The International Space Station is again visible over Essex skies. It is now very bright and easy to spot, but you do have to know when and where to look.

Current ISS viewing times for Essex are available here.

At the moment you can also see the Space Shuttle Atlantis as it makes its journey to the ISS.

Watch continuing live coverage of space shuttle Atlantis’ STS-129 mission to the International Space Station (via spaceflightnow.com)

For our last public meeting of 2009, the NEAS welcomes guest speaker Chris Jones who will be discussing “Discovery Made Easy: Variable Stars, an opportunity for amateur science”.

Variable star observing is a field of astronomy where amateurs can make significant contributions to science. Professional observatory schedules are unable to make the necessary observations of such objects and so it is down to dedicated enthusiasts to collect data and, possibly, make discoveries.

Chris Jones is just entering his fortieth year as an active observer of the skies and has been observing variable stars systematically for over three quarters of that time (making him a true expert on the subject).

Our public meetings are open to everyone. It will place at the Henry Dixon Hall, Henry Dixon Road, Rivenhall End on Wednesday 18th November. Doors open at 7:30pm, for an 8pm start. Entry cost £3, with refreshments available.

As part of the International Year of Astronomy 2009, Autumn Moonwatch (and Meteorwatch) will take place from 24th October to the 1st November.

There will also be a Twitter Moonwatch on the evenings of the 26th & 27th October), where the idea is to communicate with people all over the UK while you observe the Moon.  To take part in this, you will need to sign up to Twitter (for free) and the follow @astronomy2009uk.

During Twitter Moonwatch various people around the country will be live-tweeting images of the Moon, planets and other astronomical objects. At the same time astronomers from Newbury AS (and many others) will be online to answer any questions you might have about the images being tweeted, and about astronomy in general.

This Moonwatch will be a special one, as Faulkes Telescope Network of professional telescopes will also be taking part and taking images with their 2-metre telescope situated in New South Wales, Australia.

To find out more, visit www.astronomy2009.co.uk

For our October public meeting, we will welcome Jerry Workman for the second of two talk this year. This time he will be covering “The Solar Eclipses of 2008 & 2009″.

The public meeting takes place at the Henry Dixon Hall, Rivenhall End on Wednesday 16th September. Doors open at 7:30pm for an 8pm start. For further details on how to get there, click on the Events link above.

Head over to our gallery as some new images have been posted – including stunning shots of Saturn, Jupiter and the Lunar surface.

The images, taken by Rachel Eaton using a Celestron C8 telescope and an Imaging Source DFK colour camera, can be found by clicking on the Flickr gallery to the right.

For our first public meeting after the summer break, we will welcome our Honorary Vice‐President,  and popular science writer & astronomy journalist, Dr Stuart Clark.

“The Places That Gravity Forgot” will discuss those vast regions of space, millions of miles across, in which celestial forces conspire to cancel out gravity and so trap anything that falls into them. They sit in the Earth’s orbit, one marching ahead of our planet, the other trailing along behind. Astronomers call them Lagrangian points, or L4 and L5 for short. The best way to think of them, though, is as celestial flypaper.

Lagrange points are locations in space where gravitational forces and the orbital motion of a body balance each other. In the 4.5 billion years since the formation of the solar system, everything from dust clouds to asteroids and hidden planets may have accumulated there.

They were discovered by French mathematician Louis Lagrange in 1772 in his gravitational studies of the ‘Three body problem’: how a third, small body would orbit around two orbiting large ones. There are five Lagrangian points in the Sun-Earth system and such points also exist in the Earth-Moon system.

The public meeting takes place at the Henry Dixon Hall, Rivenhall End on Wednesday 16th September. Doors open at 7:30pm for a 7:45pm start. For further details on how to get there, click on the Events link above.

]]> http://northessexastro.wordpress.com/2009/09/10/september-public-meeting-2/feed/ 0 NEAS Blogger http://northessexastro.wordpress.com/2009/09/09/image-of-comet-christensen/ http://northessexastro.wordpress.com/2009/09/09/image-of-comet-christensen/#comments Wed, 09 Sep 2009 22:19:29 +0000 NEAS Blogger http://northessexastro.wordpress.com/?p=518 ]]>

Here is an image of Comet Christensen (C/2006 W3), taken by society member James Abbott on the 18th August this year.

Image details: 2009 August 18th - Start of imaging 22.13 UT - 7x30s images stacked - 300mm f4 reflector at prime focus with ATIK 16IC camera - Coma details enhanced using DDP filter in Astroart

This comet was discovered in November 2006 by Eric Christensen of the Catalina Sky Survey, Tuscon. At the time the comet was located ~8.7 AU from the Sun (approximately the Sun-Saturn distance). The comet reached perihelion at a still quite distant 3.12 AU from the Sun in July this year and, at that time, the comet brightened to around 9th magnitude – visible in many smaller backyard telescopes and even binoculars from dark sites.  It is currently magnitude 11 and so one needs very dark skies and a more capable telescope to see it.

This is a feed of NASA TV. Along with scheduled programmes, they also feature day-to-day coverage of activities onboard the International Space Station and other NASA projects. Click the play button to start the video stream.