Society for Popular Astronomy

A friend and myself saw Uranus without optical aid in the early '60's and from inside the town. The planet wasn't difficult to see. Mind you, we were young then with better vision, and light pollution was nothing like it is now. Previous to the unaided sighting, we'd been observing Uranus in a homem...

The Saturn rockets, as we know, were enormous, but, do moon rockets still need to be big?The ISS ( International Space Station ) was assembled in Earth-orbit from modules. Why not do the same for moon rockets? A moon rocket assembled in space could stay in space and be smaller, used as a sort of lun...

What everybody would like to know Jeff, is when did you drop those binoculars?

Very nice Cliff. The rose-tinted twilight horizon is an added feature that complements the comet.
The best thing I'll be getting this year is the Covid jab tomorrow.

I have the Helios, Voyager, zoom 10X-25X42mm monocular. It's very good for general purpose and astronomy. It also functions as a microscope with its minimum focal distance of 25 inches. The Voyager can be attached to a grip or tripod. It's good to see insects, especially butterflies, in intricate de...

The man who uttered that was Pascal in 1833 or thereabouts. Ironically, it was at the same time that Fraunhofer was making his first solar observations.

When the book was published, it was a Newtonian universe, the galaxies were regarded as clouds of gas in our galaxy, and the Sun was burning like a piece of coal, not nuclear, etc. The author would have been astonished to know what astrophysics has revealed about the Universe since then.

I've checked in Webster's Stella and they use the same "Aerial" as in the English dictionary. As you know, some Americanisms are spelt differently. Yes, I know what an Ariel is here.

Ariel might be the American ( Webster's ) spelling. In the "Tempest", Ariel is a spirit of the air.

The US Congress has ordered the intelligence agencies to reveal all that they know about UFO activities. Congress's directive has given less than 180 days for the Office of Naval Intelligence the Unidentified Ariel Phenomena Task Force and the FBI to give detailed analyses of UFO data that they hold...

If it's any consolation Brian, whatever Nature throws at us, she's equipped us with a brain that, given enough time and resources, can solve or, at least, moderate these problems.

According to the Guardian there's a high possibility of another "beast from the East" in the middle of next week, due to a threatening sudden stratospheric warming. Along with Covid-19, it would finish off more of the old folk. Heartless as she might seem to be, Nature insists on staying h...

I was forgetting about the La Grange points. There are concentrations of interplanetary dust and possibly a few old rocks of some discription at Earth's La Grange points.
Jupiter has a million Trojan asteroids at its La Grange points.

A brilliant auroral display was shown on BBC News this morning. The display was imaged in Elgin Murray. Is it a consequence of the recent solar filament ejection?

I saw it this morning Jeff on space weather and wondered what the effect would have been if it was face on to the Earth. Would it be the same effect as a mass coronal ejection, knocking out power grids,etc?