Saturday, May 10, 2014

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. 



Sunday, May 4, 2014

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.




Sunday, April 27, 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.

Saturday, April 26, 2014

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.

Wednesday, April 16, 2014

The New Weather Underground



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The New Weather Underground
The New Weather Underground
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Hello There

The New WU has arrived.


If you've logged in to wunderground.com today you'll see that a few things have changed. Hopefully you had a chance to preview the new site design but today is probably the first time you've seen the new logo. In case you didn't catch it (it's subtle!) the raindrop collecting into the letter 'U' pays homage to our PWS owners and their rain gauges.
 
The city forecast pages are working great but we're aware that some station owners are experiencing bugs on the new PWS dashboard which has replaced the 'History' page of the previous site design. We're working around the clock to get these bugs fixed and we have a long list of further enhancements we hope to launch soon. Please read our PWS Owner's blog for regular updates on how we're improving our PWS features.
 
Another change that we wanted to tell you about is that we're partnering with our sister company Intellicast and enhancing their products with the Weather Underground PWS network. You'll now be able to access your station data from intellicast.com and the Intellicast mobile apps - you can find more information here.
 
Please be sure to give us your feedback by emailing help@wunderground.com and entering PWS Feedback in the subject line.
 
Station owners like you are the core of our community and we're very focused on driving up the value we provide you with, in return for the data you share with us.
 
Thank you for your support and understanding as we make these changes.

Best Regards,
Kari Strenfel 
PWS Meteorologist. 
 
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Sun and airplane

Bull's eye. When observing the sunspots and taking pictures from the sun today I accidently took a lucky shoot from the sun with in front a airplane.








A lot of sunspots visible today. The picture presented in the corner shows the sun taken by SDO showing the sunspots