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Perseids tomorrow night!

Wednesday, August 11th, 2010

The Perseids are a shower of meteors which fall on Earth every year in July and August. The shower lasts for a while, but the rate is expected to peak tomorrow night, when you may be able to see a few meteors every minute if you’ve got a good clear sky. I’d definitely recommend going out to have a look - it’s probably the most impressive astronomical event you can watch with your bare eyes, unless you’re lucky enough to live in range of the Northern or Southern Lights. It’s also one of the oldest recorded events: there are Chinese writings documenting the shower at least as early as 36 AD.

A short guide on how to look for them is here, but really you can’t go far wrong by heading out to an open dark area and looking up!

The Perseids last year. This is a combination of 227 separate images taken throughout the night and combined, to show the circular paths across the sky the meteors take due to the Earth's rotation. Click for credit.

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Posted in Art, Astronomy, Tuesday Pictures | 3 Comments »

The music of the… circles

Wednesday, April 21st, 2010

This ‘Solar System music box’ is quite beautiful in its simplicity, in my opinion.

Via Information is Beautiful (I think - I spotted it just before NAM but didn’t get a chance to post it, and may have forgotten my source).

Posted in Art, Planets | No Comments »

Snow

Friday, January 8th, 2010

Here’s how Great Britain looked yesterday, as photographed by NASA’s Terra satellite:

Great Britain under snow

Oxford is just about visible as a little greyish spot, due East of the Northern end of the Bristol Channel.

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Retro IYA posters

Saturday, December 12th, 2009

Simon Page has designed a series of retro-style posters for the International Year of Astronomy, which the IYA committee has apparently decided to use. I think they all look really nice - perhaps partly because they remind me of the covers of old editions of Scientific American and Martin Gardner books I used to read as a child. It’s just a shame he made them so late in the year.

And what’s not to like about astronomy-inspired art?

Posted in Art, Astronomy, Science communication | No Comments »

A month of Tuesdays

Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009

If one astronomy picture a week isn’t enough to sate your appetite, have a look at The Big Picture’s Hubble Space Telescope Advent Calendar 2009, which is going to feature an image from the telescope every day until the start of Christmas.

I also recommend taking a look at the previous entries, which are usually nothing to do with astronomy but are generally fascinating.

Posted in Art, Astronomy | No Comments »

The earliest painting of a telescope

Monday, October 19th, 2009

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post about an astronomer who’s been attempting to date and place several paintings by looking for clues in astronomical events they depict. I mentioned I’d be doing a follow-up soon, and here it is, albeit somewhat later than I expected.

Around the same time as the Guardian article which inspired my last post I saw this paper presented by Selvelli and Molaro at a conference celebrating four centuries of astronomical telescopes. But this time the stars (so to speak) of the story are not objects in the night sky - they’re the telescopes themselves.

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Posted in Art, History of science | No Comments »

Star-gazing with art historians

Thursday, September 17th, 2009

Two quite similar articles caught my attention recently, both involving astronomy and art. The first is a Guardian editorial about Texas physicist Donald Olson.

Olson has made attempts to date and place several paintings using astronomical knowledge. This editorial mentions several, among them Vincent van Gogh’s painting White House at Night which shows a big yellow star or planet in the evening sky above a white house. It had been known that the painting was finished before 17th June 1890 - Van Gogh wrote a letter about it then - but the exact date wasn’t known. So Olson and his collaborator set out to find it. They tracked down the house and used it to orient the picture so they could place the object on the sky. They reckon it’s Venus, which was visible in that part of the sky around that time.

White House at Night

Having identified the planet, they then used a computer program which follows planets’ orbits and worked out that to be in exactly that spot on the sky the painting must have been done at about 8:00pm on 16th June. Now, at this point I start to get a little sceptical. I don’t doubt that they can place the planet accurately enough to get that timing (planets can actually wander about the sky fairly quickly), but how accurately did Van Gogh do it? (more…)

Posted in Art, Astronomy, History of science | 1 Comment »