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!
Edit: This article was posted on 21 June, the very day that the email discusses. Obviously it would have been simpler to just say “Stick your head out the window. How many suns do you see? Any questions?”, but emails like this tend to get recycled. Some genius adjusts the date (that “Mars as big as the Moon” hoax has hit my inbox every august for years now) to move the supposed event back into the future, and the … Continue reading →
Thanks to Kos Corianos for letting us know that the Soutpansberg Astronomy Club are having a public astronomy evening this Saturday. If you live in the far northern stretches of South Africa, why not take a drive and join what sounds like it will be a very professionally run astronomy demonstration? Saturday the 19th May promises to be jam packed with activities at Portion 72 Rondebosch in Louis Trichardt. During the day Rondebosch Riding School will host an open day … Continue reading →
The Astronomical Society of South Africa’s biannual symposium will be held in October this year, in Cape Town. Registration will begin in June, but the organisers are already accepting abstracts from aspiring speakers. The official announcement, lifted from the symposium website, reads as follows: Welcome to Cape Town! ASSA is pleased to announce this year’s symposium, which will be held from 12 to 14 October 2012 at the South African Astronomical Observatory in Cape Town. The theme of the symposium, … Continue reading →
(This article was originally written in the run-up to the big 2012 apocalypse hoax. Since then, people are still convinced that Nibiru is out there and visible to people like me in the Southern Hemisphere. Let me state up front: It’s not there, and I can’t see it. I can see comets only a few kilometers across, and I can see galaxies millions of light years away, but there is no major planet barelling through the Solar System towards us, … Continue reading →
Yesterday afternoon I was contacted by a journalist who wanted to know if I knew anything about the “new zodiac”. It seems that there’s a 13th sign, which means that all the other star sign dates will have to change to make room. We’ll probably all have to change to a different sign, and some of us will now be an ‘Ophiuchus’ (One way to pronounce it is something like oh-PHEW-cuss, in case you were wondering). My first impulse was … Continue reading →
