This will show you an oblique view of the inner planets, Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars, surrounded by the asteroid belt. Under the Favourites menu, choose Solar System:Inner Planets:Inner SolarSystem using the hierarchical menu system. Starry Night® comes with a number of "Favourites": preset views of the universe that we can use to explore things on our own. This enables us to visualize the orbits and movements of solar system objects in many unique ways. Starry Night® provides the unique opportunity to view our solar system from outside, and to navigate around it in three dimensions. Since most people are less familiar with the first use of Starry Night®, I’ll spend more time on that. Secondly, you can follow its actual movements in the sky. ![]() First of all, you can track the comet as it wends its way through the solar system. Starry Night® provides two quite different ways of looking at a comet like Lulin. Here is a view of Comet Lulin as it passed 47 Librae, captured by Canadian astronomer Paul Mortfield on January 8 using his remote telescope in Arizona:Īll of this information (except for the history of its discovery), plus a whole lot more, is available to anyone using Starry Night® software. On that date, it will be less than three degrees away from the planet Saturn, making for a remarkable sight. It will be closest to Earth on February 24, when it will be just visible to the naked eye in a really dark sky, but an easy object in a small binocular. ![]() By the time it reaches its prime observing period in February this year, it will be speeding through Libra, Virgo, and Leo. It was closest to the Sun on January 10, but still far from Earth, 1.6 astronomical units away. This is a remarkable example of cooperation between scientists of two countries usually thought to be at odds with each other.Īt the time of its discovery in July 2007, Comet Lulin was located between the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn in the constellation Aquarius. It was originally spotted in China, and its position reported to Lulin Observatory where it was imaged and its orbit calculated. Steve Umland goes "old school" for star trails.Ĭomet Lulin (C2007 N3) was discovered in 2007 by a team of Chinese and Taiwanese astronomers centered around Lulin Observatory in Taiwan. Your tour starts with the brightest (double) star in the night sky. This month he writes about another popular telescope design, the Maksutov-Cassegrain. ![]() Last month Geoff Gaherty wrote about refractors. This month Brenda Shaw continues with her series of educational articles on angles and the coordinate systems. When Galileo first turned his homemade spyglass on the heavens, the world changed forever. Two new educational products coming this year.
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