45th nniversary of Apollo 11

The picture of the  moon waxing crescent was taken last friday August 1st. As a rememberence of the 45th anniversary of Apollo 11 and a man walking on the moon, I'm showing the landingsspot of both Apollo 11 and Apollo 17.
In the area you also will find the "Jansen Crater" :)

Weather results July

Weather graphs for July month monitored using Weather station WMR 200, registrated by Cumulus and visualised by Wunderground.com

Astronomical Seeing

In order to prepare for observing the stars, planets, ... watch the weather channel.  Personally I like the one from meteoblue ... meteoblue.com

Saturn photograph

All in all it was not an ideal day for observing neither the sun neither planets or stars today. Low and high clouds came across but in between I could make this picture from Saturn. Currently Saturn is visible low 30° in the South - South-West.
This is my first picture from Saturn ever. Without guiding instruments it's quit difficult to even make a picture.

Castel Gandolfo & Astronomy

This week I was in Castel Gandolfo close to Rome, Italy. The area is also know for the summer residence and vacation retrait for the Pope.

The Apostolic Palace of Castel Gandolfo is located at the borders of Lake Albano which is formed by two small volcanic craters with a max depth of 170m and measures 3,5x2,3km.

Interesting however are the 4 observatories located at Castel Gandolfo. Two of them are part of the Pope's Palace and two are located within Papal Gardens.
According to the information I found the Observatory's Headquarter is still at Castel Gandolfo, however the telescope's from the palace are moved to Arizona. It's not clear for me what's inside the domes in the Papel gardens. Some refering to a 26¨ f/3,7 Schmidt telescoop in one dome and in the other dome the Carte Du Ciel telescope (Astrophotgrafy Aperture 33cm, focal Length 3,43m). The Vatican was part of the Carte Du Ciel Project together with 19 other observatories, including the one in Uccle.

Anyway the location is very beautiful and I clearly understand why this is vacation retrait of the Pope.

See also this website for the http://www.vaticanobservatory.org/

Earth in universe - local galactic group - Virgo supercluster

Where are we located within the Universe?

Our planet Earth is part of the solar system together with 7 other planets. Next, our Solar system is located within the Orion Arm of our Milky Way Galaxy.

Our Milky Way Galaxy together with M31 Andromeda Galaxy (2million ly away from us) and more then 30 other smaller galaxyes are part of the Local Galactic Group.

More then 100 kind of these local galactic groups form another group called the Virgo Supercluster.

Currently many of these superclusters are what we today call the Observable universe.

Source Wikipedia.

Record views

I uploaded this picture via twitter resulting in 2079 views, 8 retweets, 3 favorites and 12 link visits. Amazing how a picture can connect people.