Author Archives: Steve Dangerfield

Nov
01
2008

Alaska Aurorae from home

Caught a tweet from Will Gator’s twitter feed a couple of days ago which led me to this post and The Aurora Live web cam provided by the NiCT (National Institute of Information Communications Technology).
I’ve had it loaded in a tab in my browser for a few days now and I’ve seen some great Aurora pictures; you can access a selection [...]

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Oct
24
2008

Webcam video of the launch of Falcon-1

Just catching up on some blog reading and found this great Webcam video of the launch of Falcon-1 thanks to Bad Astronomer blog.
Until the next post… Clear Skies!
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Oct
23
2008

Moon Occultation of Neptune or Grazing?

A few weeks ago the topic of “the Moons possible Occultation of Neptune - 6th November 2008″ came up at my local Astronomical Society meeting.  It was thought that Neptune may be Occulted or may Graze what we see as the edge of the moon.
I decided to see what Stellarium though about this and my finding are that Stellarium predicts that it will [...]

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Oct
22
2008

Housekeeping: Blog subscribers -> New Feed

Just realised that I’ve not been using my blog feed through feedburner.com correctly <blush>.  Anyway I’ve got it setup how it should be now so if you want you can subscribe using this link or the one to the top right of the blog with the  sign.
Until the next post… Clear Skies!
Edit: I’ve installed FeedSmith, [...]

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Oct
10
2008

New Project: Home Observatory

As most astronomers find out sooner or later, time spent setting up your telescope is wasted observing time.  The frustrations of clouds rolling in just as you finish setting up, or missing the object you planned to observe, amongst other issues, lead many astronomers to want their own observatory.  Well, I’m no different.  As a [...]

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Oct
07
2008

Twitter

Been using twitter for a couple of months now.  At first I couldn’t get into it but after I spent some time finding people to follow I realised what a useful tool it is.  There’s a lot of people out there with astronomy (and astro related) interests tweeting away. 
So, for all you readers new to Twitter, what’s it [...]

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Oct
04
2008

Book Review: Stargazing, Astronomy Without a Telescope

If you are new to Astronomy and feel the urge to go out and buy a telescope then wait!  If you search around the forums and read the “Introduction to Astronomy” guides dotted around the internet then you’ll have come across the ultimate tip for all budding Astronomers; don’t buy a scope first, instead buy [...]

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Sep
30
2008

Jules Verne re-entry video

I guess most of you will have seen this by now but I’ve put the link here so I can find it again.
Until the next post… Clear Skies!
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Sep
28
2008

More relative sizes

A few posts ago I drew your attention to a web page that showed the relative sizes of some astronomical objects (here) and I’ve just seen another post from Astropixie covering the same topic.  I just feel so humbled; space is so vast…
Until the next post… Clear Skies!
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Sep
19
2008

Attended my first meeting at Mexborough & Swinton Astronomical Society

I’ve been meaning to attend one of the MSAS meetings for a while and finally got round to it.  They seem a good down to earth set of people and found them very welcoming.  They’d arranged a speaker Thijs Kouwenhoven who gave a talk on Star Formation which was very interesting and well delivered.  I’ll probably post [...]

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