I spent some time over the last couple of weeks weeding out my meteorite collection, with the aim of selling off a lot of less interesting ones, and buying a few historical falls. The results are beginning to appear. A couple of small micros first – Quenggouk (fell in Irrawaddy, Burma, 1857) - very rare, with a total weight...
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The Kepler mission was launched March 6th, 2009 from Cape Canaveral. It’s about 2.7m diameter and 4.7m long, and weighed about a tonne at launch. Its 1.4m mirror is coupled to a sensitive photometer and it will be spending three and a half years staring at the same spot in the sky. Sound kinda boring? Well, staring at one...
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Newly-discovered asteroid 2011 CQ1 will make its closest approach to earth around 1700GMT – about 20 minutes time. The ‘miss distance’ (yes, that’s the technical term) is 60,000 miles, or about a quarter of the distance to the moon. It’s 2m across so about the size of a family car. You can see a...
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OK, so the eclipse is real, but I got the date wrong… too busy worrying about the damn 5th Test. It’s TUESDAY morning, around 8am GMT. The diagram shows the path of the sun’s shadow across the earth. Let’s hope for clear skies M
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Observers in the UK have a chance to see a large partial solar eclipse tomorrow morning, if the weather is clear: SUNRISE ECLIPSE THIS TUESDAY MORNING As the Sun rises, shortly after 08:00 UT this Tuesday morning, on 4 January, a partial eclipse of the Sun will be visible right across the British Isles, weather permitting of course....
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Thanks to a tip-off from the guys on the BIMS list, I was able to grab a small piece of another UK/Irish meteorite. Bovedy was seen to fall near Belfast at 2125 on the 25th April, 1969. According to the Met Soc database: “The fireball was seen all the way from Sussex through London, Doncaster and Yorkshire to Northern Ireland...
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