Astronomy not Astrology!!!! Did anyone see the meteor shower last night? We thought it was a plane crashing to start with. Was a completely awesome sight..next one 17th November apparently!
I heard on the news last night that the lights were space debris burning up in the atmosphere. I have made a consistent effort for many years to look at any annual meteorite showers in this country, but I am consistently disappointed because of cloudy weather obscuring any sightings.
Me too and I'm sorry to have missed whatever it was the other night, sounds as if it was spectacular.
I keep looking though, just in case! EarthSky's meteor shower guide for 2012 | Astronomy Essentials | EarthSky
A mention of what Pixie saw: Bright meteor or space debris broke up over UK on September 21 | Space | EarthSky
I've just bought a Celestron Nexstar telescope. I'll let you know if I spot anything coming this way! www.celestron.com
I keep saying that I would like to get a telescope I love all stuff like this I find it fascinating...roll on the 17th nov and lets hope it's a clear night
I bought Mrs Shadow a telescope for her birthday this year, we seem to have had record levels of cloud cover ever since!
I sat out in a field for the last shower one night was ok , the rest was really getting going then yup clouds ! but did see some great ones The falling space Debris looked amazing. we often get stuff burning up round here I once heard a strange noise and looked up as something burnt up just missing a roof top! not a firework . I was hoping a bit would fall near me. The other thing I saw for the first time ever when watching the meteor shower was satalites . never seen them before but it was that unlight poluted there's lots of them up there! Oh astrology ... I'm a fish face .
I used to be a big fan of astrology for working out people's characters. It looked unlikely, but it seemed to work. So then I read up about it in more detail and am now of the opinion that it's complete rubbish. Apparently, in one experiment, a psychology professor handed out the same character assessment to his entire class, with their star sign on it and asked them if they thought it described them accurately. A crushing majority of them thought that it did. I have come up with my own experiment. If Aries are supposed to be pugilistic, then you would expect them to over-index in boxing clubs. I bet they don't. People might say that they might have an Aries ascendant, but as these should be distributed evenly (seeing as it is dependant on the time of day you were born), Aries sun signs should still over-index. You could do the same thing with Pisces in swimming clubs.
Its a sad fact that the bookshelves in Waterstones are packed with astrological crap and nonsense, but precious few on astronomy and science. Its so sad that were still too primitive to grow up and so many educated humans cling on to these medieval fairy stories. the origins of astrology are well understood by science, from pre historical fables and early attempts to understand the workings of the universe, through to its foundations of current religions and myths...they were all created in an age when humans didnt know how babies were made, what air was and what blood was for. Even sadder are those who have dismissed religion and have turned to 'spiritualty' and other trendy mumbo jumbo..white witches, healing crystals and the like. Magic got the human race precisely nowhere except in the minds of the misguided. Anyway, im off to bed.
I rather like fairy stories, myths, legends, religious stories, and works of fiction generally. It is not a problem that half the books in bookshops are fiction. It is quite amusing that some people 'believe', or at least pretend to believe, in Harry Potter, Sherlock Holmes, and the Jedi. Believing that astrology, homeopathy, and religions exist as ideas in peoples' minds is true enough, and harmless so long as it is harmless. The serious problems start when people lose the capacity to distinguish fact from fiction, and start really believing fictions have an objective existence in the real world. That leads down a slippery slope away from truth, and at the bottom we find ignorance, persecution and death.
Back to junk in the sky - you'll be amazed at just how much stuff you can see at night, when it's clear! You'll need to be somewhere relatively dark with no streetlights, so a back-garden or out in a field is ideal. You need to give your eyes a good five-ten minutes to adjust to the low light levels, but as they do you will see more and more detail in the sky. Then all you need to do is to stare straight up - try the pole star as a guide - and you will soon notice loads of moving specks in the sky. A very rough guide: Flashing = aeroplane Small light, moving fast = satellite or other space junk Very bright, moving fast = most likely the ISS if the date/time is right. Well recommend to watch out for this! Very bright and moving fast with streak = shooting star / meteorite Lots of flashing lights, moving erratically = THEY'RE COMING! THEY'RE COMING! RUN!
For anyone with an Ipad or smartphone, there is a superb ap that allows you to identify visible constellations, stars, planets e.t.c by holding the Ipad/phone with the mystery object in front of you. I don't have one myself so don't know what it's called, I do know it's free to download though. Hours of educational fun, and so much more satisfying than trying to work it out with an old fashioned 'starchart'
