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!
Although Mercury is one of the five classical planets and thus one of the brightest “stars” in the sky, very few people have seen it. Fortunately, the Moon will be putting on a show in the early hours of Friday morning, when it passes very close by Mercury at about 5:00 AM. Set your alarm clock extra early, so that you’ll be able to stand outside in the twilight. Face east, towards where the Sun will soon be rising, and … Continue reading →
An interesting experiment has been running for the last eighteen months on the ISS (International Space Station). Three sample trays containing various forms of life (plants, bacteria, lichens, fungi, and so on), have been bolted to the outside of one of the space station’s labs. One tray is sealed, and in the shade, one is exposed to the full, unshielded fury of the Sun’s radiation, and one is both unshielded and open to the vacuum of space. Standing tall amongst … Continue reading →
Four years of computer processing and tweaking on a series of Hubble Space Telescope photos of Pluto have produced images showing unprecedented detail of the surface of Pluto. Principle investigator Marc Buie, of the Southwest Research Institute, said “These images represent a true-color appearance of what you would see if you were near Pluto, comparable to looking at our own Moon with the naked eye. We now know we’re looking at something that has the biggest surface changes of any … Continue reading →
Thanks to the One Minute Astronomer for a nifty solution to the problem of sore necks. Our bodies weren’t really designed for staring upwards. One quick glance, that’s all our necks are built to cope with, so a bit of stargazing can become really uncomfortable. Telescopes are usually equipped with a Star Diagonal, a mirror or prism which bends the light path so that you can look at a more comfortable angle. Naked eye and binocular viewers have simply had … Continue reading →
There’s one problem with Urban astronomy, and it’s a big one. It is the reason so many historical observatories, places where great discoveries were made and the foundations of modern astronomy were set down, have been shut down and even demolished. That problem is light. Modern cities pump so much light into the sky that many of us have never actually seen a night sky at all. Ask somebody what colour the sky is at night and they’ll confidently assert … Continue reading →
