In a previous post I talked about the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), a large telescope being built in Chile which will spend 90% of its time surveying most of the sky a total of 1000 times over a 10 year period (in the remaining 10% it will revisit areas of specific interest). In this… Continue reading Surveying the Cosmos – Part II
Tag: Milky Way
Dark Sky Places
In this post I will talk about the work of the International Dark-Sky Association (https://www.darksky.org/)and the visit I made a few years ago to the Kielder Observatory, which is in the Northumberland Dark Sky park in northern England. The International Dark-Sky Association (IDA) was founded in 1988 by David Crawford a professional astronomer, who spent… Continue reading Dark Sky Places
Galileo and the telescope
Revised 18 September 2022 Telescopes are instruments which use multiple lenses to produce magnified images of distant objects. It is unclear who invented the first telescope: lenses had been widely used in Europe to correct poor eyesight since the fourteenth century and I expect that, over time, the telescope was actually invented many times by… Continue reading Galileo and the telescope
Dark Skies.
"All humans, everywhere in the world and throughout history, have looked up at the sky and wondered at it. This experience is now denied to most people, because of the background light in towns and cities. It is important to ensure that there will be somewhere in England where young people can fully enjoy a cosmic… Continue reading Dark Skies.
A Brief History of the Universe.
This post covers a brief history of the Universe from the Big Bang until the the present day. This, as I am sure you'll agree, is a pretty big topic so I'll only give a outline of some of the key events and when we believed they happened. This post in my series about cosmology,… Continue reading A Brief History of the Universe.
Explaining Science 