Dan's Amateurish Astronomy

STS-129 Ascent Video Highlights

I love it when NASA does this sort of thing… have a watch, it’s really good.
Here’s a direct download of the 400mb 640×480 mpeg file.

On another note it is probably worth mentioning that I saw Neptune for the first time with my 25×100 binoculars a couple of weeks ago (well, a few months ago)… and yes, it is blue!
I also saw the Galilean moons – Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto.  They were just dots, but still it was amazing. The binoculars were strong enough, though, to show Jupiter quite clearly as a small disc rather than a dot too.

I’ve finally released CreatioNova NightWatch to the world… and it even passes w3c validation haha.

NightWatch lets you generate a report on what celestial objects are visible in the sky for any geographic location in the world. It reports on sun and moon positions and rise/set times, planets, constellations, and deep sky objects such as galaxies and nebulas.

It will also let you set up an automatic report so that it emails you (either once off or at daily/weekly/monthly intervals) the report for that night. I thought that was rather neat

I’ve been coding the CreatioNova NightWatch utility more and more lately… the final bits i have left to do are set up the cron schedule and refine the email that gets sent. Won’t be long now til i can launch it to the world
Stay tuned!