The Perseid meteor peaks tonight (evening of the 12th, morning of the 13th of August). This year is favourable, like 2005 there is no Moon to wash out the sky.
Observers will need to look in an easterly direction, the radiant is within the constellation of Perseus. However it's best to view as much of the sky as possible rather than focus on the small area around Perseus.
If you stay out for an hour or two you should see perhaps a dozen or two meteors under good conditions....
Yes that's right, a creationist, Don McLeroy, has been appointed to head the Texas school board. This guy now has the ability to spew his anti-science ideology over 4.5 million school students, and the damage that could happen to the already poor science textbooks in the United States could be felt across the whole country.
Just check out some of this nonsense.
I don't think I share a common ancestor with a tree....
This image is a huge leap past anything I've seen before, the amount of detail is far beyond what other people have managed to get from the ground (albeit they were using far smaller telescopes), usually most photographs show a T-shaped object fly through the field of view, but the amount of detail in this is incredible.
This is a photograph of the Space Shuttle Atlantis and the International Space Station together, taken from the ground....
And other places too. This is the first time in a while that they've both been visible together in UK skies (I think it was two or three shuttle missions back the last time), they'll be visible for another 5 or 6 days from the UK.
Together they come in at around magnitude -3 or there abouts. If you want to get the exact times for your location check out Heavens Above....
As I promised a few days back, here's a complete video of Comet McNaught passing through the LASCO camera on SOHO telescope.
You can really start to see the solar wind fan the tail out as it goes around the Sun, which is why images in the northern hemisphere, show a largely straight tail, yet ones in the southern hemisphere show a much more diffuse tail as the solar wind pushes the tail away from the Sun....
Comet McNaught has now moved into the twilight skies in the southern hemisphere, captured here in this photo by Noel Munford taken from Astronomy Picture of the Day.
So if you're lucky enough to live in the southern hemisphere go take a look at this comet. It'll be visible for a few weeks now after sunset in the western skies. It is fading, so go take a look as soon as you can....
Comet McNaught is now the brightest comet in over 40 years, its reached magnitude -5 (that's brighter than Venus), which means in theory it is possible to see it in daylight.
It's very close to the Sun so it's probably best to position yourself so something is covering the Sun, like a building, but still exposing the sky near it. If you're at mid-northern latitudes it'll be towards the left hand side of the Sun....
Comet McNaught has now entered the joint ESA and NASA Solar & Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO)'s field of view, which has been looking at the Sun continuously for over a decade now.
The Sun is in the centre blocked out by a small disc in front of the camera, you can see Mercury to the lower left of the Sun, with Comet McNaught to the left of the image.
They've got an animation (under LASCO/C3) of the passage so far, which really lets you see the solar wind starting to push the tail back....
You may have already seen this on the news:
While searching for this video one newscaster on a US news channel referred to it as a meteor shower, despite the fact it was obviously a single object. Who lets these kinds of people on TV?
This was actually part of the rocket which launched the French COROT space telescope on the 27th of December. It was carried into orbit by a Soyuz-2-1b launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome....
This is a headline from the Irish Times, they go on to say:
David Moore of Astronomy Ireland said both craft [the Space Shuttle and the Space Station] could be seen as extremely bright star-like objects blazing across the sky.
"I have seen International Space Station being chased by a shuttle in the past and it is one of the most incredible sights I have ever seen - so we want everyone in Ireland to witness this rare and spectacular event,"...