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Tag Archive 'Astronomy'

The autumnal equinox is nearly upon us. Or is it?
Equi + Nox, which comes from the Latin for “noxious horse”, or more generally “nightmare” … oh I’m sorry … wrong book. Here it is: equinox means the length of the night should equal the length of the day. Theoretically.
But someone’s been lying to you. Here’s [...]

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I once heard an interesting story about a group of scientists that had written some improbably small thing on a metal platter, something like the IBM logo written in individual xenon atoms. And here’s what they learned: it was easy enough to write something tiny, but having written it, it took them several hours to [...]

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Google Sky and Comet Holmes

The latest version of Google Earth now has a projection of the sky built into called, fittingly, Google Sky. It’s a natural extension. We’ve got lots of pictures of the starry sky, so why not stick them all together using the Google Earth glue that already exists. But when I tried it for the first [...]

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Stellarium stargazing software

I’ve been on a good run with free software lately. As part of some recent work I’ve been doing with my Sky Clock, I wanted to check my accuracy against a web site that showed the current sky. Was Saturn where I said it should be? As part of my Google search for such a [...]

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