Whitby NZ Scale Solar System

19/04/2025

Back in the day, if you didn’t understand why something was the way it was, you researched and found out why.

Now it seems after the recent all female Blue Origin flight, if you don’t understand why something is the way it is, you make a TikTok claiming the whole thing is fake.

🤦‍♂️🤦🤦‍♀️

13/03/2025

Lunar eclipse alert! Friday 14 March.

As the moon rises this evening from about 7.30pm onwards it will be in full eclipse!

Rising in the east, you’ll want a good clear view out in that direction. Totality is approximately 8pm and the earths shadow will start to recede from about 9pm.

Here’s hoping it’s clear!

20/02/2025

There's been a bit of a buzz in the media about a near Earth asteroid due to return in 2032 which appears to have a slowly increasing risk of hitting us.

There is something that media aren't saying though, which is the nature of the probability calculations mean that the risk nearly ALWAYS goes up, before it starts going back down. Imagine that there is an area, which represents the possible locations that the asteroid will be in as it passes Earth, and Earth inhabits part of that area. As astronomers get more data on the orbit of the asteroid, this area gets smaller but still contains the Earth, so the 'chance' of Earth being hit gets progressively higher, until suddenly the Earth is outside of this area and the risk drops to zero.

This diagram shows what I mean. Imagine the earth is in the blue square. You can see as the area shrinks, the chance of the Earth being in the path rises, first it's 1/81, then 1/57, then 1/37, but eventually, it'll still miss. Even though we can see the earth is not right in the centre of the area, we don’t know for sure where in the area the asteroid is going, that's why we are still seeing the probability going up.

There are some other things which also make it less scary than it first sounds. Whilst it's a big rock, it's not 'that' big. Perhaps an area of 20km of destruction. It sounds a lot, until you remember that barely 3% of the Earth's surface is populated. So even if the chance of it hitting goes up to 100%, the chance of it doing anything significant to people is back to 1/33.

Add to that, NASA have already successfully demonstrated they can alter the path of asteroids (DART mission), and you should really be sleeping soundly right now ;)

31/01/2025

*blows dust off page

You may have seen in the media, a lot of talk about a 'rare planetary alignment' currently happening. Unfortunately, as the media are fond of doing, they are hyping it up and using incredibly unrealistic images.

Here's the facts, how to see the 'alignment', and what you should expect to see. It's still pretty cool, so it's worth your time ;)

Firstly, to see it, you don't need a telescope or really any special training. Just your eyes. Just go outside at sundown somewhere with a wide view of the sky. In the West will be a bright 'star', this is Venus. Slightly to it's left will be a 'star' about quarter of the brightness, and a bit creamy coloured. This is Saturn. Looking directly North you will see another bright 'star', this is Jupiter. Now looking East you might see just on the horizon, a reasonably bright red/orange 'star', this is Mars. That's the planetary alignment :) Basically you can see all these planets in the night sky at the same time, but they are spread ALL the way across the sky, not all in the same place. Uranus and Neptune are in there somewhere too, but these are not visible unless you have a telescope, and even then are quite hard to find.

If you do have a telescope, then Venus, Saturn, Jupiter and Mars are all well worth a look, though you might want to wait a few hours for Mars to rise a bit further up.

Note the bottom image is northern hemisphere so mirrored to what we will see ;)

29/05/2024

The giant sunspot that caused the fantastic Aurora last time is back.

It’s survived it’s journey around the ‘back’ of the sun and is slowly rotating back to face earth.

While sunspots are no guarantee of auroral activity, this one let off a massive flare yesterday already so is clearly still active.

Fingers crossed, keep looking up!

11/05/2024

First time I’ve ever seen the Aurora over Whitby. Quite easily visible with the naked eye as a red glow, but a phone camera reveals even more.

20/04/2024

I noticed Neptune had gone missing (again) so I’ve printed a new one, and put it even higher in the tree 😅

25/08/2023

Edit.session is now finished, thanks to all who came 🙂

Free street astronomy session tonight (Friday 25 August)

Adventure Park nr the Toy Library

630 onwards

Join me as we look through a proper astronomical telescope at the Moon and anything else you’d like to look at

24/08/2023

Pareārau - Saturn

Imaged on 22/8/23 in my backyard.

This was the first of my captures, and actually not the best, but I'd got the camera set quite bright, and inadvertently have picked up two of Saturn's many moons near to it's lower half, Tethys and Dione. Tethys and Dione are quite similar to each other, both (probably) rocky cored and icy, and both quite heavily cratered. They're much smaller than our moon at just over 1000km diameter (our moon is about 1700km diameter), and were first discovered by Cassini (the astronomer not the space probe) in 1684.

23/08/2023

The giant planets are back!

My first planet imaging session for this year, results to follow.

Can you guess which one I was targeting?

13/01/2023

I’d really appreciate if you could take 30 seconds, and consider signing this petition.

It’s aiming to reduce light pollution across New Zealand.

Light pollution is only partly an issue for astronomy. Mostly it is a problem for plants and animals, human health and ecology in general.

Astronomers and ecologists don’t want the total banning of all lights at night. Far from it. Instead what we want is something that benefits us all; appropriate, targeted lighting which is not wasteful. Simple!

Petitions are addressed to the House of Representatives and ask that the House do something about a policy or law, or put right a local or private concern.

02/01/2023

My final planet photos for 2022. Ka kite Hineitīweka. Kia ora Matawhero. So long Jupiter, and hello Mars.

Jupiter is now heading off to the Western part of the sky and is largely obscured from my position, so this is probably the last photograph I'll take of it this season. I never did manage to co-ordinate a photography session with the Great Red Spot being on the visible side (or rather I wouldn't stay up late enough when it was only visible in the early hours).

Here's what might also be the only photograph I get of Mars this season. Mars is quite small this year, and very low in the sky, making it a very tricky target, and I'm unlikely to get anything better than this, as it's already past it's opposition. I've done an annotated version showing the various areas on show here. Olympus Mons might be wishful thinking, but the lighter patch is in the right area. The North Polar Hood is an area of cloud centered over the planet's north pole. It's the remnants of the northern ice cap, which has now melted, it being spring in the northern hemisphere at the moment. The two darker areas are rocky highland areas of Mars, and the lighter parts are the more sandy bits.