Australian Sky & Telescope

A TOTAL ECLIPSE OF THE SUN, which occurs when the Moon passes in front of it as seen from the Earth, is a very special event. Enthusiasts will travel thousands of kilometres to observe one. The spectacle is enhanced by the effect known as Baily’s Bea

ASTRONOMERS HAVE DISCOVERED a collection of young stars in a surprising location: the Milky Way’s halo. Adrian Price-Whelan (Flatiron Institute) discovered the stars while digging through data collected by the European Gaia mission. The newfound star

CARL HERGENROTHER’S BRAIN was fried. He’d been awake all night, writing up results for a morning presentation at the science team meeting for NASA’s OSIRIS-REX mission, which had arrived at asteroid 101955 Bennu just a month prior. Running on maybe h

Stars form when large molecular clouds of gas and dust in interstellar space collapse under their own gravity. These large clouds contain many particles that move in random ways. But they will always have an overall ‘spin’ to their collective motion,

IT’S NOT THE LARGEST TELESCOPE in the world. It’s not at the best possible site. And it can only look straight up, towards the zenith. But at just over US$2 million, the nearly completed 4-metre International Liquid Mirror Telescope (ILMT) in norther

THE QUESTION OF HOW PLANETARY systems form, and how those processes relate to what we see in our own Solar System, is one of the most fundamental problems in astrophysics and a key piece in the puzzle of figuring out our place in the universe. With t

IN 1969, JOHN DOBSON sent an article query to Charles Federer, founder and editor of the US edition of this magazine. Dobson had come up with a new way to build large-aperture telescopes cheaply and effectively. But Federer famously rejected Dobson’s

Something that concerns me as an observer is just how much sky I haven’t looked at carefully yet. There are so many wonderful things to see in the deep south, it’s sometimes hard to know where to start. Plus there’s the temptation to keep revisiting

ESA/HUBBLE & NASA, D. ROSARIO (CEA, DURHAM UNIVERSITY) ■

If you look to the west at sunset in early May, you’ll see Venus — the Roman goddess of love — very low on the horizon. Already gone from our autumn skies are summertime star cluster favourites the Pleiades (the Seven Sisters of Greek mythology) and

In our April issue we looked at Betelgeuse, the nearest red supergiant star and a core-collapse supernova candidate. This month we’ll introduce T Coronae Borealis, an expected candidate of a different type of supernova — the thermonuclear, or Type 1

Late autumn and early winter this year will bring two ‘dark horse’ comets of interest to southern observers. Details of the discovery and early history of the first of these, C/2019 Y4 (ATLAS), were given in our April issue, where the relationship be

This year’s favourable apparition of Mars presents an excellent opportunity to witness the development of a transient but recurring Martian feature known as the Mountains of Mitchel, discovered 175 years ago by the founder of the first major observat

If beauty is symmetry laced with mystery, then a discovery by a young doctoral student back in 1950 could be one of the most beautiful ever. His discovery has inspired not only generations of professional astronomers but has also intrigued amateurs d

TOTAL SOLAR ECLIPSES, as seen from the Earth, occur because the ratio of the real diameters (400.6) and the average centre-to-centre distances from the Earth (389.2) of the Sun and Moon compensate for each other almost exactly. In other words, the Su

IT WASN’T THAT LONG AGO that photography went through the major transition from chemical film-based emulsion to digital cameras. I remember well an editor of a computer magazine who would regularly pontificate about how ridiculous it was that anyone

US price: $1,799 US price: $2,499 usa.canon.com Excellent red sensitivity in the Ra model 30× magnification for precise focusing Excellent battery life Lacks dark frame buffer No built-in intervalometer 4K movies are cropped 1.8× IT SEEMS THAT EVERY

As this issue was going to press at the end of March, the coronavirus crisis was hitting the conference and function sectors hard, with events being cancelled or postponed left, right and centre. Unfortunately this includes the National Australian Co

Stephen Kerr has been a leading light in occultation observing for many years, and in February 2015 was appointed Director of the Royal Astronomical Society of New Zealand’s Occultation Section. What got you into astronomy? A Patrick Moore book almo

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