product of the mission, is a bigger source for the study of stars (about one million stars) and its data is also used for orientation of satellites in space." (more...) (ESA)

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Heinlein online

A bit off topic here, but well worth a look. If you're into astronomy, you might well be into science fiction as well. One of the most famous hard science fiction writers was Robert Heinlein, who died in 1988. Among his work is "Starship Troopers" (also made into a movie) and "The Cat who walks through walls".

Now the personal Heinlein archive has been opened to the public, and some 106,000 pages have been scanned and put online as PDF. Not for free, but interested nevertheless. The archives can be found here

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Astronomy in Science Fiction

This week's AstronomyCast handles astronomy in science fiction. "What they get right, and what they get wrong… so very wrong." (AstronomyCast)

Some even go further: read a list here.

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Parallel Worlds

Parallel Worlds: A Journey Through Creation, Higher Dimensions, and the Future of the Cosmos is a kinky but very readable book from Michio Kaku, about developments in cosmology, from relativity and quantum mechanics to string theory and M-theory. If you want to impress people around you with weird statements like "we're everywhere in the universe at the same time until you all look at me, then it's simply a matter of chance that you'll see me here", you're choosing the right read. Some people think relativity is the weirdest thing in science. Kaku shows you that we've gone a long way beyond that.