November/December 2019

Australian Sky & Telescope

The Essential Magazine of Astronomy

Australian Sky & Telescope1 min readAstronomy & Space Sciences
Here Comes The Sun
AWE-INSPIRING. SPELLBINDING. Unforgettable. A total solar eclipse tends to bring out the superlatives when those who’ve seen one grasp for words to describe the experience. If you’ve witnessed one of these natural wonders then you’ll know what I mean
Australian Sky & Telescope2 min readAstronomy & Space Sciences
Amateur Finds Another Interstellar Visitor
ON AUGUST 30, 2019, Ukrainian amateur astronomer Gennady Borisov, using a newly built 0.65-metre telescope, discovered a rather inauspicious-looking 18th-magnitude comet that has actually turned out to be of remarkable interest. Orbital computations
Australian Sky & Telescope2 min readAstronomy & Space Sciences
German-Russian Satellite To Map The X-ray Sky
THE SPEKTRUM-RÖNTGEN-GAMMA (Spektr-RG) satellite, a long-delayed and much-modified X-ray astronomy package, launched successfully from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on July 13. Once Spektr-RG reaches a stable solar orbit 1.5 million kilometr
Australian Sky & Telescope2 min readAstronomy & Space Sciences
TESS Finds Hundreds Of Planet Candidates In Southern Sky
NASA’S LATEST exoplanet hunter, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), has found more than two dozen new worlds that have been confirmed in follow-up observations. Scientists shared their findings late July at the mission’s first science c
Australian Sky & Telescope2 min readAstronomy & Space Sciences
Hubble Constant Tension Continues
A NEW STUDY of a special class of red giant stars fuels a dispute about the rate at which today’s universe is expanding. The universe’s expansion rate has changed throughout time. However, the crux of an ongoing debate is that observations of the ear
Australian Sky & Telescope2 min readAstronomy & Space Sciences
In Brief
A new instrument installed on the Very Large Telescope in Chile has completed a 100-hour campaign looking for planets in the Alpha Centauri system. While a planet has already been found orbiting the red dwarf Proxima Centauri, it is probably dessicat
Australian Sky & Telescope2 min readAstronomy & Space Sciences
Astronomers Map Our Galaxy’s Warp
A SURVEY OF MORE THAN 2,400 Cepheid variable stars has revealed the Milky Way’s warped disk in new detail, Dorota Skowron (University of Warsaw, Poland) and colleagues report in the August 2nd issue of the journal Science. Cepheids are giant stars t
Australian Sky & Telescope11 min readAstronomy & Space Sciences
Mapping the Milky Way
IF THE MILKY WAY were just an average galaxy, mapping its structure would be easy. The average galaxy is a dim, ghostly dwarf roughly a thousand light-years across, so astronomers could easily chart it by measuring the parallaxes of its stars to dete
Australian Sky & Telescope9 min readAstronomy & Space Sciences
Cosmic Mariners
“THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS A GRAVITATIONAL time machine!” belted out a voice across the hall. “You can’t just reverse gravity!” One of us (NIL) was lecturing on work that we and our collaborators had been developing, in which we tried to answer two si
Australian Sky & Telescope10 min readAstronomy & Space Sciences
Seeing Stars
FOR ALL THE TIME THAT HUMANITY has spent gazing at the stars, we still know shockingly little about what they actually look like. Even with the biggest telescopes, nearly every star except our Sun appears as a speck of light, their surfaces hidden fr
Australian Sky & Telescope7 min readScience & Mathematics
Demystifying Image Calibration
JUST FIVE WORDS IS ALL IT TAKES to highlight one of the main things that makes astrophotography so challenging: It is dark at night. With very few exceptions, there are big differences in how to photograph dim targets under low-light conditions compa
Australian Sky & Telescope3 min readAstronomy & Space Sciences
Eternity In The Sky Tonight
To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour —William Blake, Auguries of Innocence, c. 1807 Avery small meteoroid could be considered both a “Grain of Sand” and a “Wor
Australian Sky & Telescope2 min readAstronomy & Space Sciences
Eyes Opened By An Open Cluster
I can still remember my first binocular views of the sky. As a young teenager I would set up a chair in the front yard of our family home, and I would scan the skies with my mother’s 8×30s. I didn’t have much of a clue of what I was looking at, other
Australian Sky & Telescope3 min readAstronomy & Space Sciences
Planetary Triple Treat
The big news for fans of the planet Mercury (mag. –0.5, dia. 8.5”, Nov. 1) will be its transit across the face of the Sun on November 12. Unfortunately, observers in Australia will entirely miss out on this event, but those in New Zealand will get to
Australian Sky & Telescope1 min readAstronomy & Space Sciences
Moonlight Meddles
This November and December the main meteor showers will be hampered by rather poor lunar conditions. The Leonids’ peak on November 18 will be under a waning gibbous moon, while the Geminids, usually the most productive shower, will reach its peak jus
Australian Sky & Telescope4 min readAstronomy & Space Sciences
Christmas Comets
November sees the distant C/2017 T2 (PANSTARRS) continue its northern drift through Auriga. Earlier reports of an extended coma and unexpectedly bright magnitude estimates have not been confirmed and most observations noted the comet to be small and
Australian Sky & Telescope2 min readAstronomy & Space Sciences
Hunt This Star In The Hunter
If you undertake an observing commitment of some sort you will get more from your hobby. This month’s proposed commitment is regular observation of the bright semi-regular variable star W Orionis, and the payoff will be enjoying this famous and ancie
Australian Sky & Telescope4 min readAstronomy & Space Sciences
Monitoring The Sun With Neptune
On the night of September 23, 1846, German astronomer Johann Gottfried Galle called out the configurations of stars in the field of view of the 9-inch refractor at the Berlin Observatory, while an assistant, Heinrich Louis d’Arrest, checked them on a
Australian Sky & Telescope4 min readAstronomy & Space Sciences
Dark Clouds In Taurus
The finest dark nebulae for telescopes are those that are silhouetted against a bright background, such as the striking, chevron-shaped dark lane within the high surface brightness Carina Nebula, or those silhouetted against the Milky Way’s brightest
Australian Sky & Telescope3 min readAstronomy & Space Sciences
Daytime Astronomy
Amateur astronomers on each side of the Tasman Sea will have a solar spectacle of their own over the next couple of months. In November, New Zealanders will be treated to a transit of Mercury across the face of the Sun, while observers in much of Aus
Australian Sky & Telescope4 min readAstronomy & Space Sciences
The Path To Totality
AUSTRALIA HAS HAD ITS SHARE of total solar eclipses, arguably the most spectacular of all natural phenomena. There was one in the far south west of Western Australia in 1974; Mt Gambier, across Victoria and into far southern New South Wales in 1976;
Australian Sky & Telescope4 min readAstronomy & Space Sciences
Advancing Amateur Research Programs
MANY AMATEUR ASTRONOMERS devote themselves to semi-professional astronomical research, and in some cases collaborate with professional astronomers in investigations of great importance. Often, standard backyard astronomical equipment is perfectly ade
Australian Sky & Telescope7 min readAstronomy & Space Sciences
Spotlight On A Seyfert
MY BEST CHANCE TO OBSERVE the remarkable Messier 77 came in October 2016 when I had four nights to observe it through one of the largest amateur telescopes in the world, Jimi Lowrey’s 1.2-metre (48-inch) f/4. It was the next object on my observing li
Australian Sky & Telescope7 min read
Celestron’s RASA 8 Schmidt Astrograph
FAST OPTICS ARE LIKE FAST CARS: Both are a thrill to experience firsthand. I have some previous experience with fast astrographs and thus was very enthusiastic when the opportunity arose for me to try out Celestron’s new f/2 20-cm (8-inch) Rowe-Acker
Australian Sky & Telescope2 min readAstronomy & Space Sciences
Sea Change On Venus
VENUS AND EARTH are a strange pair for two planets so similar in size and apparent composition. Our planet’s rapid spin sets the 24-hour day-night rhythm of light and life on Earth, gives us our cyclonic weather patterns and shapes ocean currents. It
Australian Sky & Telescope4 min readAutomotive
JMI Heavy-Duty Wheeley Bar
HAVING A PERMANENT HOME for a big telescope is the dream of most dedicated amateur astronomers. The ability to have your scope ready for a night of observing or photography at a moment’s notice is priceless. This is particularly true for those of us
Australian Sky & Telescope2 min readAstronomy & Space Sciences
Annual Conferences
As described on page 55 of this issue, Australasian observers will be treated to some solar spectacles in the last two months of 2019 — a transit of Mercury on November 12 (visible from New Zealand but not Australia) and a partial solar eclipse on De
Australian Sky & Telescope2 min readAstronomy & Space Sciences
John Drummond
John Drummond is one of New Zealand’s best-known amateur astronomers. A past president of the Royal Astronomical Society of New Zealand (RASNZ), he has long been active in scientific work, including astrometry of newly discovered asteroids and comets
Australian Sky & Telescope3 min read
The ‘Binocrane’ Parallelogram Mount
ANYBODY WHO’S TRIED to hold up a pair of binoculars for more than a few minutes can tell you it’s hard on your arms. And your neck. And your back. Binocular astronomers have it especially rough, since we have to look upward. We need a way to mount th
Australian Sky & Telescope1 min readAstronomy & Space Sciences
Astrophotos From Our Readers
Eugene and Richard travelled to the Ringa Railway Bridge, 1.5 hours’ drive north-east of Perth, to produce this shot… which is a composite of 20 frames, each of which comprised multiple shots of their own. The lights of Perth can be seen behind the t
Australian Sky & Telescope2 min readAstronomy & Space Sciences
Close Encounters With The Law
AMATEUR ASTRONOMERS NEED dark skies and a minimum of stray light. Yet many of us live in metropolitan areas with their light-polluted skies. Observing closer than one might wish to people and their homes can produce extra safety concerns for the star

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