Stargazing
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Updated on april 16 2001. Do you remember those warm nights on your holiday when you spend the night with watching the stars? In some night you could see infinite stars. Once in a while you saw a meteorite in the sky and you said: "Wow, what did you wish?". You could not tell your friends because otherwise your wish will not come true. In this way many people get interested in stargazing. Just like me. At school i was interested in gravity and other physical events. I had the opportunity to take part in a stargazing course in the evening. Mr. Blauw was our teacher. I enjoyed his courses very much. |
Eclipse in North France
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Even with simple tools you can record the eclipse very nicely. I used our home video camera, with a self made Mylar sun filter in front of it. That filter is a sort of plastic foil. that looks like aluminum foil. Before the full eclipse I had to put the filter in front of the lens. When the sun was covered by the moon, I could remove the filter. The nice part of recording with a video camera is that you can hear the people around you react to the eclipse. |
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The picture on the left was taken by a simple compact camera. You can see that there were lots of clouds, but still the picture looks nice. The picture above was taken around noon and shows how darks it gets. |
Photographing Constellars
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I like to take pictures from constellars. In 1998 made a few pictures. You can see Ursa Major (big bear) on the picture on the right side. This picture doesn't look very spectacular, but if you project it to the wall with a projector it looks awesome. It seems that the stars in the pictures really radiate light. Then you can also see the colors of the stars very clearly. Some stars are clearly, red, yellow, or blue. With the bare eye, you can't see those colors for real, because the strength of light is to weak. I used a extra sensitive photo film (400 ASA). The lens I used was a 28 mm with a diaphragm of F3.5. An exposure time of 1 minute results into very beautiful pictures with lots of stars. An exposure time of two minutes and longer changes the dots of the stars into lines because in two minutes the earth is turning 0.5 degrees around its own axis. |
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Moon eclipse
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You could see a eclipse of the moon on Friday morning on the 21st of January 2001. Me and a friend called Jeroen Horsthuis went to Volkssterrenwacht Burgum. That's a place were people come together to watch the sky through a big telescope. That night many people visited the place. Around 03.09 the moon moved into the side shadow of earth. At 04.02 the moon moved into the core shadow. At 05.43 it was in the center of the core. shadow. The moon moved outside the core at 06.22. This event ended around 07.25. At 08.45 the moon set. The picture on the left was taken by Jeroen Horsthuis and was put in to the Frisian Daily Newspaper of January 22nd. |
Astronomical Software
Astronomy Lab is a very nice shareware program. It makes lots of interesting drawings of event in the sky. Like a moonset, sunrise, moon eclipse, meteor storms, data of planets, animations of Jupiter's moons and so on. |
Skyglobe is also a shareware program. Its a very quick graphical planetary program which is easy to use. It shows stars, planets, constellars, the milky way and more. This a DOS program and it also works well on a old cumputer like a 386. |
My own zodiac is Taurus (bull). This constellar, just north west above Orion, is
a striking North hemnisphere constellar with two of the most big star groups in
our constellar. They are called the Hyaden and the Pleyaden. Since 5000 years, this constellar is recognized as a bull. From ancient times bulls are
honoured as a symbol of strength and fertility in countless myths..
