Astronomy, The Sky and Outer Space

Dark Energy Lecture Lecture, documentary

Don't worry, Dreamtime. I'm watching Bake off. I'm back to sensible viewing. Keep safe & well. E=M.C.Squared, which is Eggs=Mash&Cheese in Battenberg.

This picture, entitled Pale Blue Dot, was taken by the spacecraft Voyager 1 in February 1990. It was taken as the craft passed Neptune, 6 billion km from earth. At first it appears to show an empty space but in fact just right of centre is a single pale blue pixel. This is the earth. The picture was the idea of the late Carl Sagan who arranged to turn the spacecraft around so that it could take a final picture of home before it would be too small to see. The cameras were then shut down to save power and currently Voyager 1 is 22 billion km from earth, still transmitting science data back home. In 1994 Carl Sagan composed the following text to accompany this image: Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar", every "supreme leader", every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there - on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Moon seems quite clear this evening. Perhaps the rain has cleared the atmosphere.

Pollution. Mike Collins, Apollo astronaut in 2007, said in an interview that the overriding sensation he got when looking back at the Earth was "My God, that little planet Earth looks so fragile out there, surely that must be defended as a holy relic". Nothing has changed, in fact it's got a lot worse. Earth's pollution has risen tenfold since then, and still rising.

Jupiter & Saturn conjunction, visible in the south west.

With clear evening skies forecast for Thursday & Friday, quite a spectacular sight in the south west just after sunset.

Amazing. They seem so close. An illusion - the BBC said yesterday they are still 400 million miles apart!

Jupiter has moved on. Different camera setting, Jupiter's moons clearer.

These are outstanding pictures. I love them. Thank you. I loved plotting the planet positions on a map table, from the data in Whitaker's Almanac years ago. To see them literally become stationary in the sky, then appear to go backwards. Posting the position of the sun & moon, the moon as a pointer, whereas the sun showed If they could be seen at sunset or sunrise. I loved those days.

The track of the planets, sun & moon in the sky, 24/7.

The sine-wave line in the above diagram shows the path centre of all the planets, the sun & moon. The exact position can vary a few degrees north or south. The planets, sun & moon are not exactly in the same plane. Obtaining the position data, I then used Alma pieces, with the planets names on, along with a model sun & moon. My chart at home was coloured, heavily varnished so withstood years of use as I positioned all of the moving items, including extras like comets & predicted meteor showers. Friends thought I was nuts! Just as an example, without any precise data, we can post the position of the sun now. It's at the bottom of the trough, near the RA 18, which is exactly where it was on Dec 21. The sun takes a year to travel all the way round, whereas the moon is formula 1, racing around every four weeks. Pluto is in an old slow coach, taking 240 years to travel around, so has only moved a third of the way around since I was plotting in 1958, when I started my hobby. What makes it all the more fascinating, is that we on planet Earth are moving as well. So depending where we are in our orbit, dictates what direction everything is going in. It's not like a horse race, all moving together. Suggest you all have a sip of brandy.

Hi Philip, you probably know you can do that now on an app, geo or helio centric, a free app too. Using either an astronomy or astrology app. Science at your fingertips.

Hi Heathite, Yes. In fact, there is sufficient info in the online native that I use. My delight just now is reflecting in conversation with you my memories. Back when I was eleven, I must have appeared to folk as the mad scientist, with my charts. At a meal in the dining room, then announcing to show off, that Jupiter needs moving along. What a fluff! Best wishes to you.

Hi all. The equinoxes are the best time of the year for observing the phenomenon known as the false dawn or false sunset. It requires freedom from all artificial light all the way to your east or west horizon. Not an easy task living in a city.