What To Know About Backyard Astronomy

Getting started in backyard astronomy is actually easier than most people realize, because they’ve got all the tools they need right in their heads. This means, of course, that their eyes are the single best instruments for at least starting out in astronomy that they’ll ever use. Most experts advise that one learn what’s up in the night sky before buying a telescope, as a matter of fact.

What this means is that taking the time to gain just a little bit of knowledge about the objects existing in the nighttime or daytime skies is important to the study of astronomy. In fact, it can be far more enjoyable once one has a working understanding of celestial objects, such as galaxies, constellations, the planets and the like. Understanding these objects before starting out will increase enjoyment, for a fact.

Once this basic understanding is gained, it will then be time to start thinking about the kinds of astronomy and study of the skies that one wants to get involved in. Just go online or go to any bookstore and look in the astronomy section to get an idea of how vast the field really is. After all, with billions of galaxies, innumerable suns, moons and stars there’ll certainly be much to study, right?

Consider all of these pre-astronomy activities as being preparation for really getting into the pastime. With them, one’s better equipped to start seeking out astronomy clubs and also selecting a good quality telescope. A club can help in this regard because its members can make recommendations about telescopes and also about what forms of astronomy for the backyard may be the easiest to start out on.

As far as telescopes are concerned, for those just starting out in astronomy it’s a good idea to learn what they are and what they’re capable of. In truth, one doesn’t have to spend a lot of money to get a nice telescope that will be just fine for backyard activities. It’s important, though, to gain an understanding of telescope so that one knows exactly what it’s capable of doing, depending on the circumstance.

If one is just starting out, and needs to stay within a budget, it’s a good idea to find a telescope that strikes a good balance between price and magnification, for example. How “strong” is the telescope? “How wide is the telescope’s field of view?” is always a good question to ask before deciding to buy one. Ask, also, how portable the instrument will be and how easy will it be to move it so that objects in the sky can be tracked.

There are many resources available online for those wishing to get started in backyard astronomy, fortunately. Planetariums are also fantastic when it comes to at least getting started in the right direction, as well as local astronomy clubs (planetariums usually have lists, as do colleges and universities). A nice quality telescope used for amateur astronomy may cost less than 100 dollars, by the way, so why wait to get started?

Writer, Steve Mitchell, writes helpful articles on amateur astronomy. To find out more on stargazing, read more astronomy articles at seekandlearn.com

2012 And The Return Of Planet X

The only culture using 2012 as a reference to pinpoint dates in the future are the Mayans on their LONG COUNT calendar. What most people are not aware of is that the Mayans had several calendars. The LONG COUNT calendar was one of which various PREDICTIONS were said to happen but not always accurate as time has shown us.

The Mayans were exceptional at Astronomy, but they did not see the future with their own eyes. They predicted that their God would return in one of the Bactoons from their long count calendar. Instead on that date, the Conquistadors showed up, tried to convert them to Christianity and burned almost everything they had, including their calendars.

Aside from the Mayan prediction for an end of time in 2012, there is no astronomical or Sumerian reference citing planet x is anywhere near us nor will it be anytime soon.The amateur astronomy community has always been very good at finding new objects in our vicinity even before professional telescopes. Until now, no Planet X has been detected.

This planet is said to be 4-8 times the size of our planet, so if it came near, we would see it, trust me. How then, can we discover evidence of this planet in our solar system?

In the early 1990’s, Dr. Robert Harrington the lead astronomer for the Naval Observatory in Washington suggested including another large planet in our solar system model. He could then explain many of the anomalies we currently see, such as why Uranus is tilted on its side. Or how Pluto and Neptune are possibly dislodged moons of Saturn.

He talked about a planet with an elliptical orbit coming out of the southern hemisphere and moving towards the inner part of our solar system. Dr. Harrington’s model matched very closely the description by the Sumerians of Nibiru , by its size and elliptical orbit. He also explained that based on the orbital perturbations of the outer planets in our solar system, there should be another large planet.

The planets being pulled in a certain direction by a mysterious force, suggests that there should be some large body as the cause. Currently, the search for this planet X has spurred a large interest in looking for planets outside of our solar system. With this new found interest, we have been able to create many new classifications for stars and planets far out in space.

Want to learn more about 2012? Visit Jason Martell’s site now to get the information you need on this topic.

Astronomy – Important Pre-Christian Dates

There is no uncertainty that astronomy is the oldest science and there is also no hesitation that astronomy was being studied by everyone, not only the wise men, thousands and thousands of years ago.

We do not understand exactly why they did it, but we can surmise that early man noticed a correlation between the weather and the stars, which were themselves not fully understood, of course.

Early man, almost certainly even as far back as Neanderthal man, noticed the connection between the weather and herd movements and crop growth, or at least fruit and nuts on local trees, if they did not have planted crops.

This means that people could see a connection between the stars and food availability. This relationship was probably ritualized into some sort of religion like early Wicca. Therefore, the stars became a very important part of the lives of every single person and it is likely that astrology and astronomy were widely intermixed by the average person.

However, there were also people who did not only use the stars as some enormous celestial clock and who tried to make sense of the whole shebang. I am going to narrate below, eight of the most important dates or years in the history of astronomy before Christ walked on the Earth. Never forget that they had nothing but an abacus to do there calculations and no telescopes, which came about two thousand years later.

585 BC: Thales of Miletus (c. 625- c. 547), a Greek, predicted a solar eclipse in Asia Minor purely on the basis of his observations and calculations. It was not a lucky guess!

c. 400 BC: the astronomer Oenopedes (5th. century). also a Greek, announces that the Earth is tilted on its axis with respect to the Sun.

352 BC: the Chinese report what they called a ‘guest star’, a supernova, which was the earliest reported sighting.

340 BC: The astronomer, Kidinnu (b. Babylon c. 379 BC) discovers the precession of the Equinoxes, ie the apparent change in the position of the stars caused by the Earth’s wobbling on its axis.

c. 300 BC: a ‘committee’ of Chinese astronomers compile star maps of the visible universe.

c. 240 BC: Chinese astronomers observe and make notes about Halley’s Comet. Also Eratosthenes of Cyrene (c. 276 – c.194 BC), a Greek, correctly calculate the Earth’s dimensions.

165 BC: Chinese astronomers notice sunspots for the first time.

c. 130 BC: the astronomer Hipparchus of Nicea (b. 147 BC), a Greek, correctly calculates the distance to the Earth’s Moon and also rediscovers the precession of the Equinoxes.

You will see from the dates above that clearly not everyone let nature and the stars govern their lives, as the common farmer or hunter did. Some men actually put pen to paper, but before pen and paper even existed, and tried to work out ‘why these manifestations took place?’.

These individuals must have been remarkable men to have worked these measurements out by calculation, observation by the naked eye and rationalization alone.

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The Chinese Lunar Calendar

Previous to their implementation of the Western solar calendar scheme, the Chinese almost exclusively followed their own lunar calendar for determining the times of planting and harvesting and festival days. Although people in China today use the Western calendar for almost all business, governmental and practical matters of daily life, the old system still serves as the basis for working out numerous recurring holidays. This coexistence of two calendar schemes has long been acknowledged by the people of China.

However, this does not only apply to China, it also occurs in most other Eastern countries, like Thailand, and most Arabic countries.

A lunar month is determined by measuring the period of time needed for the moon to complete its full cycle of 29 and a half days, a standard that makes the lunar year a full eleven days shorter than its solar counterpart. This difference is corrected every 19 years by the addition of seven lunar months.

The 12 lunar months are further divided into 24 solar divisions characterized by the four seasons and times of heat and cold, all of which bear a close relationship to the annual cycle of agricultural work.

The Chinese calendar – very much like the Hebrew calendar- is a combination of the solar and lunar calendars in that it strives to have its years coincide with the tropical year and its months coincide with the synodic months. It is not surprising that a few similarities exist between the Chinese and the Hebrew calendar.

For example, an ordinary year has 12 months, a leap year has 13 months. An ordinary year has 353, 354, or 355 days, a leap year has 383, 384, or 385 days. When determining what a Chinese year will be like, one needs to make a number of astronomical calculations.

First of all, you have to work out the dates for the new moons. In these instances, a new Moon is the completely black Moon (that is to say, when the Moon is in conjunction with the Sun), not the first visible crescent, as is used by the Islamic and Hebrew calendars. The date of a new moon is then the first day of a new month.

The reason why the majority of countries which had their own calendars had to dump them in favour of the Western, Julian calendar that we use today, is business. First the British and then the Americans ran international business and they used the Julian calendar.Anyone who sought to work with them had to follow suit. This is why national policy often differs from local custom in Third World countries.

The government desires to trade on the International markets, but the normal family in the country can not. So, the government adopted the Julian calendar but the people only pay lip service to it. I live in Thailand and people here do not even use the 24 hour day divided into two halves. Their day has four sections of six hours each and the first part starts at 6AM, not midnight. Therefore, they have four 4 o’clocks a day, for example and no 7 o’clocks. They are also 543 years ahead of us, although this is more common, for instance in Muslim countries.

Fascinated by astronomy, why not pop along to our website at: Astronomy Today

Astronomy – An Introduction

Although astronomy is the oldest science, it continues to be at the forefront of not only scientific thought, but that of the public at large too. Who has not looked up at the galaxy while walking home late at night and wondered? Having said that though, the ancient people of certainly the northern hemisphere, but probably both, knew the movements of the stars and planets better than most of us do nowadays.

They knew even then, thousands of years ago, that the majority of stars seem to appear in the Eastern skies at night and travel on circular paths. They also noticed that some ’stars’ were ‘wanderers’ (we call them planets) and that sometimes they went ‘against the flow’.

They also named groups of stars that we now call constellations or even galaxies and knew that those visible in the winter were not the same as those seen in the summer.and that others were visible all year round. The average common man of 5,000 – 10,000 years ago almost certainly knew more about the movement of the heavenly bodies than the average common man of our times. (I mean men and women here, of course).

They learned how to calculate or at least locate the extremities of the sunrise and went to extraordinary lengths to mark those positions with huge stone structures, such as Stonehenge in the United Kingdom, probably to facilitate the location of certain positions of the sun or other planets or stars, which may have been important to their religious beliefs or crop cycles.

In 1609, Galileo invented the first artificial device for looking at the stars and planets. It was the first astronomical telescope and through it he was able to see objects millions of miles away that no one had ever seen before. Because of the deductions he drew from his observations, he clashed with the Roman Catholic Church and was often in serious danger for his life, so radical were his discoveries.

But humankind was not to be intimidated, and since then we have gone on to construct ever bigger and ever better astronomical telescopes through which we can even detect radio waves, microwaves, X-rays, infrared waves and gamma waves from outer space. Forty years ago, we even travelled to our Moon. and we have sent probes to eight of the nine planets in our Solar System, as well as to quite a few comets and asteroids.

Where are we going next? That decision was always up to the government of the United States and the old Soviet Union, but now there are other players in the field. What will China or India want to explore with their possibly slightly different outlook on life? Or will it be just a question of financial benefit?

The world may be in a state of flux and power may be moving from its traditional seats in the West, but it has not diminished interest in questions that scientists think can only be answered in space. These are exciting times for the science of astronomy, but then man has always found astronomy enthralling .

If you are fascinated by astronomy, then please pop along to our website at: http://astronomy.the-real-way.com

Astronomy For Teens.

Astronomy is a very exact branch of science, although a lot of people get involved with it when they are very young. Astronomy is inspiring pursuit that can show children about the other sciences in general. Certain astronomical subjects inspire kids and movies like Star Wars and they only increase this interest.

Our only natural satellite is called the moon. Its orbit around the Earth takes just over twenty seven days to complete. Man’s knowledge being what it is and because the moon is so close, it is the only space object that mankind has ever set foot on, except for the Earth of course. The effects of gravity between the moon and Earth causes the seas’ tides. The moon is one of the first objects that sparks a child’s interest in astronomy because it can be clearly seen with the naked eye.

Let’s move on to the sun. Earth is quite far from the sun, although the distance actually fluctuates between about 91 million miles and about 94 million miles. The reason for this variance is because of Earth’s elliptical orbit. Life on Earth is only possible because of the sun, which is our source of important elements such as light and heat. A little-known fact is that the sun contains about 98% of the mass of the whole solar system! Just think about how small a person is compared to that.

Our planet is in the galaxy called the Milky Way. Like all other galaxies it’s a very large collection of gas, dust, stars and planets. Most of the area in a galaxy is filled with nothing, only empty space. That means that most of its volume, 3,000 light years high by 100,000 light years diameter, the volume of our galaxy, is nothingness.

Our Earth is located somewhere in the neighbourhood of 30,000 light years from the very centre of our galaxy. The emptiness is broken up by over 100 billion stars. In fact, the galaxy was named for the thick group of stars in the main portion of it.

It looks like a pool of liquid, which is why it was called the Milky Way. There are four kinds of galaxies: elliptical, lenticular, irregular and, like the Milky Way, spiral.

There is a great deal of information on astronomy on the Internet that is suitable for children: it ranges from dictionaries and encyclopaedic references to programs that show the orbits of the different planets, solar systems and objects right on the computer’s monitor! In fact, there’s more information out there than a child could ever get through.

If you are fascinated by astronomy, then why not visit our website at: http://astronomy.the-real-way.com