General Chat

So I am told. I did go onto other hard things after the astronomy and found them more to my taste but I would like to re-learn the constellations,if only to look like i know something.

If I am going to get interested I had better hurry up.Patrick Moore is not too far away from me and, if I want to ask him, I will have to catch him before he disappears completely into his trousers.

I downloaded the site, had a look.

I can see more stars if I go outside! To be fair, there are few street lights were I live (none in my street) and it's a very small town.

Can I get rid of that silly bushes thing? I didn't click on "landscape". Those bushes look nothing like anything we have here lol I think they are the same bushes that appeared when I first opened the site, and got Paris.

lol your cup is half empty. Make it half full instead.

It actually isnt too hard, but even if it was, things that are hard are worth doing more than things that are easy. Just do it a bit at a time. Its a good excuse to sit in the garden on a summers night with a glass of wine, working out what is what and where it all fits together :-)

No Eldrick,you are wrong. I know Orion,the Plough, Casseopiea and Taurus and Polaris.Oh and Cygnus.

I have known them for a long time.All the others are too hard.

I have downloaded the site you recommended but don't know how to get into it. New fangled contraptions!Where do you put a spanner on them?

Will wait until OH gets home tonight and proceed from there.It will still be too hard though!

It has the facility to do that, you can ask it to show the constellations in different formats.

You will soon relearn them. Lots of ways -from the plough, arc to arcturus, drive a spike to spica. The two stars that form the front of the plough point towards the north star (polaris) and from there you can pretty much pick out the remaining bright stars and find your way round the sky.

Actually, if you can find the plough and orion (in the winter) then pretty much everything else is dead easy. Then use some binoculars and you will multiply the things you can see at least tenfold! Then you get obsessed and start spending thousands on equipment and turn into an anorak wearing geek.

I have a problem with star maps.I would rather see the stars of a constellation shown in a brighter or different colour than see the lines drawn between them.

Many,many moons ago, the constellations were probably different then, when I did the O level, I did know a few of the constellations and was even able to pick out Cameleopardus once, but have forgotten them now.

I think I will have a look at that site and see if I can remember them again.

I put a short time lapse onto youtube back in march, it shows the apparent movement of the stars quite cheesily, lol.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DjEsN_MRDU&feature=relmfu

You can see why they thought everything moved round the earth in the old days. That being the case, plus they didn't know how far away the stars were or even what they were, it was only natural to attribute some influential force to them. Of course, we now know just a teensy weensy bit more about quantum mechanics, dark matter and relativity, not to mention science in general.

Some people still live in the past, though. Even though they talk about it on computers and mobile phones. Getting a horoscope on the internet......that cracks me up! :-D :-D :-D

Actually, you can, you just dont notice it. If you are looking at the moon through a telescope, it takes less than a minute to move out of view. If you have a reference point you can actually see it moving.

If you are interested, http://www.stellarium.org/ has a free software download that shows you the night sky in real time. You just set your location and away you go. You can speed everything up, zoom into objects and generally mess around with it. It's probably the best bit of totally free software ever created.

If you have an iphone or ipad theres loads of aps of a similar nature, but none quite as good as stellarium.

So it was imperceptible movement,which I suppose it would be wouldn't it?

Well you can't see the moon move can you?

Just under 7 hours altogether, depending on where you were. although from the UK it was only visible from sunrise (4.30am here until 5.55am BST.

Typical, bright blue skies this morning.

There's some absolutely cracking photos turning up now, far too many to put links up. Although it pains me to say this, the Daily Mail has one of the best collections; http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2155140/Transit-Venus-2012-Spectacular-seen-time-2117.html

Eldrick,you know about these things and I didn't do very well at O level astronomy.

I have seen the time lapse films which don't give proper idea but how long did the transit actually take?

I collect navel fluff. I've got some lovely miniature cushions stuffed with it. :-D

Interesting stuff!

I have recently been reading a book "The Golden Bough" by James Frazer, that I downloaded free from Gutenburg.com, that goes into the history and origins of all kinds of woo-related nonsense!


xxxxx mick

I bet I could do you just as good a reading over the phone!

http://www.ianrowland.com/index.php?p=ColdReading1

I did this chaps course and I can confidently say that I can read navel fluff up there with the best of them. BTW, navel fluff and bum dimples trump tarot cards every time, in case you didn't know.

:-D :-D :-D

hahaha Annx - just saw your post.

Many years ago (at last 30!) my cousin talked me into seeing a "fortune teller".

Made an appointment

The morning of the appointment, she 'phoned me to cancel because of "unforeseen circumstances"

I didn't make another appointment lolol

But....... I had a Tarot reading done once....... and that was scary! Too close to the truth to be a guess. (Yes, the same cousin talked me into it).

lolol Eldrick :-D That's what I thought

Saw a History Channel thing.......... nothing on it was history! Some loony reckons the Snake Brothers have been around since Adam & Eve. I rarely watch tv, found it on YouT*be when looking for something else. Was good for a giggle.

Ooooh that's a good one.....thanks for putting the link.

I had a form at work years ago from a fortune teller. Where it asked her to anticipate what her earnings would be for the next 12 months she put that she didn't know. :-S Made me chuckle at the time.

The best picture I've seen so far - a high res shot by the japanese Hinode satellite

http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/657111main_1-SOT_120606_venus_ca_nc_yellow_001_color_full.jpg

Just a load of cloud here,,,but we did see the Lancaster and the other planes as they flew back from the palace yesterday.

Not that I know a great deal about them, but seems to me to belong to the same genre as hogwarts, atlantis, scientology and santa claus.

A fairly typical sort of cult that picks obsucre texts and weaves a fictitious story around 'facts' from these texts and claims them to be true. A bit like all religions, really. I take it you are referring to the Egyptian based cultish thingy? Seems to me that anything that isn't immediately explainable is given a ritualistic meaning, or some great significance is manufactured to show deep mystical knowledge now lost to makind in general but still retained by a select few guardians who keep it secret, for if the secrets were revealed there would be an apocalyptic event.

Which is a long winded way of saying what a load of old pants.

:-D :-D :-D