The Astrolabe is of interest in showing how much the ancient world knew of astronomy: http://www.astrolabes.org/ And I don’t think we can talk about Ancient Greek Astronomy without considering the Antikythera (around 2nd Century BC): http://www.antikythera-mechanism.gr/ Although the later probably not really related to ancient astronomy – its still pretty interesting how they applied what …
Nature published a free PDF about the wonderful successor to Hubble: The James Web Space Telescope – download it with no registration required: http://www.nature.com/news/2010/101027/pdf/4671028a.pdf Great download. Also this week – a great composite photo of a Quasar (3C 186) about 8 billion LYs has been released by the Chandra team – this too is worth …
As well as looking through either my Meade ETX-125 or my 8†Saxon or my astronomical binoculars, the next best thing is visiting telescope sites within Australia.  I also like visiting tracking stations as well – and there are so many of those, many operated by Nasa and the Australian government. I’ve been to most …
OPTICAL & RADIO TELESCOPES AND TRACKING STATIONS IN AUSTRALIA. Read More »
Welcome to my new Blog – simply a repository for current papers I’ve read really for my purposes of keeping track of all my favourite articles and thinking about Astrophysics: Astronomy and Cosmology. Others are welcome to use this as a resource and I hope you find it helpful. If you have any comments – …
12:14 04 September 2006 by Stephen Battersby (Image: NASA) Cosmologists study the universe as a whole: its birth, growth, shape, size and eventual fate. The vast scale of the universe became clear in the 1920s when Edwin Hubble proved that “spiral nebulae” are actually other galaxies like ours, millions to billions of light years away. …
12:14 04 September 2006 by Stephen Battersby For similar stories, visit the Cosmology Topic Guide Cosmology is one of the most creative and bizarre areas of science. Explore some of the strangest ideas in this exclusive feature Could space-time actually be a “superfluid” substance, scattered with whirling vortices? (Image: Forex/Rex Features) 1. Clashing branes Could …
Jan 5, 2005 The last 30 years of his life were spent on a fruitless search for a unified field theory, but as John Ellis explains, Einstein put this “holy grail” of modern physics on the theoretical map. The definitive scientific biography of Einstein, Subtle is the Lord…, which was written by Abraham Pais in …
Jan 5, 2005 Gravitational physics has become a truly experimental science as tests of the special and general theories of relativity reach new levels of precision When I was a first-term graduate student in the late 1960s, it was said that the field of general relativity was “a theorist’s paradise and an experimentalist’s purgatory”. There …