"The Alternate View" columns of John G. Cramer are short (~2,000 word) essays about cutting-edge science. They are aimed at readers (and writers) of "hard" science fiction, as exemplified by the SF stories of Analog, but they are about real science, usually physics or astronomy. These columns are now published bimonthly in every issue of Analog Science Fiction & Fact Magazine.
Updated occasionally (monthly?)
The Open Exoplanet Catalogue is a catalogue of all discovered extra-solar planets. It is a new kind of astronomical database. It is decentralized and completely open. We welcome contributions and corrections from both professional astronomers and the general public.
Github: https://github.com/openexoplanetcatalogue/open_exoplanet_catalogue/
T CrB is a famous recurrent nova of spectral class B . It is a double star system made of a red giant and a white dwarf orbiting in 228 days. T CrB is usually around magnitude 10 however during outbursts it can reach magnitude 2. Previous outbursts have been observed in 1866 and 1946 and some studies suggest that a new outburst might happen in the second half of 2024.
It would be fun to monitor this page and watch for novae.
This is a 3D-printed dobsonian telescope built around a 76mm/300mm parabolic mirror kit. While there are plenty of mini-scope models on the internet, I wanted something that looked like a dobson that went a bit too hard through the clothes dryer, but without compromise on what matters.
This package provides scripts to interface with the RTL-SDR to automate measurements for measuring the hydrogen line.
Data and plots are automatically stored in your home directory under ~/.hydrogenline. It consists of a settings file settings.json and the averaged spectra under [folder]/data/YYYMMDD_HH_MM_SS.npy.
There are several scripts available as CLI executables. In order to use them, you will have to activate the virtual environment, if you used the installation method above. These scripts include a manual which can be accessed by passing the -h argument. The scripts available as CLI executables:
- reference: capture a reference measurement of the receiver.
- capture: captures samples repeatedly from the RTL-SDR, calculates and averages the PSD, and stores them.
- waterfall: creates a waterfall plot of the measured PSDs.
- spectra: create PSD plots of all measurements.
Satellites in secret orbits provide the finest test of an amateur satellite observer’s observational and analytical skill. Our interest in them motivates us to learn about the political and policy, as well as technical aspects of spaceflight. Information we produce contributes to public knowledge. We have long been a valuable source of independent information for journalists and authors of books and papers on intelligence gathering satellites.
Our fairly frequent appearances in the press, whether as sources, or featured subjects, provide opportunities to inspire others to join our hobby. We also contribute to public knowledge through our blogs and technical papers, and these too can inspire others.
Space Weather impacts numerous facets of everyday life, from where airplanes can safely fly, to how accurately a farmer plows his field. In addition, there are a large variety of phenomena that are driven by the variability of the sun over periods ranging from hours to years. SWPC provides information for novices and experts alike about the impacts and phenomena of Space Weather.
For as long as it takes for the current regime to remember this exists and shut it down, anyway.
The periodic table organizes all the known elements by atomic number, which is the number of protons in each atom of the element. This version of the table, which draws on data compiled by astronomer Jennifer Johnson from Ohio State University, shows our current understanding of how each element found on Earth was originally produced. Most of them ultimately have cosmic origins. Some elements were created with the birth of the universe, while others were made during the lives or deaths of stars. The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will help us understand the cosmic era when stars first began forming. The mission will help scientists learn more about how elements were created and distributed throughout galaxies.
astroterm is a terminal-based star map written in C. It displays the real-time positions of stars, planets, constellations, and more, all within your terminal—no telescope required! Configure sky views by date, time, and location with precise ASCII-rendered visuals.
Choose any date, time, and location to explore past, present, or future celestial events. View the moon, stars, and planets with as much precision as terminal graphics allow. Precise lunar phases in real-time. Detailed constellation shapes. Lightweight and fast ASCII rendering.
If you compile it yourself, be sure to download the astronomical data as well. Requires Meson to compile.
When and where can you see the northern and southern lights also known as the aurora? This page provides a prediction of the aurora’s visibility tonight and tomorrow night in the charts below. The animations further down show what the aurora’s been up to over the last 24 hours and estimates what the next 30 minutes will be like. The aurora’s colorful green, red, and purple light shifts gently and often changes shape like softly blowing curtains.
The SuperNova Early Warning System (SNEWS) is a global network of neutrino experiments sensitive to supernova neutrinos. The goal of SNEWS is to provide the astronomical community with a prompt alert of an imminent Galactic core-collapse event. This will allow for complete multi-messenger observations of the supernova across the electromagnetic spectrum, in gravitational waves, and in neutrinos.
The observation of a neutrino burst can thus provide a warning for astronomers that the opportunity to get a rare glimpse at the collapse of a star, resulting in a supernova, may soon be presenting itself. In addition, there is a real chance that a Galactic supernova may be observable with the naked eye, making this alert interesting to hobby astronomers and the general public alike. Most large-scale neutrino detectors around the globe thus joined forces in the SNEWS network to provide a high-sensitivity alert to interested parties. In addition, gravitational wave detectors like LIGO and Virgo have sensitivity to asymmetrically-collapsing supernovae and can both benefit from and contribute to such an alert.
The early supernova alert project has a central computer which accepts neutrino burst candidate messages from neutrino detectors around the world and sends an alert to astronomers if it finds a coincidence within a few seconds.
The EHT is an international collaboration that has formed to continue the steady long-term progress on improving the capability of Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) at short wavelengths in pursuit of this goal. This technique of linking radio dishes across the globe to create an Earth-sized interferometer, has been used to measure the size of the emission regions of the two supermassive black holes with the largest apparent event horizons: SgrA* at the center of the Milky Way and M87 in the center of the Virgo A galaxy. In both cases, the sizes match that of the predicted silhouette caused by the extreme lensing of light by the black hole. Addition of key millimeter and submillimeter wavelength facilities at high altitude sites has now opened the possibility of imaging such features and sensing the dynamic evolution of black hole accretion. The EHT project includes theoretical and simulation studies that are framing questions rooted at the black hole boundary that may soon be answered through observations.
By linking together existing telescopes using novel systems, the EHT leverages considerable global investment to create a fundamentally new instrument with angular resolving power that is the highest possible from the surface of the Earth. Over the coming years, the international EHT team will mount observing campaigns of increasing resolving power and sensitivity, aiming to bring black holes into focus.
CHART stands for Completely Hackable Amateur Radio Telescope. Our goal with this project is to create an easy to navigate system of tutorials that will lead to you in building your own radio telescope from the comfort of your home or classroom. It is very important to us that that radio astronomy is as accessible as possible to whoever is interested, so we strove to keep the creation of this project as cheap as possible. We are excited that you have found our project and wish you the best of luck in the creation of your radio telescope.
Open source powered meteor station. We are currently using the Raspberry Pi 4 as the main development platform, and we use digital IP cameras. The code also works on Linux PCs, and everything but the detection works under Windows. We are slowly phasing out the support for analog cameras, but they should work well regardless. The software is still in the development phase.
The main operational goal of the project is to establish a decentralized science-grade instrument which observes the night sky every night of the year from as many locations around the world as possible.
Providing the meteor community with real-time awareness of the near-Earth meteoroid environment by publishing orbits of all observed meteors from all around the globe every morning.
Observing meteor showers, computing their flux, mass indices and orbits to constrain meteor shower prediction models.
Observing meteorite producing fireballs to increase the number of meteorites with know orbits (only ~50 circa 2021, more info: http://www.meteoriteorbits.info/) and help constrain meteorite source regions.
When the US-based SkyHub organisation regrettably closed down in August 2021, enthusiastic former community members wanted to keep the project and the valuable exchange within the community alive. Therefore, in October 2021, we, a group of European astronomers, software developers and hardware engineers, founded Sky360 as a non-profit NGO association, registered in Austria.
We want to provide a community platform, tools and support to all people interested in observing the skies for stars, meteors, satellites, planes, drones, weather phenomena, birds, UAPs or anything else that happens in our atmosphere and low Earth orbit. We already support the Discord channel the UAP Tracking Forum for the community of UAP trackers with over 900 members and more communities to come in the future. Together with and for the community we develop hardware and software for a 24/7 citizen sky observatory that can detect, track, identify and analyze any aerial phenomena and yet is still affordable for citizens.
Virgo is an easy-to-use open-source spectrometer and radiometer based on Python and GNU Radio (GR) that is conveniently applicable to any radio telescope working with a GR-supported software-defined radio (SDR). In addition to data acquisition, Virgo also carries out automated analysis of the recorded samples, producing an averaged spectrum, a calibrated spectrum, a dynamic spectrum (waterfall), a time series (power vs time) and a total power distribution plot.
Lastly, an important set of utilities is provided to observers, making the package for a great tool for planning (radio) observations, estimating the system sensitivity of an instrument, and many more.
CygnusRFI is an easy-to-use open-source Radio Frequency Interference (RFI) analysis tool, based on Python and GNU Radio Companion (GRC) that is conveniently applicable to any ground station/radio telescope working with a GRC-supported software-defined radio (SDR). In addition to data acquisition, CygnusRFI also carries out automated analysis of the recorded data, producing a series of averaged spectra covering a wide range of frequencies of interest. CygnusRFI is built for ground station operators, radio astronomers, amateur radio operators and anyone who wishes to get an idea of how "radio-quiet" their environment is, using inexpensive instruments like SDRs.
The CLI tool is used to set up scanning runs. Data is graphed as output.
Maybe make a bot out of this?
A point-in-time simulation of the position of the planets in the solar system, based upon date and time. Also calculates the ephemera for the planets at that point in time.