Skymap - How awesome is this ?

[Khagan1227]

Originally Posted by anjou

Now your talking. Ive also loaded a moon phase app and tonight its a waxing crescent, the first after last nights new moon

True geek after my heart, I have both those apps on my phone as well.

Now I'm trying to figure out how to strap the phone to a sextant for those cloudy nights...

[Cormorant]

Thanks fourwinds and Rebel Heart for the recommendation of Stellarium. I've got that on my Windows laptop now. Very cool program with a lot of detail and settings options.

One other astronomical app I like is Astroid on my Android phone (free). It tells the times for sunrise and sunset, moonrise and moonset, azimuth for same, noon altitudes, moon phase, and rise and set times for all the planets.

This time of year I love to watch one of its other features -- it tells how much longer the sun is up compared to the shortest day of the year, and how much shorter today is than the longest day of the year. Here in upstate NY, daylight is 1 hour 54 minutes longer than it was at the solstice in December. And at the summer solstice the daylight will be 4 hours and 15 minutes longer than today -- which really lights up my dreams of summer sailing.

[stevensuf]

played with that skymap on an android tablet last year ,while camping on the isle of gigha off western scotland, we had a great clear night, miles away from background lights, it was truly great

[SaucySailoress]

Originally Posted by anjou

Its clouded over tonight and I cant see a single star

Still in the UK, then?

[anjou]

Originally Posted by Khagan1227

Now I'm trying to figure out how to strap the phone to a sextant for those cloudy nights...

I like your style

Ive just had a thought, why not take sightings off the internet and then work out your position. All those sats wont be wrong so it has to be more accurate than taking a real sighting.

[anjou]

Originally Posted by belizesailor

Geez, why do people continue to buy into that stuff. The Mayans made no, nada, predictions about 2012. It is only the end of a long-count period -- like the odometer rolling over. Just a bunch of foolishness like 2000 ... remember that Big Event?

Although there are some very interesting processional alignments that occur on that date.

Suggested reading: "The Order of Days..." by David Stuart.

Hey, I take my conspiracy theories VERY seriously. On the law of averages, one cannot afford to be complacent, **** realy does happen, and this time it could be us.

I figger im gonna start stockpiling supplies soon, ahead of the rush, before the prices start going up and the panic buyers kick into action.

[anjou]

Yeah Saucy, im still in Blighty, along with the terrorists we cant deport, but, im taking the proactive approach and being positive about it, .....you always got to look on the bright side and I figger that its better to have them in the tent with ya, pissing out, than on the outside pissing in.

[mrlassiter]

"**** realy does happen... " (anjou)


I'm sooo using that line!

-mrlassiter

"its better to have them in the tent with ya, pissing out, than on the outside pissing in."

...and that one too!

[anjou]

Ive just downloaded Stellarium on the lapdog and im turning into a star struck Nerd.
'Awsome' cannot begin to describe all this stuff.

Where has it been all my life? Of course, its always been up there, always was and always will be, worlds come and worlds go, yet the worlds still turn.

Ive fallen in love with Prof Brian Cox, to me, hes the first guy whos made sense of this since the late great Carl Sagan went to the big galaxy in the sky.
But one thing is bugging me, its a constant question which no one mentions.
They all focus on the big bang and events since but I want to know what there was before the big bang, and im not talking just a few weeks before.

Popularists say the BB was the start of it,, but we also know time has been running since before time began, so there had to be stuff happening before the BB, and not just in our neck of the woods, cos once again, we know there is no end to space, its not like theres a brick wall at the end of it, with another place beyond, this space thingy just keeps on going and going..........like it says in the lords prayer, ......'World without end, ...Amen'

So my space nerdy friends, the question is punk, how big is space and what else is out there?
Dont google it cos I have a feeling thats one answer they dont have.

[stevensuf]

my take is that it runs round in circles, big bang - expands, expansion stops, shrinking starts as black holes eat it all up till their is only one black hole left then it explodes out again.

[mrlassiter]

Aaawwright, I'll give it a shot.

It started with an accidental touching of two planar universes (imagine two waving flags on adjacent flagpoles flapping in the wind and they touch each other... This contact results in an immense release of energy...) THIS universe being the resultant release of energy from the contact of the two OTHER universes(energy=matter). Admittedly, THEY don't yet have a WHERE the other two universes came from theory,.... but the multiverse theory gets us here. Supposedly, there are precisely 11 (9?)dimensions that account for the multiverses that have arisen through like processes since the true beginning of time, which is, who the hell knows how much further back than the mere blink of an eye that THIS universe has managed to have been born and raised itself up in.

The preceding satisfies me, don't really care how screwed up or myopic my take on it is.


-mrlassiter...

[mrlassiter]

Put more succinctly, and to quote you, Anjou,... "**** really does happen!"

-mrlasster

[Khagan1227]

Originally Posted by anjou

Ive just downloaded Stellarium on the lapdog and im turning into a star struck Nerd.
'Awsome' cannot begin to describe all this stuff.

Where has it been all my life? Of course, its always been up there, always was and always will be, worlds come and worlds go, yet the worlds still turn.

Ive fallen in love with Prof Brian Cox, to me, hes the first guy whos made sense of this since the late great Carl Sagan went to the big galaxy in the sky.
But one thing is bugging me, its a constant question which no one mentions.
They all focus on the big bang and events since but I want to know what there was before the big bang, and im not talking just a few weeks before.

Popularists say the BB was the start of it,, but we also know time has been running since before time began, so there had to be stuff happening before the BB, and not just in our neck of the woods, cos once again, we know there is no end to space, its not like theres a brick wall at the end of it, with another place beyond, this space thingy just keeps on going and going..........like it says in the lords prayer, ......'World without end, ...Amen'

So my space nerdy friends, the question is punk, how big is space and what else is out there?
Dont google it cos I have a feeling thats one answer they dont have.

Simple really, before the big bang was the big sky rocket in a different (and larger) universe. This explains why the universe is constantly expanding and why the (ours not theirs) universe will some day go dark.
I've often wondered (usually after a but of rum) if there are galaxies, stars and the like on the other side of the big bang. After all wouldn't some of the explosion gone in the opposite direction?

[four winds]

I've been an avid star gazer since my teen years. Read everything I could find on the subject, including the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Astronomy. Which I read from cover to cover like a novel and was surprised to find I actually understood what it had to say.

Of course this was back when there were only three subatomic particles compared to the hundreds or thousands known today. But what hooked me was when I realized some of the pin-pricks of light in the night sky were actually other galaxies, full of millions of stars like our milky way. This expanded my understanding of the vastness of space and humbled me beyond any ability to express it with words.

Once told my wise old grandmother who had a sixth grade education that the stars were actually other suns, while we were hoeing in the garden. She stopped weeding and said, "Well, they must be really far away". I said, "Yes ma'am, they are".



I believe it was Hubble who first noted the universe was expanding by observation of the red shift of distant galaxies. I think this accelerated the the efforts to reverse time and try to understand the early universe, down to the instant of the Big Bang. I think we are down to the first few trillionths of a second in being able to "apply mathematics" to this understanding. Not sure we'll ever get there until we learn to apply a little "supernatural math" to the equation. My apologies to the empiricists among us.

At any rate, since the 70's I have believed that the speed of light is not a constant. And that there is a galactic constant that we experience in our galaxy, outside of which the speed increases exponentially between galaxies only to be slowed to the galactic constant of that galaxy.

The only reason we apply constants to things is the need to simplify the math to a point where the calculations can actually be done. The common idea that the laws of physics apply universally is flawed.

Now it has come to the point that we understand that gravity effects the speed of light, referred to as the gravitational lens effect. So were just a stones throw from a common understanding that light speed is not a constant and that it is unknowingly faster outside of galactic gravitational fields.

In thinking about how we understand the age of the universe based on the speed of light and its relation to the red shift of galaxies, one can come to realize the universe is not nearly as old as we "think" once these things become better understood.

Recently, we have come to realize the expansion of the universe is actually still accelerating. We are getting better and better at observation of the universe around us. But think about that, still accelerating. That suggests we are still in the early stage of the explosion of matter from the theoretical "point of origin" of no dimension yet containing all the mass of the universe.

And despite the new ideas of "dark matter", which suggests the galaxy has much more mass than previously believed the universe still appears to be accelerating its expansion. All of this supports the idea that light is not a constant and the universe is much younger than we commonly believe.

Crap, I'm rambling and forgot what the question was.

But yeah, I like the star programs.

[TeddyDiver]

Downloaded skymap in the morning.. Now it's dark and time to go out to make some astronomy