Astronomy clubs offer several positive benefits for the backyard (or professional) astronomer. While it is human nature to be solitary, there are a great many benefits to joining a group or club. This may not be an easy task for some folks because, in reality, we’re sure many of our problems in life stem from “other people”. Well, that is true sometimes, but when we take an honest look at ourselves, we should quickly realize that we’re not perfect and being around others of like interest has a very positive effect on learning and experience. Another tremendous benefit is developing friendships - imagine that! Let’s take a look at several benefits to joining an astronomy club.
The first is access to great observing locations. This is a direct result of the networking function of the club - the ability to scout a large area of possible observing platforms. If the membership is large enough, you can bet that there will be a surplus of great places the members go to regularly that you may not have even know existed. Maybe a member has a family member that owns a farm within an hour’s […]
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The planet Mercury is the closest to the Sun and is now the smallest planet in our Solar System. The temperatures on Mercury range from 700 degrees Kelvin on the sunlight side to 90 degrees Kelvin on the night side. Mercury orbits the Sun once every 88 days and rotates on its axis once every 58 days. The orbit of Mercury is very elliptical and brings it as close to the Sun as 46 million kilometers and as far away from the Sun as 70 million kilometers. Since it is so close to the Sun, Mercury can only be seen from Earth during the early morning or evening twilight.
We can observe Mercury from the Earth using both optical and radio telescopes, but much of what we know about Mercury is the result of three fly bys performed by the Mariner 10 spacecraft during the 1970s. The Mariner 10 only photographed 40 to 45 percent of the surface of Mercury and the rest has never been seen up close. The photographs the Mariner 10 did send back reveled a rocky, cratered surface similar to the Earths own Moon.
Mercury is about 4878 kilometers in diameter and this makes Mercury slightly smaller […]
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The dwarf galaxy is located in the center of Canis Major, the constellation that’s home to the Dog Star - Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky. To the ancient Greeks, Canis Major, in particular Sirius, represents a hunting dog following Orion, helping the hunter in pursuit of Lepus the Hare.
Discovered just recently in 2003 by an international team of astronomers from France, Italy, the UK, and Australia, the Canis Major Dwarf is only 25,000 light years away from earth. Just across town by comparison to Sagittarius at 50,000 light years from earth. The team sifted though data on millions of stars collected by 2MASS (the Two-Micron All Sky Survey) and discovered an unusually dense area of M Giants (a class of star). The 2MASS survey scanned the entire sky at three near-infrared wavelengths with 1.3-meter telescopes in Chile and Arizona to “look through” clouds of dust and gas in our Milky Way Galaxy to get a clearer, more accurate picture of it’s makeup.
The Canis Major Dwarf, classified as an irregular galaxy, went undetected for many years because of this dust in the Milky Way’s atmosphere. The decaying galaxy lies very close to our galaxy’s galactic plane where it’s […]
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