Dan's Amateurish Astronomy

Archive for May, 2011

haven’t had much time for star gazing lately, so I thought I’d share this lovely timelapse video of the milky way at the ESO VLT obervatory in Chile.

On another note, here’s another video this time of a great talk given by Jeff Greason on A Settlement Strategy for NASA. He talks about what the future of the USA’s space program should be all about, and how at present the space program is goal-less. More importantly he gives an example of how to achieve those goals with sensible strategies and tactics. Very worthwhile if you’ve got ~50mins to spare.
http://www.vimeo.com/24260744

With all the news of planetary conjunctions this month I thought I’d state for the record that I haven’t actually seem them myself…  this is mostly due to sheer laziness on my part (who wants to get up at 5am?!), but also because I don’t have a good view of the eastern sky. Oh well, maybe next time.

I’ve decided what path my amateur career astronomy will take: radio astronomy! Everybody’s doing astrophotography, and it seems to be hellishly expensive to produce any good pics, but I think scavenging for useful equipment such as a dish, amplifier, signal processors and related software etc, is just up my alley. Blogging about my experience with radio astronomy is on the cards, so I’m sure to post about equipment I get, discoveries and “a-hah!” moments, etc.