The “Clear Sky Clock” is a forecast that comes courtesy of the Canadian Meteorological Center and use useful for determining if viewing conditions will be good in a particular area at a particular time. If you don’t live in Marietta, don’t worry, there are over 3,000 other locations with associated clocks. Click on the image below for details regarding how to read it and to help you find other clocks that may be closer to you.
Check it out below, happy viewing!
While watching this 6 minute short on the Hubble Deep Field, I could not help but hum to myself the music that goes with.. “Whenever life gets you down, Mrs. Brown… Just remember that you’re standing on a planet that evolving, and revolving…”.
Monty Python aficionados will recognize this little tune. It is so truly mind-bogglingly awe inspiring to glimpse even the tiniest aspect of the immensity that is this universe we inhabit.
This is the 10th anniversary of Carl Sagan’s death (Dec. 20, 1996) and if you’re in the blogosphere you’ll likely see many of the science-oriented sites post entries about this sad milestone.
There is not much that I can say that has not already been posted before about Dr. Sagan’s role in growing our knowledge about the planets and moons of our local solar system as well as in popularizing the Cosmos in general. Click here for his Wikipedia entry.
My own experience with Dr. Sagan’s work began way back in 1989 when I was on vacation in Morocco for a couple of weeks. That was one of the first vacations I’d ever been on where I was truly a “stranger in a strange land”. There were a couple of French TV stations available from France in the North, but most channels were in Arabic (Berber, I believe). There happened to be a copy of Carl Sagan’s book “Cosmos” available, and over the course of those two weeks I managed to read it cover to cover.
While I enjoyed that experience immensely, it is not for that work that I really respect Dr. Sagan. I disagreed with some of his stances on political issues (nuclear holocaust and environmental concerns chief among those), but I greatly respected the skepticism and mental rigour that he expressed so clearly in my favorite of his works, “The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the dark”. I have this book on audio tape and feel it is a must read / listen for anybody interested in understanding what skepticism is really about.
I truly regret that Dr. Sagan can no longer produce such wonderful and thought provoking works anymore and that he is not able to see the incredible discoveries we’ve made both within our own solar system and throughout the Cosmos over the past few years.
[Update 2009 12 22 – It was just pointed out to me that the domain under which this is hosted belongs to an idiot. While I have my own views about the amount of attention and assistance the Jewish people get from our media and government, the owner of this website is completely over the top.
This does not take away from the scientific relevance of this astronomy page. End Update]
For some great pictures showing the relative sizes of our solar system’s planets as well as some contrasting the size of our sun with that of other stars out there, click here.
Don’t forget to point your telescope toward Jupiter in the latter part of July (originally July 4). Scientists tell us that the fairly new Red Spot “Junior” on Jupiter is catching up to the Great Red Spot and that the two will interact.
Nobody really knows what will happen but the last I heard is that “Junior” will very likely change color from red to white.
Talk about your perfect storm… Each of those spots is mulitiple times the size of our entire planet!!
