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!
A press release landed in my inbox this morning from the folks at Starmap letting me know about the new Starmap Media functionality they’ve added to their products. As somebody who’d never used (or even heard of) it, I felt I need to have a closer look and ran into an immediate problem: It’s for iPad and iPhone only. I’m an Android guy. Looks like I’ll have to wait for the next chance to launch into product reviews. That hiccup … Continue reading →
Astronomers studying a giant black hole have found that it is surrounding by vast clouds of cold dust that nobody expected to see. Observations made with the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI) in Chile showed that, instead of being arranged in a huge torus (doughnut shape) swirling into the black hole, it fills the areas above and below the torus region, and is being blown outwards. Supermassive Black Holes (SMBH), containing the mass of millions or … Continue reading →
176 light years from Earth, in the constellation Hydra (the Water Serpent), lies a small young star and what appears to be a brand new planet. Recently spotted by the Hubble Space Telescope, TW Hydrae is breaking records and disrupting current theories on planetary formation, because not only is the star apparently too young to have formed planets, but the planet itself is about twelve billion kilometers from the star — twice as far out as Pluto. Of the thousands … Continue reading →
Astronomers using 13 years worth of data from the Chandra X-ray space telescope have potentially identified 26 stellar-mass black holes in the nearby Andromeda Galaxy (M31), and a further 8 in globular clusters orbiting it. The distribution of these black holes confirms theoretical predictions made years ago by scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics. “While we are excited to find so many black holes in Andromeda, we think it’s just the tip of the iceberg,” said Robin Barnard … Continue reading →
Dear Urban Astronomer Thanks for all your interesting celestial tidbits, which my hubby and I enjoy very much. We are just viewers and treasurers of the skies we love so much, not a professional like you! Could you perhaps enlighten us about a very bright star which is currently to be seen approx 30% up from the horizon to the east. When we say to the east, it is where our sun sets during the winter season. The star … Continue reading →
