Author Archives: Allen Versfeld

About Allen Versfeld

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!

Hubble captures stunning image of M66

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M66 is a spiral galaxy, and is part of the Leo triplet, a group of three interacting galaxies in the constellation Leo (pictured below).  The sixty sixth entry in Charles Messier’s famous catalogue of Things That Aren’t Comets, it has an unusual asymmetric shape, with spiral arms arcing over the main disc and an off-centre nucleus.  This is probably a result of gravitational interaction with the other two members of the group, which has also resulted in unusually high rates … Continue reading →

Saturn’s Great Hexagon replicated in lab

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Saturn is well known for its rings, and remains the single most impressive sight an astronomer can show off through his telescope eyepiece, but astronomers have discovered that it has many other fascinating aspects.  Most surprising of all was the discovery of a perfect giant hexagon encircling it’s North Pole.  Like all the Gas Giants, Saturn has a number of horizontal ‘belts’ marking out the various atmospheric jet-streams, but the most north belt is permanently distorted into a hexagon, and nobody … Continue reading →

Venus is Volcanically Active

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New discoveries put Venus in the exclusive club of volcanically active bodies in the Solar System, joining Earth and Jupiter’s moon Io.  The European Space Agency’s (ESA) Venus Express mission, which has been in orbit around Venus since 2006, returned data on the composition of Venus’ atmosphere.  This was combined with data from NASA’s Magellan probe, which mapped the planet in great detail using a combination of Radar and high resolution gravity data to reveal the shape and structure of … Continue reading →

Mystery Object eclipses Epsilon Auriga

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A 175 year old mystery has been solved with the University of Michigan’s discovery of a mysterious disc-shaped object eclipsing a famous variable star.  Epsilon Auriga has always confounded astronomers who study variable stars, as it seemed to be an eclipsing variable, but never behaved the way such the model predicts:  While its brightness dips according to a regular twenty seven year cycle, the variations at the peak of the cycle have never been regular, or predictable. Now though, interferometric … Continue reading →

Apollo 13: Unintended Consequences

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An earlier article talks about how the 13th Apollo mission might have ended, without the heroic efforts of the ground crew.  But as part of the rescue process, Apollo 13’s Saturn IV-B rocket stage was jettisoned, and aimed to crash into the Moon.  The rocket, weighing fourteen tons and travelling at 2.5 kilometres per second, slammed into the moon with the force of ten tons of TNT exploding, and left a crater some 35 meters across.  This new image from … Continue reading →