Little Astronomer

I.S.S near the Sun

2006-10-16T20:47:00.000+03:00

You can open the image below and try to see the International Space Station, with the Space Shuttle Atlantis floating next to it! The photo was taken in france by amateur astronomer Thierry Legault. It may look like you are seeing computerized graphic, but actually it's real photo of a sun, shot with some special filters that gave clear silhouette of ISS. You can find the full size picture here

Hubble space telescope

2006-10-08T19:07:00.000+03:00

Named after the trailblazing astronomer Edwin P. Hubble (1889-1953), the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) is a large, space-based observatory which has revolutionized astronomy by providing unprecedented deep and clear views of the Universe, ranging from our own solar system to extremely remote fledgling galaxies forming not long after the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago.

Launched in 1990 and greatly extended in its scientific powers through new instrumentation installed during four servicing missions with the Space Shuttle, the Hubble, in its sixteen years of operations, has validated Lyman Spitzer Jr.'s (1914-1997) original concept of a diversely instrumented observatory orbiting far above the distorting effects of the Earth’s atmosphere and returning data of unique scientific value.

Hubble's coverage of light of different colours (its "spectral range") extends from the ultraviolet, through the visible (to which our eyes are sensitive), and into the near-infrared. Hubble's primary mirror is 2.4 meters (94.5 inches) in diameter. Hubble is not large by ground-based standards but it achieves heroically in space. Hubble orbits Earth every 97 minutes, 575 kilometers (360 miles) above the Earth's surface.

These are some famous pictures that Hubble space telescope caught:

Andromeda Galaxy (M31)

Crab Nebula (M1)

Ring Nebula (NGC 9723)

12 planets not 9!!!

2006-08-25T15:35:00.000+03:00

About 2,500 scientists meeting in Prague have adopted historic new guidelines that see the small, distant world demoted to a secondary category.

The researchers said Pluto failed to dominate its orbit around the Sun in the same way as the other planets.

The International Astronomical Union's (IAU) decision means textbooks will now have to describe a Solar System with just eight major planetary bodies.

Pluto, which was discovered in 1930 by the American Clyde Tombaugh, will be referred to as a "dwarf planet".

There is a recognition that the demotion is likely to upset the public, who have become accustomed to a particular view of the Solar System.

Without a new nomenclature, these discoveries raised the prospect that textbooks could soon be talking about 50 or more planets in the Solar System.

Amid dramatic scenes in the Czech capital which saw astronomers waving yellow ballot papers in the air, the IAU voted to block this possibility - and in the process took the historic decision to relegate Pluto.

The scientists agreed that for a celestial body to qualify as a planet:

It must be in orbit around the Sun.

It must be large enough that it takes on a nearly round shape.

It has cleared its orbit of other objects.

Pluto's status has been contested for many years. It is further away and considerably smaller than the eight other "traditional" planets in our Solar System. At just 2,360km (1,467 miles) across, Pluto is smaller even than some moons in the Solar System.

In addition, since the early 1990s, astronomers have found several objects of comparable size to Pluto in an outer region of the Solar System called the Kuiper Belt.

Some astronomers have long argued that Pluto would be better categorized alongside this population of small, icy worlds.

The critical blow for Pluto came with the discovery three years ago of an object currently designated 2003 UB313 (sedna). After being measured with the Hubble Space Telescope, it was shown to be some 3,000km (1,864 miles) in diameter: it is bigger than Pluto.

2003 UB313 (Sedna) will now join Pluto in the dwarf category, along with Pluto's major moon Charon, and the biggest asteroid in the Solar System Ceres.

An US spacecraft called New Horizons is due to fly by Pluto and the Kuiper belt in 2015.

Sedna

2006-08-22T15:02:00.000+03:00

Astronomers have been conducting an ongoing survey of the outer solar system using the Palomar QUEST camera and the Samuel Oschin Telescope at Palomar Observatory in Southern California. This survey has been operating since the fall of 2001, with the switch to the QUEST camera happening in the summer of 2003. To date they have found around 40 bright Kuiper belt objects. To find objects, Astronomers have taken three pictures of a small region of the night sky over three hours and look for something that moves. The many billions of stars and galaxies visible in the sky appear stationary, while satellites, planets, asteroids, and comets appear to move. Objects in the inner Oort cloud are extremely distant and so move extremely slowly.

(The Oort cloud is a hypothetical shell of icy proto-comets in very loose orbits around the sun that extends to a distance of almost halfway to the nearest star. The existence of Sedna is evidence that the Oort cloud actually extends much further in towards the sun than previously thought).

These are two slightly differently processed views of the same 3 discovery images. The total area of sky shown in the bottom image is equivalent in size to the head of a pin held at arm's length. Incidentally, that is how big the Sun would appear from Sedna:

Sedna is the most distant solar system object ever discovered. It is twice as far from the sun as any other solar system object and three times farther than Pluto or Neptune. Standing on the surface of Sedna, you could block the entire sun with the head of a pin held at arm's length.

Even more interestingly, the orbit of Sedna is extreme elliptical, in contrast to all of the much closer planets, and it takes 10,500 years to circle the sun.

Here is an image of the orbit and position compared to all the known solar system objects:

In our discovery images, we see only a point of light. We can't directly measure the size of Sedna from this point. The light that we see has traveled from the sun, been reflected off the surface of Sedna, and come back to us where we can see it in the images like the discovery images below. So a small icy object and a large coal-covered object, for example, would both look about the same brightness in the discovery images, because both objects could reflect about the same amount of sunlight.

Astronomers measured Sedna's size using a thermal telescope, which measures the heat coming from the surface. They know how far away Sedna is, so they know that the surface temperature is about 400 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. A large object of that temperature will give off much more heat than a small object of that temperature. A 30 meter diameter IRAM telescope and a Spitzer Space Telescope were used. Sedna was too small to be detected in either. This tells us that Sedna is at most about 1800 km in diameter: about halfway in size between Pluto and the largest known Kuiper belt object Quaoar. Even though all we know for certain is that Sedna is smaller than 1800 km, we have evidence which suggests that the size might be pretty close to this number. They are virtually certain that the size is larger than the 1250 km size of Quaoar, though this object has shown many unexpected characteristics, so they can't completely rule out a smaller size.

Sedna is about 20.5 magnitudes in R, considerably fainter than 2004 DW and Quaoar. It is beyond the reach of almost all amateurs astronomers (though, interestingly, the first confirmation of the existence of Sedna was made at Tenagra Observatory, an extremely high-end amateur telescope run by Michael Schwartz in southern Arizona).

In March 2004, the location of Sedna is easily found in the evening sky to the southwest just after sunset. It is almost directly below Mars, and forms a triangle with the very bright Venus.

When astronomers first announced the discovery of Sedna, we noted that circumstantial evidence suggested that there is a moon around Sedna. Soon after, we acquired the images below with the Hubble Space Telescope. Much to our surprise no moon is visible!

But In December 2005 astronomers finally discovered a moon for sedna they called it (Gabriel).

Symbols of planets

2006-08-12T10:03:00.000+03:00

The symbols for the planets, Moon and Sun (along with the symbols for the zodiac constellations) were developed for use in both astronomy and astrology. The astronomical symbol for the Sun is a shield with a circle inside. Some believe this inner circle represents a central sun spot. The symbol for Mercury represents the head and winged cap of Mercury, god of commerce and communication, surmounting his staff. The symbol for Venus is designated as the female symbol, thought to be the stylized representation of the hand mirror of this goddess of love. The symbol for Earth shows a globe bisected by meridian lines into four quarters. These for quarters represents the four seasons. The symbol for the Moon is a crescent. The symbol for Mars represents the shield and spear of the god of war, Mars; it is also the male or masculine symbol. The symbol for Jupiter represents a hieroglyphic symbol of the eagle, or the initial letter of Zeus with a line drawn through it to indicate its abbreviation. The symbol for Saturn is thought to be an ancient scythe or sickle, as Saturn was the god of seed-sowing and also of time. The symbol for Uranus is represented by combined devices indicating the Sun plus the spear of Mars, as Uranus was the personification of heaven in Greek mythology, dominated by the light of the Sun and the power of Mars. The symbol for Neptune is the trident (long three-pronged fork or weapon) of Neptune, god of the sea. The symbol for Pluto is a monogram made up of P and L in Pluto (and also the initials of Percival Lowell, who predicted its discovery).

for more information visit this website:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomical_symbol

How Observant are you?

2006-08-05T09:50:00.000+03:00

Read out loud the text inside the triangle below.

More than likely you said, "A bird in the bush" and

If this is what you said, then you failed to see

That the word THE is repeated twice!

Next, let's play with some words.

What do you see?

In black you can read the word GOOD, in white you can read the word EVIL. It's all very physiological too, because it visualizes the concept that good can't exist without evil (or the absence of good is evil).

Now, what do you see?

You may not see it at first, but the white spaces read the word optical, the blue landscape reads the word illusion. Look again! Can you see why this painting is called an optical illusion?

What do you see here?

This one is quite tricky!

The word TEACH reflects as LEARN

Last one.

What do you see?

You probably read the word ME in brown, but.......

when you look through ME

you will see the word

YOU!

ALZHEIMERS EYE TEST

Count every " F " in the following text:

FINISHED FILES ARE THE RESULT OF YEARS OF SCIENTIFIC Studies COMBINED WITH THE EXPERIENCE OF YEARS.

HOW MANY ?

WRONG! THERE ARE 6 , no joke.
READ IT AGAIN !

The brain cannot process "OF".

Anyone who counts all 6 "F's" on the first go is a genius!

Only smart people can read this!

The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and the lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig huh?

Talking with astronaut

2006-07-26T12:04:00.000+03:00

Last month I participated in a program that has been organized by Maryam ( So I want to be an astronaut ) called '' talking with astronaut '' sponsored by Kuwait amateur radio society. The program was at the Scientific Center in Salmyia with some students from different schools. We had 3 days of rehearsal. We were trained on how to ask some questions to astronaut Jeff Williams abroad the ISS ( International Space Station ).

The day of the contact was 28th June, it was an amazing day when I spoke with the astronaut, all the media came to take photographs and make interviews with students. Here are some pictures:

Kuwait speaks with ISS

Astronaut Jeff Williams

Floating in space

students after finishing the contact

member of the Kuwait Amateur Radio Society

P.S: since you had never seen me before, guess who and where I am in the fourth picture?

Saturn

2006-05-20T16:30:00.000+03:00

Saturn was the most distant of the five planets known to the ancients. In 1610, Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei was the first to gaze at Saturn through a telescope. To his surprise, he saw a pair of objects on either side of the planet. He sketched them as separate spheres and wrote that Saturn appeared to be triple-bodied.

Like Jupiter, Saturn is made mostly of hydrogen and helium. Its volume is 755 times greater than that of Earth. Winds in the upper atmosphere reach 500 meters (1,600 feet) per second in the equatorial region. (In contrast, the strongest hurricane-force winds on Earth top out at about 110 meters, or 360 feet, per second.) These super-fast winds, combined with heat rising from within the planet's interior, cause the yellow and gold bands visible in the atmosphere.

Saturn's ring system is the most extensive and complex in the solar system, extending hundreds of thousands of kilometers from the planet. In the early 1980s, NASA's two Voyager spacecraft revealed that Saturn's rings are made mostly of water ice, and they found 'braided' rings, ringlets, and 'spokes' - dark features in the rings that circle the planet at different rates from that of the surrounding ring material. Material in the rings ranges in size from a few micrometers to several tens of meters. Two of Saturn's small moons orbit within gaps in the main rings.

Saturn has 30 known natural moons and there are probably many more waiting to be discovered. Saturn's largest moon is Titan a bit bigger than the planet Mercury. Titan is shrouded in a thick, nitrogen-rich atmosphere that might be similar to what Earth's was like long ago. Further study of this moon promises to reveal much about planetary formation and, perhaps, about the early days of Earth. Saturn also has many smaller 'icy' moons. From Enceladus, which shows evidence of recent surface changes, to Iapetus, with one hemisphere darker than asphalt and the other as bright as snow, each of Saturn's moon is unique.

SPARKY

2006-02-25T11:36:00.000+03:00

A new member of the family has just joined. It’s my lovely puppy sparky and he is 4 months old. He is so naughty and so hyperactive, it’s like his drinking coffee 24 hours. Here are some picture:

I've been tagged

2006-01-05T21:25:00.000+03:00

I've been tagged by elegance. what pictures do i use for my computer's wallpaper ?, well, i use nature, space, 3d pictures and windows original wallpapers. here is some samples.

Happy New Year

2005-12-31T14:02:00.000+03:00

Happy new year to you all , and have a lovely and enjoyable 2006 .

world space week

2005-12-22T23:26:00.000+03:00

Yesterday was the last day of the world space week. It was the first time that such interesting event was held in Kuwait.
I attended for 3 days in the scientific center and I found it very interesting, informative and well organized, thanks to (so I want to be an astronaut) and the sponsors. I learned from the Kuwait Amateur Radio Society how to use the radio to communicate with astronauts, I also participated in the astronomy contest, it was a lot fun.

beautiful pictures

2005-12-03T20:55:00.000+03:00

horse head nebula

space dust

tangle nebula

eye of god

our galaxy

hill bob comet

Mars

2005-11-03T22:32:00.000+03:00

The red planet Mars has inspired wild flights of imagination over the centuries, as well as intense scientific interest. Whether fancied to be the source of hostile invaders of Earth, the home of a dying civilization, or a rough-and-tumble mining colony of the future, Mars provides fertile ground for science fiction writers, based on seeds planted by centuries of scientific observations.We know that Mars is a small rocky body once thought to be very Earth-like. Like the other "terrestrial" planets - Mercury, Venus, and Earth - its surface has been changed by volcanism, impacts from other bodies, movements of its crust, and atmospheric effects such as dust storms. It has polar ice caps that grow and recede with the change of seasons; areas of layered soils near the Martian poles suggest that the planet's climate has changed more than once, perhaps caused by a regular change in the planet's orbit. Martian tectonism - the formation and change of a planet's crust - differs from Earth's. Where Earth tectonics involve sliding plates that grind against each other or spread apart in the seafloors, Martian tectonics seem to be vertical, with hot lava pushing upwards through the crust to the surface. Periodically, great dust storms engulf the entire planet. The effects of these storms are dramatic, including giant dunes, wind streaks, and wind-carved features.

In the Shade of a Historic Planet

2005-10-30T16:00:00.000+03:00

Explanation: For the first time, astronomers have recovered independent evidence that distant planetary systems exist. Last Friday, a team led by G. W. Henry (Tenn. State) and G. Marcy (UC Berkeley) announced the discovery of a shadow of a planet crossing a distant star. Little known HD 209458, a Sun-like star 150 light-years away, had been suspected of harboring planets from a slight wobble found in its motion. Henry now finds that this wobble exactly corresponds to a planet crossing the face of the star, creating the slight dimming effect of a partial eclipse. The astronomers were then able to make a groundbreaking estimate of the mass and radius of the extra-solar planet, which they find to have about two-thirds the mass of Jupiter but about 60 percent larger radius. The drawing above is an artist's depiction of a planetary eclipse in the HD 209458 system.

First photography taken by the biggest telescope in the world!

2005-10-27T23:05:00.000+03:00

Did you hear the latest news ?

In Arizona (U.S.A.) a shot was taken from the strongest and biggest Visual UFO-shaped telescope of some stars, situated 24 million light years away from earth, at "Andromeda Galaxy".

This magnificent telescope has two mirrors; each is 8.4m wide and weigh 16 tons.

Exciting isn't it?

galileo galilee

2005-10-14T22:18:00.000+03:00

He was born in 1564, he had great achievements during until his deadness in 1642 (and it is the year that nioten was born), his father was a music teacher and a fine lute player. Galileo Galilee was a Tuscan astronomer, philosopher, and physicist who is closely associated with the scientific revolution. His achievements include improvements to the telescope, a variety of astronomical observations.

Although the popular idea of Galileo inventing the telescope is inaccurate, he was one of the first people to use the telescope to observe the sky. Based on sketchy descriptions of telescopes invented in the Netherlands in 1608, Galileo made one with about 8x magnification, and then made improved models up to about 20x. On August 25, 1609, he demonstrated his first telescope to Venetian lawmakers. His work on the device also made for a profitable sideline with merchants who found it useful for their shipping businesses. He published his initial telescopic astronomical observations in March 1610 in a short treatise entitled Sidereus Nuncius (Sidereal Messenger). On January 7, 1610 Galileo discovered four of Jupiter's largest moons : Io, Europa,Callisto and Ganymede . He determined that these moons were orbiting the planet since they would appear and disappear; something he attributed to their movement behind Jupiter. He made additional observations of them in 1620. Later astronomers overruled Galileo's naming of these objects, changing his Medicean stars to Galilean satellites. The demonstration that a planet had smaller planets orbiting it was problematic for the orderly, comprehensive picture of the geocentric model of the universe, in which everything circled around the Earth.
Galileo noted that Venus exhibited a full set of phases like the Moon. The heliocentric model of the solar system developed by Copernicus predicted that all phases would be visible since the orbit of Venus around the Sun would cause its illuminated hemisphere to face the Earth when it was on the opposite side of the Sun and to face away from the Earth when it was on the Earth-side of the Sun. By contrast, the geocentric model of Ptolemy predicted that only crescent and new phases would be seen, since Venus was thought to remain between the Sun and Earth during its orbit around the Earth. Galileo's observation of the phases of Venus proved that Venus orbited the Sun and lent support to (but did not prove) the heliocentric model.
Galileo was one of the first Europeans to observe sunspots, although there is evidence that Chinese astronomers had done so before. The very existence of sunspots showed another difficulty with the perfection of the heavens as assumed in the older philosophy. And the annual variations in their motions, first noticed by Francesco Sizzi, presented great difficulties for either the geocentric system or that of Tycho Brahe. A dispute over priority in the discovery of sunspots led to a long and bitter feud with Christoph Scheiner; in fact, there can be little doubt that both of them were beaten by David Fabricius and his son Johannes.
He was the first to report lunar mountains and craters, whose existence he deduced from the patterns of light and shadow on the Moon's surface. He even estimated the mountains' heights from these observations. This led him to the conclusion that the Moon was "rough and uneven, and just like the surface of the Earth itself", and not a perfect sphere as Aristotle had claimed.
Galileo observed the Milky Way, previously believed to be nebulous, and found it to be a multitude of stars, packed so densely that they appeared to be clouds from Earth. He also located many other stars too distant to be visible with the naked eye.Galileo observed the planet Neptune in 1612, but did not realize that it was a planet and took no particular notice of it. It appears in his notebooks as one of many unremarkable dim stars.

Did you know?

2005-10-08T13:56:00.000+03:00

1- The International Space Station (I.S.S) is one of the brightest objects in the night sky. You can see it with the naked eye or a pair of binoculars as a point of light moving past the stars.

2- The moon has no atmosphere. This means it has no wind or weather, so everything on its surface stays the same. The footprints and American flag left by astronauts in 1969 are still there!

3- One light-year is the distance light travels in one year about 5.9 trillion miles.

4- On Earth we live at the bottom of an ocean of air. Seventy-eight percent of it is nitrogen.

5- Jupiter's four largest moons-Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto-were first seen by Galileo in the 17th century.

6- Because Uranus is tipped way over on its axis, its north pole is in darkness for 42 Earth years.

Niel Armstrong

2005-10-06T22:12:00.000+03:00

ARMSTRONG, Neil Alden (1930– ), American astronaut, born in Wapakoneta, Ohio. He served as a pilot in the U.S. Navy during the Korean War. After graduating (1955) from Purdue University, he joined the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, then known as the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, serving as a civilian test pilot at Edwards Air Force Base, Lancaster, Calif. In (1962) he became the first civilian to enter the astronaut-training program. In March (1966), Armstrong was command pilot of the Gemini 8 mission, which accomplished the first physical joining of two orbiting spacecraft. In July (1969), Armstrong, as commander of the Apollo 11 lunar mission, became the first person to set foot on the moon. His companions on the mission were Edwin E. Aldrin, Jr., and Michael Collins. In (1971) be became professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Cincinnati. Following the fatal explosion of the space shuttle Challenger in January (1986), Armstrong was appointed deputy chief of the presidential commission set up to investigate the disaster.

Being an astronaut

2005-10-06T02:31:00.000+03:00

Being an astronaut is one of the most exciting and most demanding jobs in the world, and also out of this world! You brave danger from the moment you rocket away from the launch pad to the moment you touch down on Earth again days or maybe weeks later. Up in the strange weightless world of space, you carry out experiments, launch satellites and go space walking. In the years to come, you might spend months in orbit in space stations, walk on the moon, or even travel to mars.