Astro Blog

Stargazing Oxford photo competition: The results are in!

Congratulations to everyone who entered our photo competition! We were extremely impressed with the quality and variety of the entries, and the photos made a beautiful display.

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Moving objects, and non-moving telescopes!

For those of you eagerly awaiting the next installment of comet ISON, I'm afraid all we have to report is a broken telescope! However, you can track a solar system body for yourself tonight (15th Feb 2013), as asteroid 2012-DA14 flies by the Earth at only 35,000km and should be visible in binoculars.

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Stargazing Oxford 2013 Project : Comet ISON

Comet Incoming! Here is the first image of Comet ISON taken for our 2013 PWT Stargazer's project. ISON is still as far away as Jupiter, but already a small tail is starting to develop... For this project, we will be imaging the comet every 2 weeks this year with the Philip Wetton Telescope (PWT) telescope here in Oxford. Check back to see how the comet develops, and if it delivers on its promise to be the brightest comet in 40 years!

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Jupiter and the Galilean Moons

Jupiter reached opposition (directly opposite the Sun, as seen from Earth) on the 3rd of December 2012. This year's opposition is particularly favourable for us Northern hemispherites, with Jupiter climbing high in the Southern sky at midnight. We took the opportunity to grab some images of Jupiter with the Philip Wetton Telescope here in Oxford, showing the bands in the atmosphere, a well placed Great Red Spot, and the four Galilean moons. What's more, the image has a challenge for you solve...

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Stargazing Oxford 2013 photo competition

As part of this year's Stargazing Oxford open day (details to be announced shortly), we are running a photo competition. The deadline for submission is midnight on Tuesday the 8th of January, and all entries will be displayed to the public during the open day on January 12th. Details are included below. We look forward to receiving your beautiful images of the night sky!

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What is an Astrophysicist?

Megan (aged 4 1/2 years) wrote to us to ask as two questions: What is an astrophysicist? And where could she get an astrophysicist's toy? Phil Marshall wrote back, with some partial answers and an astrophysics investigation to get her started...

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Exploring the Frontier

Whilst we go about our busy lives, a host of unmanned space probes are investigating other worlds. Oxford astronomer Joseph Caruana takes a look at some of the spacecraft currently exploring our Solar System.

Homo Sapiens has always been on the move, from the time our species migrated out of Africa more than 50,000 years ago, to later times when seas were traversed, oceans mastered and new continents discovered.

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Sunspots, solar flares, and aurorae

Oxford astronomer and exoplanet researcher Amy McQuillan was in Tel Aviv this week for a research visit. Taking photos early one evening, she noticed something strange on the disc of the Sun. A little while later, she posted what she'd seen on FaceBook:

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Exoplanet GJ1214b: What a wonderful world!

The field of extra-solar planet research is still a young one, but progress over the last few years has been startling. Now that we've found hundreds of exoplanets, the time is ripe to start asking interesting questions about what their atmospheres are like, says Jo Eberhardt.

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The Milky Way and Andromeda galaxy are on a collision course!

Forget global warming baking the Earth - how about something even bigger, like the destruction of the entire Milky Way galaxy? Celia Escamilla Rivera looks at new evidence that predicts a cataclysmic fate for our own galaxy.

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