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365 Nights of Skywatching
Fraser Cain writes "Universe Today has released a free, downloadable PDF book for its What's Up this Week astronomy column. This 400+ page ebook has an entry for what you can see in the night sky every day in 2006, as well as additional information on choosing equipment, viewing conditions, and additional resources."
"March 3, Asteroid 758-A crashes into Earth destroying all life. [Ed. Please remove this, may panic readers. Add something about Mutara Nebula. Most readers won't realize it's a fictional place from Star Trek 2: Wrath of Khan"]"
Nasa has up a Skywatching site with all sorts of fancy pictures.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
The Great Stellarium (open source):
http://www.stellarium.org/
Celestia (also free):
http://www.shatters.net/celestia/
NASA's astronoly picture of the day:
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/
Stellarium is really a must-download for anyone even slightly interested in astronomy. It's another open source software success.
There is always the moon from our overlords... but moon through NASA's WorldWind too.
Animoog.org
Why should you go outside?
What is this... "outside"... that you speak of?
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
this guy's pictures:
He lives just outside of Houston, Texas.
X
Some day's entries are visual objects, some are binocular, some are telescope, and some are 'here's what's there if you could see it.'
A great book for the casually curious. You could call it 'astronomy bait.' (Star bait?)
Never shake hands with a man you meet in a fertility clinic.
This is what amateur astronomy people call it when a "regular" person looks through a five-thousand-dollar backyard telescope and is dissappointed that they can't see the US flag left on the moon.
Most astronomy photos the public sees are taken by massive professional telescopes (either Hubble or large ground based scopes) and so they have no idea what kind of results they would get out of the many many different types of amateur scope available. And of the amateur photos that are published, in my experience almost none of them are captioned with information about the equipment used, exposure times, post processing, etc.
What would be really good is a collaborative astronomy database where you could look up an astronomical object and see the results of different equipment - i.e. I could look up the Horsehead Nebula and get to see lots of photos of it all stating what equipment and settings were used. That kind of thing would certainly be really useful when deciding what equipment to buy.
you don't live in an area of high light pollution
This is a serious problem and aparantly one that the UK government/councils at least don't appear to care about. More and more street lights go up every year, few of them seem to have full cutoff shades and worryingly most of the new ones now seem to be high presure sodium lights (much less filterable than the old low pressure sodium lights). Do we really _need_ our streets to be lit so brightly at night? Some legislation designed to reduce light pollution would be a good step - i.e. requiring all lights to have full cutoff shades and putting limits on the amount of lighting used.
http://blog.nexusuk.org