Home > Events, Observing, Planets > Worlds in Collusion

Worlds in Collusion

July 26, 2010

There’s is a planet grouping that will happen starting this weekend.  Look west, young astronomer.  Mars will pass Saturn on Sunday August 1st.  Venus will in turn pass Saturn on the 9th.  And finally Venus will catch up to speedy Mars on the 23rd.  Through this, keep an eye on Venus.  The first event will take place just left of Venus.

Of course these planets aren’t gathering at all.  Venus is closer than the sun, Mars farther than the sun, and Saturn nearly a billion miles from us.  They’re just kinda lining up with the earth at one end.

Categories: Events, Observing, Planets
  1. Erasmussimo's avatar
    Erasmussimo
    July 31, 2010 at 2:51 pm

    Sorry to gum up your blog comments with what should be an email, but I couldn’t find a contact address here. This will be one of the better years for Perseids; the moon, which often interferes with the Perseids, will not be a problem this year. So I’m putting together something that’s never been done before: a spatial analysis of the Perseid meteor stream. We’ve had plenty of temporal analyses, but nobody has ever been able to get data over a wide area — because observations have always been localized to single observers. But what if we had hundreds or thousands of people all over North America and Europe observing Perseids and somebody collected and collated all their observations? This is crowd-sourcing applied to meteor astronomy. I’ve been working for some time on putting together just such a scheme. I’ve got a cute little Java applet that you can use on your laptop to record the times of fall of meteors you see, the spherical trig for analyzing the geometry (oh my aching head!) and a statistical scheme that I *think* will reveal the spatial patterns we’re most likely to see — IF such patterns exist. I’ve also got some web pages describing the whole shebang. They start here:

    http://www.erasmatazz.com/page78/page128/PerseidProject/PerseidProject.html

    I think I’ve gotten all the technical, scientific, and mathematical problems solved, but there remains the big one: publicizing it. It won’t work unless I get hundreds of observers. That’s where you come in. I’m asking two things of you:

    1. Any advice, criticism, or commentary on the project as presented in the web pages.
    2. Publicizing it. If we can get that ol’ Web Magic going, we could get thousands of observers and end up with something truly remarkable. So, would you be willing to blog about this project on your blog?

    Thanks for any help you can find time to offer.

    Chris Crawford

  1. No trackbacks yet.
Comments are closed.