Month: February 2016

Shout-out to all the Astronomy Ladies

Posted on by Alex Pratte

In a lot of professions today it seems like the ladies are under appreciated, so for my fourth blog I thought it would be nice to give some credit to a couple of smart lady astronomers that paved the way for women in the sciences. As I learned in a really cool BBC article that can be found here, two of those women are Fiametta Wilson and Grace Cook. During WWI, while all the guys where off shooting each other, these two women were observing shooting stars and making sure all the records on meteors were kept up to date. These two were among the first four women to be awarded fellowship of The Royal Astronomical Society which was a huge milestone for women and science (way to go). According to a Dr. Mandy Baily, “in the years between 1910 and 1920 Wilson observed somewhere in the region of 10,000 meteors and accurately calculated the paths of about 650 of them – no small achievement!”(BBC). She also did all of this while bombs were being dropped everywhere and on one occasion had a bunch of falling shrapnel almost hit her (but she still finished her research).

This just goes to show that women are just as capable as men when it comes to observing and calculating the path of meteors. Take that misogynists. Also important to note that the picture below is not just a bunch of random women in front of books. These are the leading women in UK astronomy today.

88207621_raswomenmosaic

Using the Stars to Navigate

Posted on by Alex Pratte

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For my third blog, I came across a mental floss article giving some helpful tips on how to navigate at night by looking at the stars. As we all know people have been using the stars to navigate from place to place for really long time, so it seems like something pretty handy to know. Here are a couple of the tips noted in the article:

  • If your trying to find the North Star what you need to look out for are Cassiopeia and the Big Dipper. Once you find the big dipper, what you want to do is “look at the Dipper’s ladle and pretend you’re pouring soup from it. The flow of the space soup will point you straight to the North Star” (Mentalfloss).
  • Below the equator the North Star is not visible, so if you find yourself in Australia or something you’re going to want to find the constellation Crux. Crux is supposed to look like a kite and the trick is “if you draw a line from the top of the kite to the bottom, it will point you south” (Mentalfloss).

So there you go. If you want to read about some more cool tips on celestial navigation you can find the link here

Link to Picture here

 

 

 

 

 

 

Creative Title For HW6

Posted on by Alex Pratte

In 1609 Galileo, improved on the current design of the telescope and used it to make many astronomical discoveries including sunspots, the phases of Venus, and the four largest moons of Jupiter. He was also a supporter of the Copernican theory that the earth revolved around the sun. This eventually led to him to being imprisoned by the church for life. Source

1636- Harvard was founded. Harvard is one of the oldest and most prestigious Universities in America, so yeah that was big.

1608- The French founded Quebec. Quebec is one of the biggest cities in Canada.

Source2

Shakespeare: 1564-1616

Shakespeare is considered by many to be the greatest play writer person in the English language. Some of his most famous works are: Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream etc. Source3

I thought it was really interesting how Brahe, Kepler and Galileo were all alive at the same time. Astronomy must have advanced so much during that one generation. While researching Galileo, it made me pretty sad when I read that he was imprisoned for life for saying the earth revolved around the sun. I find it hard to comprehend why the Church would even be mad for someone thinking that. It doesn’t seem like an issue that would contradict Christianity, but the Church obviously disagreed with me. Poor Galileo.