Meteorites under microscope

Helios Astronomy club was invited by one of it's members Lieven - thanks for the nice invitation. On the agenda today, observing meteorites under the microscope. Jan brought along his meteorites collection  - a mars meterorite, a iron meteorite and a rock sample impacted by a meteorite.

The Science behind gravitational lensing by spinning black holes

Astrophysics of the accretion disk shown around spinning black holes is explained in this movie  Gravitational lensing by spinning black holes - see also http:\\www.orionxt12.blogspot.com

Avg and extremes for April 2015

Weather results for April 2015 - Averbode. April counted 25 days without rain (17mm). 

Light Grafitti

Settings for taking astronomical pictures at typically require long exposures, large aperture and high ISO. When setting your camera to a small aperture, still using long exposure time and high ISO you are able to take some nice light grafitti pictures - See http:\\www.orionxt12.blogspot.com

Light Grafitti -  Car lights in Berlin

Natürkunde Pictures - Bleu Jellyfish

Playing and experimenting with my digital camera sometimes results in beautiful pictures. See http:\\www.orionxt12.blogspot.com

Picture taken from Bleu Jellyfish in the Zoo Aquarium Berlin.

Meteorites - Museum fur Naturkunde Berlin

If you enjoy seeing meteorites, ensure you visit the Museum fur Naturkunde in Berlin which has a collection of more than 5000 meteorites -only a dozen are displayed. But for each category you will find a meteorite sample.

On top of these samples you are able to see at the end of the main entrance a comprehensive collection of impact crater rocks which are among the largets in the world. It focusses on European, Asian and African impact craters. Interesting to see this exposition which was rather new for me.

Deutsches Technikmuseum Berlin

Last weekend I was visiting Berlin including the Museum of Technology. Besides rail transport, photoart, shipping, textile engineering, computer science the museum provides information on aerospace. You can discover German aviation technology and history.
You will find many German airplanes including the first rockets : the Rheintochter, the Fieseler Fi 103 (V1) and the engine of an Aggregat 4 (V2).

The museum also exposes the Lunar Sample 76015,143 from Appolo 17. This rock weights about 333g and was part of a original lunarrock with a weight of 2819gram. The age is 3.96 by years and is bombarded by micrometeorites and is a so called Vesicular Micropoikilitic Impact Melt Breccia.