Leonids

SO there were supposed to be the Leonids a few days ago. Somehow didn't hear much about it in the news. This year Leonids were supposed to be huge with a meteor rate of nearly 500 meteors per hour for a couple of hours. Unfortunately, at the place where I stay the sky was overcast and it was freezing outside. So I didn't see even a single meteor.

When you talk about Leonids, its imperative to mention temple-tuttle. Tempel-tuttle is a short period comet with a period of 33 years. But its a tiny non-impressive comet that is almost not seen by the naked eye when it enters the inner solar system. But what seems to be interesting is the dust it leaves behind. The dust belt that's left behind by the comet drifts away from the sun and eventually reaches earth's orbit. When earth passes through this best, we see the dust particles as meteors in the sky. Actually its more of dust, icy pebbles and other normal comet material.

One thing that I found very interesting is that scientists have actually observed each dust path that is left behind by the comet. This year's showers were apparently the dust left behind by the comet somewhere in 1533. Now that's some cool astronomy!

An amusing story!

Ok, I wanna tell a story. There is a planet earth.
Its a rock and if you look at the solar system, its really really small compared to Jupiter. So if Jupiter is a huge ball, our earth is a tiny little speck!
And now we look at the Sun. The magnificent, glorious huge humongous ball of fire, and compared to that! our Jupiter is a tiny speck! Haha...
Proceeding, we have our Sun surrounded by milllions and zillions of stars, some bigger or smaller, all kinds! So our Galaxy which holds all these zillions of balls of hydrogen, compared with that! Our dear old Sun is a tiny speck!
These galaxies spread out in the whole huge wide universe, can form HUGE clusters and these cluster can form superclusters and there are millions of galaxies...
"Hmmmmm....uh-uh, Ok now you have me lost me, sorry cant believe it anymore! You are making up stories... !"

That was the reaction some kids had by the end of this story I told them :-)
Well, thats how the universe is! Unbelievable!

Moon and Jupiter

So today, the 29th of September 2009, I saw the moon and Jupiter pretty close to each other. Though the sight of moon and a planet seeming close to each other is something that happens at least 3-4 times a month, this was significant because it was I who saw it. :)

The thing that I observed the most was how much the moon had moved over a day. If im not mistaken, in a day the moon travels about 7 to 8 degrees each day. If you were to look at the moon and forward / rewind the time by 24 hours, you'll have to nearly tilt your head a little bit to get your glance back on the moon.

The sky looks so calm and motionless, yet there are things like our little moon running around in circles like the ball on roulette. No matter what, there's always something amazing to look at in the night sky!

Saturn the 4 parts of the sky

Saturn can now be seen in Leo... Just under the triangular part at the lion's rear end. This is a nice thing to look at. After a few months this will be the only thing worth looking at in the sky if you don't have a 5" reflector. Perhaps even with that. Right now we see lots of stars in the sky because we can see the ring of milky way beyond the stars in Orion. Awesome constellation. After a few months, the sun will enter taurus and then gemini hiding the light of these stars in 'more' light.

I usually split the sky into 4 parts:
The Interesting part: far side of the milky way part with Orion as the outstanding constellation.
The somewhat empty part: The space beyond leo when we're looking at a direction perpendicular to the disk of the milky way (away from andromeda)
The really interesting part: The region beyond the summer triangle (Cygnus, Lyra, Aquilla) in the north extending all the way down to scorpious and saggitarius where we look at the thick of the milky way (right at the center.. wooot)
The hmmm part: the region beyond pegasus and all that where we look at the other direction perpendicular to the disk of the milkyway and oh we see M31 [Must be seen with a 5" reflector]

I saw a shooting star the day before. It had been almost an year since I saw one...