It’s been an incredible week here at Urban Astronomer headquarters. Not only did we push out our first podcast with an international guest, and coordinate an exhibit at the ICON Comics and Games Convention near Johannesburg, South Africa, but we’re hosting this week’s Carnival of Space!
Continue reading →Winter has been running late this year, in South Africa, but with a sudden string of week-long crystal-clear cloudless night skies, it finally seems to have arrived! The air is crisp, the stars are steady and bright, and it’s time to blow the dust off my telescope. But while we wait for the optics to cool down and stabilise, let’s have a look at what’s been going on in the world of space science and astronomy, in this 510th edition … Continue reading →
In the constellation of the Sextant, lies a star, invisible to the naked eye. Until recently it was known only by its catalogue number HD93396. But recently, a robotic telescope in Sutherland, South Africa, called KELT-South noticed something unusual about it. Every 4.7 days, it’s light would dim slightly, for seven hours. KELT-South had found an exoplanet. The project scientists renamed the star KELT-11, and the planet KELT-11b. KELT-South is one of a pair of robotic telescopes. The name is an … Continue reading →
It’s time for the 506th Carnival of Space! As usual, we’ve collected some of the latest news and articles on space science and astronomy from some of the most important and well known writers in the field.
Continue reading →Hi and welcome to the 7th episode of the Urban Astronomer Podcast! This episode was dropped in the middle of the Easter weekend, so in deference to the season we’ve got a brief segment based on one of Urban Astronomer’s religiously themed articles: How is astronomy used to calculate the dates of religious festivals? And our feature item is another interview! This time around, I managed to get a hold of Neil Viljoen, who owns Telescope Shop, one of the … Continue reading →
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