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[10ebbor10]

So, just for fun. Amateur astronomer(as in barely know what I'm doing, so...) here, and since the night sky truly is a beatifull thing, we really need a thread about it. Unless otherwise noted, most instructions and stuff will be for Europe. Dates in GMT/ GMT+1

Just as a general note, the first one who dares to confuse astronomy with astrology will be shot.

Spoiler: Stuff to see this month (click to show/hide)

Not much. Mostly the Moon standing near to some other planets.

10/1/13: Moon + Venus
13/1/13: Moon to the North of Mars
18/1/13: Mercurius on the other side of the sun. Meaning that some time after this data, you should be able to see it
22/1/13: Moon + Jupiter
24/1/13: Mars reacher Perihelium

Spoiler: Interesting stuff to look for(Calender) (click to show/hide)

-Comet ISON (Around Nov 28).
    -Really, this can be the comet of the century. If it survives it's near sun encounter, it will be as visible as the moon, even during daylight.

-Other stuff to be added, much later. Feel free to suggest. I have a list somewhere, but can't find it

[JWNoctis]

Definitely watching this.

Speaking of amateur astronomy, I am kind of waiting for Betelgeuse to go supernova myself. Silly, I know.

And Albireo(Beta Cygni) is really beautiful through a telescope. This is about as far as I can go for now.

EDIT: Spelling.

[RedKing]

Yays for Astronomy. I spend virtually no time in front of a telescope now, though I used to when I was a kid.

Do a ton of virtual astronomy now though, 3D visualization programs and such. Been working on teaching my kids a few of the easier constellations (Orion, Ursa Major, etc.) and explaining the basics of stars and space to them.

There are definitely times I regret not taking that full scholarship to Alabama-Huntsville. Coulda been a rocket scientist/astronomer.

[PyroDesu]

Yeah, I'm hanging about, I enjoy a bit of amateur astronomy. Nice when your father is the president of the local astronomical society.

I love going out with him and the rest of the group and just setting up our scopes for a night. Even better when it's a public event, since they tend to be packed.

[Silfurdreki]

I guess I'll join this thread as well. I started getting into actually looking at the night sky myself after last summer, which is a fucking disgrace, considering I'm a master student of astronomy that works weekends in a planetarium.

Anyway, looking at Jupiter is always nice and is possible until about early-mid April, depending a bit on your latitude, because of the time of the sunset. Later on during spring me and a few others will be trying for a Messier marathon, since almost all of the Messier objects are visible from Europe during late March.

I'd also like to recommend Stellarium, an open-source virtual planetarium that's very useful for finding things to look at.

Finally, Betelgeuse going supernova would be an incredibly spectacular thing to see. It would get brighter than the moon and would be easily visible during the day. Unfortunately, the timetable is somewhere between now and a million years from now, so don't hold your breath.

[PyroDesu]

I always thought the Messier stuff was a bit boring to look at ("Faint Fuzzies")... until we got a new, 12-inch telescope and some high-zoom lenses. Then... wow. Stuff like globular clusters where you can see the entirety of it clearly is just plain amazing.

[Silfurdreki]

That is one thing I always found amazing with astronomy. Case in point: Albireo, mentioned above, is just two tiny dots of light that are differently coloured but when you look at it through a telescope, it seems like such an amazing thing. Or why not an open cluster? It's basically a region with a a bit more stars than other regions, but looking at one through a telescope makes it feel like the most astounding thing.

When you look at it this way, it doesn't seem strange at all that people spent entire lifetimes mapping out the stars on the sky.

[RedKing]

Something that might be of interest to this thread:

42 new exoplanets discovered by amateur astronomers. (Warning: SPACE.com, which for some reason has some of the worst science journalism online...) 

Distributed astronomy is such a neat concept. I've never done anything with planethunters.org, but there was another site I remember that had volunteers perusing millions of deep-sky objects in order to catalog them.


Exoplanets in general fascinate the hell out of me, because growing up we didn't even know if there WERE planets outside the solar system. Now we're finding that not only are there planets, there's a hell of a LOT of planets. Which bodes well for the Drake equation.

[PyroDesu]

Indeed. Looking up with bare eyes is amazing enough if you're in a dark enough area (seeing the band of the galaxy in the sky), but looking through a scope is just so much more.

[JWNoctis]

Exoplanets in general fascinate the hell out of me, because growing up we didn't even know if there WERE planets outside the solar system. Now we're finding that not only are there planets, there's a hell of a LOT of planets. Which bodes well for the Drake equation.

Assuming that the composition of planetary system of our solar system is nothing but ordinary, it's reasonable to assume the existance of similar systems around many G and K type stars with reasonable metallicity. However if memory serves, another component of Drake's equation is the period of visibility of advanced civilization before they either crumble or as some sci-fi author envisions, ascend - Our planet has been in existance for more than 4.5B years, yet the visible time of our civilization at any significant range had been -much- less than that, and given the way things are going currently, this period of visibility might end very soon on a cosmological timescale. But that's not the subject.

Um, I'm probably missing the point here.

Speaking of the exoplanets themselves...I wonder when we shall have a direct observation of one of them. I know that's impossible in most if not all cases with even theorical equipments.

And maybe I should go out to sea sometimes. I heard the night sky's beautiful out there.

[RedKing]

There's already been some direct imaging of exoplanets, though only super-Jovians with some distance seperation from their parent star. Not much to see beyond a dot, really. Most of what we're picking up in terms of direct imaging is infrared emissions from the "hot Jupiter"/sub-brown dwarf class of exoplanets.

[Silfurdreki]

It's not easy to see the dot, though. See Fomalhaut b for an example. What we really want to do is spectroscopy on exoplanets, that would enable some kind of guess as to which could possibly harbour life (as we know it).

I was at a seminar by one of the guys that started zooniverse (it started out only classifying galaxies as Galaxy Zoo) and that website is apparently an amazing source of statistics for all kinds of things. Turns out that if you have enough people doing this you get statistics that are way better than what computers can produce in the same time.

[MonkeyHead]

I think its compulsory for me to be in this thread.

You wait till the James Webb 'scope is up there. That should be able to resolve surface details and atmospheric features of certain exoplanets within a certain distance, which might be the best thing ever.

[olemars]

Something that might be of interest to this thread:

42 new exoplanets discovered by amateur astronomers. (Warning: SPACE.com, which for some reason has some of the worst science journalism online...) 

Distributed astronomy is such a neat concept. I've never done anything with planethunters.org, but there was another site I remember that had volunteers perusing millions of deep-sky objects in order to catalog them.


Exoplanets in general fascinate the hell out of me, because growing up we didn't even know if there WERE planets outside the solar system. Now we're finding that not only are there planets, there's a hell of a LOT of planets. Which bodes well for the Drake equation.

Wow, I think I just found a new hobby. Just don't read the comments ("discuss this star"), they're sadder than youtube.

[Il Palazzo]

Exoplanets in general fascinate the hell out of me, because growing up we didn't even know if there WERE planets outside the solar system. Now we're finding that not only are there planets, there's a hell of a LOT of planets. Which bodes well for the Drake equation.

Same experience here. I remember reading pop-science essays from the early 90s that seriously explored the possibility of planets being an ultra-rare occurence on the galactic scale. And whenever I read a sci-fi story about other planets it went without saying that their mere existence was but an excercise in a wishful-thinking speculation.
The exoplanets kinda crept up on us in the years since, and it's sometimes easy to forget that but two decades ago we lived in a much emptier universe.

Heck, even the paper that first confirmed the existence of exoplanets oozes this sense of wonder and amazement at the possibility of the imminent paradigm shift.

The detection of a planetary system around a nearby (~500 pc), old neutron star, together with the recent report on a planetary companion to the pulsar PSR1829–10 (ref. 3) raises the tantalizing possibility that a non-negligible fraction of neutron stars observable as radio pulsars may be orbited by planet-like bodies.

42 new exoplanets discovered by amateur astronomers. (Warning: SPACE.com, which for some reason has some of the worst science journalism online...) 

Distributed astronomy is such a neat concept. I've never done anything with planethunters.org, but there was another site I remember that had volunteers perusing millions of deep-sky objects in order to catalog them.

The thing about the "amateur" in "amateur astronomer" is that it encompasses a ridiculously wide range of competence.
You can be an amateur astronomer as soon as you set up your first telescope to look at the sky, and you cam be one even as you find yourself needing to know more than professional astronomers will ever need to.
Here's an excerpt from a book by Bruce L. Gary entitled "Exoplanet observing for Amateurs"(freely available here: http://brucegary.net/book_EOA/x.htm):

Professionals don’t need to know how to deal with telescopes with an imperfect polar alignment
(because their telescopes are essentially perfectly aligned). They don’t have to deal with telescopes
that don’t track perfectly (because their tracking gears are close to perfect). They don’t have to worry
about focus changing during an observing session (because their “tubes” are made of low thermal
expansion materials). They don’t have to worry about CCDs with significant “dark current” thermal
noise (because their CCDs are cooled with liquid nitrogen). Professionals don’t have to worry about
large scintillation noise (because it’s much smaller with large apertures). Professionals can usually
count on sharp images the entire night with insignificant changes in “atmospheric seeing” (because
their observatories are at high altitude sites and the telescope apertures are situated well above ground
level). Professionals also don’t have to deal with large atmospheric extinction effects (again, because
their observatories are at high altitude sites).

Also, check out his observatory shown on pages 17-21.