Posts Tagged ‘stars’
“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars”*…
From the good folks at Chrome Experiments, a wonderfully-informative interactive map of the stars in our corner of the universe. Readers can zoom around our galaxy at “100,000 Stars.”
* Oscar Wilde
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As we pause to celebrate the birth of the archetypical “Renaissance man,” quite possibly the greatest genius of the last millennium, Leornardo da Vinci (born on this date in 1452), we might also send starry-eyed birthday greetings to Friedrich Georg Wilhelm von Struve; he was born on this date in 1793. A renowned astronomer, Struve is known both as the founder of the modern study of binary (double) stars, and as the second in a five-generation-long dynasty of great astronomers: he was the son of the son of Jacob Struve, the father of Otto Wilhelm von Struve, the grandfather of Hermann Struve, the great-grandfather of Otto Struve.
Webcam to the stars…
Fall is prime time for the Aurora Borealis. But unless one lives in the higher latitudes of the Northern hemisphere– and bundles up snugly– there’s been no way to see them… until now. A new venture between the Canadian Space Agency, the University of Calgary, and Yellowknife’s Astronomy North educational center, AuroraMAX, takes the frostbite out of the Northern Lights, and lands it right on ones monitor.
(TotH to National Geographic)
As we put on the popcorn, we might recall that it was on this date in 1912 that Lewis Boss, an indefatigable observer of the night sky, shifted up and off this mortal coil. Boss, who directed the Dudley Observatory in Schenectady and observed the heavens visible in the north from there, traveled to Argentina to scan the southern skies. The products of his vigilance were two extraordinary books: Preliminary General Catalogue of 6188 Stars for the Epoch 1900 (1910) and General Catalogue of 33,342 Stars for the Epoch 1950 (completed after his death by his son, Benjamin, and and published in 1937).
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