StarDome Blog
by Sonia Turkington FRAS.
Each Month Sonia will bring you a roundup of the latest astronomy & Space news directly to this page.
Hi I'm Sonia, I have been into astronomy since 1997 when I was 11 years old when comet Hale Bopp was around.
I remember being in the back garden with my dad and he was showing me how to take a photo of it with his old Fujica camera,
that I still have now. Ever since then I've been fascinated with space.
I started with a very cheap Tasco telescope from Argos to look at the moon, went onto a Meade go-to - ETX 90 telescope, which unfortunately due to it's age stopped working. For a very long time I have also used a Skywatcher 10" Dobsonian, to mostly photograph the moon with a moon filter and also the planets.
I now have a Seestar S-50 which has got me into deep sky imaging which I love! I also own a Coronado PST for solar imaging.
I have two Bsc. (Hons) Open degrees in "Introducing Astronomy and the planets".
In 2023 I was elected a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society and am also Vice President since 2024
for the Manchester Astronomical Society. Also I am currently a freelancer for the BBC sky at night magazine.
Clear Skies
Sonia
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Time will tell.. On the moon.
If you have read the recent news, you will have seen that the white house wants NASA to create a time zone on the moon known as (LTC) Coordinated Lunar Time.
This is apparently due to the different gravitational field that the moon has, as time moves a lot quicker on the moon. Compared to Earth it moves -58.7 microseconds everyday.
Having LTC will help to synchronise space craft.
"The same clock that we have on Earth would move at a different rate on the moon," Kevin Coggins, NASA's space communications and navigation chief, said in an interview
If nasa were to put an atomic clock on the moon it will be very different than ones on Earth and will tick at a different rate,
The US is hoping that this clock in LTC will be ready by the time the next planned crewed space mission is going to the moon by 2026.
I don’t know about you, but this will be interesting to see how they are going to do this.
Watch this space….
The glory effect, on another Planet?
A rainbow-like pattern was spotted outside the solar system on another planet.
It resembles much like what we would call the glory effect.
The planet is ultra-hot and much like Jupiter and is called WASP-76b. It’s quite away away, some 637 light years away.
This planet must have some very strange atmospheric conditions as for a glory to appear, it must have water droplets and clouds to be able to diffract to be able to create a rainbow.
It was discovered by a little spacecraft called Cheops which has been monitoring this planet over a period of time
and then discovered the glory effect.
The sun has gone very quiet lately.
For anyone that has been recently solar observing, you may have noticed that it has gone very quiet in terms of solar activity.
I don’t know about you, but I find this a little strange before a total solar eclipse.
On the left I took this image on
7th April 2024 at 11:10am, it’s very quiet
I took the image on the right the previous
month on the 24th March 2024, it was very busy!
However, sunspot activity might be low, but there has been an increased activity in solar flares. This shows the other side of the sun is showing all the activity and Mars is getting a good show at the moment! So, who know what is about to come from around the corner soon?
Voyager 1 has a bit of Amnesia!
It turns out that Voyager 1 has a few memory problems, so NASA have been trying to fix this old elderly machine. It started to send back in November some gibberish talk to us. Poor Voyager 1 yet has not yet been fixed, but now they know what the problem is.
The issue has been down to the flight data subsystem, this is a computer that communicates with the spacecraft’s telemetry modulation unit, this enables the science and engineering data to be sent back to Earth. It’s all down to a tiny little single chip part of the FDS. Around 3% of the FDS memory has been corrupted so it wasn’t able to do what it is supposed to.
Currently it is over 15 billion miles away and it takes 22.5 hours for a radio signal to reach Voyager 1,
and it takes just as long for us to receive a signal back.
So, it’s not so easy to be able to be fixed and poses some challenges, it could be damaged, or it could be a matter of age
as Voyager 1 is getting very old after 46 years since its launch back in 1977!
It could take weeks or months to fix it, so let’s keep optimist.
I hope there is an update soon though! As soon as I know, I’ll be sure to let you know!
An international team of astronomers have made a significant breakthrough in understanding the
unprecedented behaviour of a previously dormant star with a powerful magnetic field.
Jodrell Bank have kindly allowed me to post this information on my blog
Here is the link to this significant breakthrough.
@Jodrellbank
Next month
I’ll be blogging about the solar eclipse, adding some of your photos and asking you about your experiences.
Whilst also what is happening in the latest space news.
