Allen is an amateur astronomer, an IT professional, a podcaster, a father of five growing kids, a barely competent chess player, and the owner and publisher of the Urban Astronomer podcast and website. He has formerly served as Director of the Astrophotography and Citizen Science sections of the Astronomical Society of South Africa. You can find his personal social media feed on Mastodon!
I’ve been a little jaded over past years by lackluster eclipses, to the point of not even bothering to look outside for the last few. I am so glad I made the effort to watch tonight’s show – it was spectacular! I’m sure a great many people took photographs of the event – if you have managed to capture the event and would like to share your images, please contact me at uastronomer@gmail.com so I can add them to this post. … Continue reading →
Earth orbits the Sun at an average distance of 149,598,000 kilometers. Astronomers refer to this distance as 1 Astronomical Unit (AU), which is a handy unit for measuring distances within the Solar System. But the actual distance changes every day, because the Earth’s orbit is elliptical and not perfectly circular. On the 3rd of January each year, Earth is at its closest point to the Sun, with a distance of 147,098,074 km. It is at its furthest point (152,097,701 km) on … Continue reading →
The Sun is a gigantic naturally occurring hydrogen bomb.. It is composed mostly of hydrogen, with a small percentage of helium and trace amounts of other elements, but is so huge that its own weight compressed the hydrogen at the core to the point where nuclear fusion can take place. Hydrogen is consumed at a rate of billions of tonnes every second. By human standards this is such a ridiculously fierce explosion that if we could set off our entire … Continue reading →
Dr Stephen Potter and Dr Encarni Romero-Colmenero from the South African Astronomical Observatory (SAAO) have discovered evidence for an unusual extra-solar planetary system: Two enormous planets distantly orbiting a tiny double star (UZ Fornax). The binary pair in this instance are a white dwarf and a red dwarf, orbiting so closely to each other that they are able to rob material from each other’s outer layers, causing periodic outbursts as the captured material gets thick enough to ignite. The two … Continue reading →
Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto in 1930, at the Lowell Observatory where he worked as a junior astronomer. Tombaugh was a keen amateur astronomer who, having reached the limits of the telescope his father bought him as a child, built his own. He took his astronomy very seriously. Professional astronomers at Lowell Observatory were so impressed by the detailed sketches he sent them of Jupiter and Mars that they offered him a job as a junior astronomer. His job was to … Continue reading →
