About Space Exploration

I have always loved star-gazing, and I can remember exactly when my interest in space exploration and science began - with the stunning (for their time) images of Jupiter from the Voyager probes. I can still picture now the issue of National Geographic with a little flick-book animation on the page corners that let you see the bands of clouds and the red spot swirling around - that issue got very dog-eared!

I don't follow it as obsessively as I used to, but I keep my eye on New Scientist etc. and have a nice little internet session on the NASA websites now and then.  Living on the edge of the Dales, I can get out to somewhere with good seeing a few times a year, though the light pollution is usually to bad to see much from where I live (no chance of the Milky Way - boo!) The visual snow that my brain perceives the whole time doesn't help much either!

I'm not great at spotting the constellations (like DC, Cassiopea is one of my main "landmarks".)  However, I have a nice little freeware application called Stellarium on my laptop, so I can take a real-time start chart out with me which can tell me what all of the objects are and when to expect meteor showers and good views of the planets etc.  I'd love to have a telescope and to do some astro-photography, but I can't really justify the expense given how few nights of good viewing I get.

Being able to identify stars and constellations was probably my best hope of impressing girls. Now there's an app for it. Bah.

Just been reading Scientific American on dark matter axions. Doesn't seem real somehow. One good thing about the NASA sites is the images are all free of copyright.

Being able to identify stars and constellations was probably my best hope of impressing girls. Now there's an app for it. Bah.

Just been reading Scientific American on dark matter axions. Doesn't seem real somehow. One good thing about the NASA sites is the images are all free of copyright.