Society for Popular Astronomy

Mars and Uranus are still close and just two degrees apart and not far from the Moon tonight in the South. See today's www.spaceweather.com .

It's an absolute deluge in Lancs today. All in all, it wouldn't be surprising if the last twelve months have been the wettest in the North West since records began. There have been so many dreary "twilight" days and the sullen faces that they generate. They seem to get it much better in th...

The Guardian might have meant that, regardless of direction, the weather would be the equivalent of the Beast from the East - severe cold and heavy snowfall.

I'm sure you'll agree Cliff that the British weather puts many people off stargazing. Probably, there are quite a few more people who find indoor astronomy more interesting. I refer to TV and radio science programmes. Over the years there have been, for example, some excellent HORIZON programmes on ...

A friend and myself saw Uranus without optical aid in the early '60's and from inside the town. The planet wasn't difficult to see. Mind you, we were young then with better vision, and light pollution was nothing like it is now. Previous to the unaided sighting, we'd been observing Uranus in a homem...

The Saturn rockets, as we know, were enormous, but, do moon rockets still need to be big?The ISS ( International Space Station ) was assembled in Earth-orbit from modules. Why not do the same for moon rockets? Instead of launching enormous one-off, fuel-greedy, rockets, the modular parts for moon ta...

What everybody would like to know Jeff, is when did you drop those binoculars?

Very nice Cliff. The rose-tinted twilight horizon is an added feature that complements the comet.
The best thing I'll be getting this year is the Covid jab tomorrow.

I have the Helios, Voyager, zoom 10X-25X42mm monocular. It's very good for general purpose and astronomy. It also functions as a microscope with its minimum focal distance of 25 inches. The Voyager can be attached to a grip or tripod. It's good to see insects, especially butterflies, in intricate de...

The man who uttered that was Pascal in 1833 or thereabouts. Ironically, it was at the same time that Fraunhofer was making his first solar observations.

When the book was published, it was a Newtonian universe, the galaxies were regarded as clouds of gas in our galaxy, and the Sun was burning like a piece of coal, not nuclear, etc. The author would have been astonished to know what astrophysics has revealed about the Universe since then.

I've checked in Webster's Stella and they use the same "Aerial" as in the English dictionary. As you know, some Americanisms are spelt differently. Yes, I know what an Ariel is here.

Ariel might be the American ( Webster's ) spelling. In the "Tempest", Ariel is a spirit of the air.

The US Congress has ordered the intelligence agencies to reveal all that they know about UFO activities. Congress's directive has given less than 180 days for the Office of Naval Intelligence the Unidentified Ariel Phenomena Task Force and the FBI to give detailed analyses of UFO data that they hold...

If it's any consolation Brian, whatever Nature throws at us, she's equipped us with a brain that, given enough time and resources, can solve or, at least, moderate these problems.