astronomy
Work
Heavens Above Locates Space Objects Worth Watching
6:00AM Lisa Hoover | Want to wave at the International Space Station as if flies overhead? Website Heavens Above keeps space freaks and NASA junkies advised of precisely where man-made and naturally occurring objects are orbiting to make tracking their movements a snap. More »
Work
Celestia Brings Interstellar Exploration To Your Desktop
10:00AM Jason Fitzpatrick | If you enjoyed playing with Stellarium, the open-source planetarium software we shared with you earlier this year, but felt strangely tied to an earth-bound perspective, you’ll definitely want to fly through space with Celestia. More »
Design
Enjoy The Orionid Meteor Showers Tonight
4:00AM Jason Fitzpatrick | Catching an occasional shooting star is one thing, but with the right timing you can see dozens to hundreds of them in a single night. We’re in the peak season for the Orionid Showers, read on to catch a glimpse. More »
WorldWide Telescope Visualises the Night Sky
7:45AM Gina Trapani | Windows only: Microsoft Research releases astronomy application WorldWide Telescope, software which offers “terabytes” of detailed telescope images of the night sky for exploration right on your desktop. Zoom, pan, and explore the solar system, galaxies and more using WorldWide Telescope. The BBC reports: Collections include pictures from the Hubble and Spitzer telescopes, as well as the Chandra X-Ray Observatory. … “Users can see the X-ray view of the sky, zoom into bright radiation clouds, and then cross-fade into the visible light view and discover the cloud remnants of a supernova explosion from a thousand years ago,” explained Roy Gould, a researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics. Check out WorldWide Telescope in action after the jump. Via Gizmodo, here’s a demo of WorldWide Telescope at the TED conference back in February. More »Hubble Hubble
10:42PM Sarah Stokely | Google recently launched its Palimpsest project, which will upload and host terabytes of scientific data, including data from the Hubble Space Telescope. But in a talk today at Linux.conf.au Googler Leslie Hawthorn pointed out an awesome mashup that this has made possible – images from the Hubble Space Telescope can be overlaid on the sky view in Google Earth: Sky. Neat stuff. :)
More » 
Get started as an amateur astronomer
10:08AM Sarah Stokely | If you’re interested in astronomy, but want to find out more before investing in your own telescope, the GeekDad blog has a couple of good suggestions for how to get started. It recommends finding a local astronomy club which holds stargazing nights which are open to the public.
Quasar Publishing, publishers of Astronomy Australia hosts a list of amateur astronomy societies here, or a web search for the name of your city and “astronomy club” should do the trick.
If you have an observatory or planetarium near you, check out what they have on offer too. Sydney’s Observatory charges $15 for a night visit which is hosted by an experienced astronomer. It also runs paid night classes including one on stargazing skills which includes guidance on how to choose and use a small telescope.
The photographer’s note on the image I’ve used here says it’s a telescope image of the Andromeda Galaxy (M31) taken from a backyard observatory. 12 hours total exposure time. Neat. :)
Don’t have a telescope? Borrow one! [Geek Dad] More » 
