A preview of sights in the night sky for the month of August from Astrocast.tv:
Carolyn Collins Petersen, your guide to skygazing for August 2013. This month you can see gorgeous planets, a meteor shower, and some familiar constellations. Be sure and dress for the weather, and bring along binoculars or a small telescope to enhance your view.
Steve Shurtleff and Joe Latrell have a new book titled, Out There – A Small Guide To A Big Universe –
Space is a really big place. The Earth, the Sun, and all the other planets live in a relatively quiet corner of an average sized Galaxy in a pretty nice cosmic neighborhood. There is plenty of space, lush nebulae and families of stars that pretty much keep to themselves. It’s a great place to be.
Let’s Go Exploring
While we can’t yet warp to other planets to get a close-up look, we have learned a lot about our place in the universe. Robotic probes, powerful telescopes, and human ingenuity have given us the ambition to not only ask questions, but also get answers about our place in the cosmos.
This book is simple guide to the Universe. It doesn’t explain everything, but it does cover some of the more intriguing spectacles and wonders. It’s data that we have discovered in our search to understand where we fit into the universe.
It’s Only An Hour Away By Car
Space is big, but it’s very close to us. You could get there in an hour if your car could go straight up. When we look at the universe, we see distances that just boggle the mind. ‘Out There’ helps you make sense of the numbers by relating them to items and ideas you might come across every day.
Join us in taking a quick adventure around our cosmic block. We’ll learn about some of the wonderful sights to see ‘Out There.’ Grab your ‘Small Guide to a Big Universe’ and let’s get started!
A reader was interested in Satellite Observing and wondered if I knew of any looking-down style telescope devices like that used in Project Moonwatch during the 1950s:
![Moonwatch+scope2_f[1]](http://hobbyspace.com/Blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Moonwatch+scope2_f1.jpg)
Such a system is much more comfortable for long observations, especially for those with back problems that make upward viewing difficult and painful.
I noted there were compact telescopes with bent eyepieces such as this Orion TableTop Refractor Telescope. However, he pointed out that these had narrow fields of view.
Fortunately, he later found the Sky Window apparatus that combines binoculars with an adjustable mirror:
Allows observer to be seated while “looking down” at the sky in total comfort.
Keeps binoculars fixed at a “microscope” angle while observing from horizon to zenith. Observer’s head never moves ! Only Sky Window® can do this !!
It works with “most modern binoculars with Standard 1/4-20 spindle tripod port ( adapter for Celestron giants and custom fit available)”. Check it out if this would suit your satellite observing style.
The Planetary Society is supporting a project using a ground based telescope to detect planets around the two stars of the Alpha Centauri system, the closest stars to our own solar system:
Prof. Andrew Fraknoi of the Foothill College Astronomy Department sends this announcement about a new resource guide for the study of exoplanets:
A new annotated guide to written, web, and audio-visual resources for teaching about planets orbiting other stars is now available. Materials in the guide to this rapidly-changing branch of astronomy include video and audio files of lectures and interviews with leading scientists in the field, phone and tablet apps, a citizen-science web site, popular-level books and articles, and more.
Published by the NASA Astrophysics Education and Outreach Forum and the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, the guide can be found as a PDF file at:
