Lightning images

Severe weather in Belgium this evening, lightning, rain and even hail as big as 5 cm diameter.

Luckely my home town was not part of this and only the sky colered black with lot's of lightning. I could take some pictures. 

Double rainbow

This morning a beautiful double rainbow.

Cosmos a spacetime odyssey

Cosmos : A Spacetime Odyssey is a documentary television series from 2014. 

Currently the show is running on the National Geographic Channel. 

The program is based on the 1980 series presented by Carl Sagan, Cosmos :  A Personal Voyage. 

As a small kid I was impressed by this presentation and probably it also started my intrest in the cosmos. 

As with the first series, this new one has in total 13 episodes which will tell the story of our cosmos. 

Possible meteor shower May 24th

Dust particles spread along Comet 209P/Linear's orbit may enter Earth's atmosphere, creating a meteor shower with a ZHR between 100 and 400 meteors/hr. Some media even speculate of a meteor storm with more than 1000 meteors an hour.

In Europe, the morning (3AM-6AM CET) of May 24th is predicted to be the best to observe. For North America best timing is around midnight May 23-24th.

Weather @ Averbode April review

Weather @ Averbode April 2014

Helios Meeting

The monthly meeting of  the astronomy society "Helios" was organised today with different topics on the agenda.

On July 6th, Helios will join the yearly "Sun observation" event. More details will be shared shortly.

Also discussed are double stars and binary stars, Gaia telescope status, project SPECULOOS, a search for terrestrial planets transiting the nearest ultra-cool stars and project TRAPPIST, TRAnsiting Planets and PlanetesImals Small Telescope. Next Belgium project will be called "CHOCOLATE" :)

As part of these projects we also talked Kepler 186f. Kepler-186f is an exoplanet orbiting the red dwarf  Kepler 186A about 500 light years from the Earth. It is the first planet with a radius similar to Earth's to be discovered in the habitable zone of another star. It takes Kepler 186f 130days to orbit the red dwarf.



A final topic and with a lot of enthusiasm was the cosmic illusion revealed on which a supernova class IA was magnified by gravitational lensing.  A massive object between us and the supernova bends light rays much as a glass lens can focus light. As more light rays are directed toward the observer than would be without the lens, the supernova appears magnified and this 30 times greater than normaly expected.

Solargraph gone.

One of my two solargraphs which was installed at the abbey of averbode is gone. This afternoon I wanted to check if  my solargraph was in place and operational. Unfortunately and to my surprise the solargraph was gone.