Category Archives: News and Updates

News about Astronomy and Space Science. Find every news item and update here, in blog format. You can get these updates sent straight to your mailbox by subscribing here, or you can subscribe to the RSS feed by clicking the link.

The Science of Battlestar Galactica

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When Ronald E. Moore, executive producer of Battlestar Galactica, started work on re-imagining the 70’s cult classic sci-fi series, he wanted to avoid one of the biggest cliches of modern TV science fiction:  Technobabble.  No character was ever to “Reverse the polarity” to create an “assymetrical pulse variance”, since he knew full well that the average viewer is more interested in story than faux-science.  He wanted a story about real people, in a real working space ship that viewers (both … Continue reading →

Halo over Gauteng skies

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Most people have seen many Rainbows in their lives, and know that they have something to do with the sun shining through rain.  But the simple elements of water, ice and sunlight produce an astounding array of beautiful effects, of which the rainbow is merely the most common.  Most, like Halos and Sundogs, have been known to those who keep an eye on the sky for centuries.  The ethereal Glory, on the other hand, was only discovered recently as it … Continue reading →

ASSA 2010 Symposium – Part One

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Last week, from 7 to 9 October, the Pretoria Centre of the Astronomical Society of South Africa (ASSA) hosted the 8th biennial symposium at the Council for Geoscience Silverton campus.  Although the theme of the symposium was light and spectrum pollution, a wide range of papers were presented across topics as diverse as mining in space and the problems facing science journalism in South Africa. The first day opened with a tour of the Council for Geoscience.  We were introduced … Continue reading →

ASSA 2010 Symposium – Part Two

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continued from yesterday – Part 1 The second day of the symposium started with an interesting talk by Professor Barbara Cunow of the University of South Africa (Unisa).  Unlike many professional astronomers, she finds the time to continue her own amateur observations and has been monitoring Saturn for the past thirty years.  She does it the old fashioned way, too – through the same six inch reflector she used as a school girl, sketching the view by hand.  Over the … Continue reading →

WISE brought out of retirement to hunt NEO’s

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NASA’s Wide-field Infra-red Survey Explorer (WISE) was a highly successful short-term mission to map the sky in infra-red wavelengths.  Equipped with 4 infra-red detectors (operating at different wavelengths, correlating to different temperatures) and cooled to a frigid 260°C below zero, it was able to reveal an unprecedented view of both the universe and our own Solar System.  In the course of performing a second pass of its initial sky survey, it discovered 19 comets and more than 33,500 asteroids, including … Continue reading →