July 2020 in the sky – Star Safari
What’s in the night sky in July 2020. Listen to our podcast covering both hemispheres with Sam, Hari and Peter.
What’s in the night sky in July 2020. Listen to our podcast covering both hemispheres with Sam, Hari and Peter.
We get asked many times what do we see when we look through our telescopes?
Prepare your telescopes, we have two amazing planets to observe. If you don’t have telescopes, join us at Space Place at Carter Observatory where we
Once you get to know your way around the sky and spend a lot of time under the stars you can start seeing amazing things.
Observing the transit of Venus was no easy task, it required careful observations and measurement. 250 years ago expeditions went out across the world to measure this amazing and rare event in order to help us understand the size of the known universe.
Riding on Elon Musk’s muscle power earthlings are preparing to invade the Moon again. There they will find that some of its craters have been renamed to honour the Apollo 8 mission, the first to orbit our natural satellite 50 years ago. Venus is hailed by the Parker Solar probe that swings by it, Jupiter’s Moon Europa has 15 meters ice spikes on the surface and Saturn’s rings are not just water nor all the lost airline luggage. Mars has to resign to the idea that earthlings have figured out how to grow plants on it. Not even perchlorates can stop them. And last but not least, New Horizons is unstoppable going towards Ultima Thule.
When observing the planets in astronomy it can be quite surprising to see the different sizes that appear in the eyepiece and how this can change over time.
We had a great time showing heaps of students Jupiter and Saturn during a talk about Matariki at Government House.
Now that your telescope is all ready, take it outside and start viewing the night sky.
New Horizons will make its next encounter on 1 January next year as it approaches the Kuiper Belt Object Ultima Thule, formerly known as 2014 MU69.
NASA launched Juno to look at Jupiter in 2011 and since 2016 it has been sending back fantastic images of the Solar System’s biggest planet.
Space exploration drives a lot of technological development that has spinoffs for Earth-bound applications.
It looks like NASA is going to get a good amount of funding in a bill set to fly through the US Congress and Senate. This is great news for programmes such as Europa Clipper that have dependencies on the SLS programme.
SpaceX is well advanced in it’s plans to build a huge rocket to take humans to Mars and they plan to do this by 2024. This article has a closer look at the Big Falcon Rocket to see what’s so special about it.
With all the talk of going back to the moon, we thought it’d be good to recap on who is doing what in the coming years about returning to the Moon.
Where are the satellites? We hear a lot about GPS, Hubble, the ISS and a load of other satellites, but not often where they are or much about how they got there, or how they stay there.
A great reason to look up at the night sky is that you might see a supernova like the the one that Albert Jones spotted in 1987.
Milky-Way.Kiwi is a social enterprise for quality and affordable access to the night sky run by professional space science communicators. We provide educational services for teachers and schools – Spaceward Bound NZ, stargazing and astronomy and space courses and programmes for the public – Star Safari and we write about space and astronomy with a New Zealand perspective.
At Star Safari, everyone 15 and younger is FREE because we believe that young people should not pay for inspiration.
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