Limerick Astronomy Club

A Europe-wide education event will link the International Space Station with hundreds of schoolstudents in four European cities. In a live link-up with the International Space Station, scheduled for 21 September, ESA astronaut Frank De Winne will perform a simple experiment in space to demonstrate t...

Sorry can't make it - wheels in sick bay since Tuesday expected to be discharged on Wed next.

Simon

Great astronomers: Johannes Kepler (Article174) Johannes Kepler was a seventeenth century mathematician who laid the theoretical foundations for planetary motion. When Kepler was born near Stuttgart in 1571, the Earth was still considered the centre of the universe. Copernicus’s theory that the Sun ...

Apollo Missions: Apollo 1 (Article 173) Welcome to this, the first in a short series of articles on the Apollo space missions. NASA celebrated its 50th Anniversary on 1st October 2008. In those 50 years, NASA has spent 700 Billion Dollars on the entire Space Programme. That is the same amount of mon...

Dave,
I should be available for the 7 March and 4 & 5 April.

Simon

Stellar Evolution (Article118) Now and again, strange things happen in the sky. Over time these strange happenings were observed and noted down by astronomers and writers. Star-like objects suddenly appeared in the sky, got brighter until some of them could be seen in daylight and then slowly faded ...

Romance in the stars (Article 117) Since the dawn of civilization, the ways of love have been so important, yet so unpredictable, that every method from the pedestrian to the bizarre has been employed to confirm our hopes or dispel our fears in the tangled and uncertain minefield of romantic affairs...

Newgrange -- The cycles of change (Article 116) People have always recognised the importance of predicting the cycle of events in the heavens that shaped their lives. From time immemorial, the daily cycle of the Sun, the yearly cycle of the seasons and the monthly phases of the Moon were an intimate...

Mars revealed (Article 115) Mars has fascinated earthlings more than any other planet. The fascination increased when telescope studies began in the 17th Century and Mars was thought capable of supporting life. Much of the evidence, taken from fairly primitive instruments, was ambiguous, but this on...

December Night Sky (Article 114) During December in the northern hemisphere, the nights are at their longest. Looking north the constellation Perseus is almost overhead, with the bright star Capella and its fellow stars of Auriga to its right. Gemini lies further east. The handle of the Plough point...

Star colours (Article 113) We know that stars are made of many of the same chemical elements found on Earth. We can measure their size, mass and temperature and have some understanding of their internal structures. We also know that they come in a range of beautiful colours and that there is a relat...

Comet Holmes surprises (Article 112) On October 24th last, amateur astronomers noticed something odd in the night sky. A new ‘star’ suddenly appeared in the constellation of Perseus triggering an unprecedented flurry of excitement in the astronomy community as reports arrived from observers all over...

Celestial North (Article 111) The stars seem fixed in relation to one another, yet they never stop moving. They orbit around our Galaxy, but because of Earth’s rotation the celestial vault changes in appearance from one hour to the next. To find your bearings when looking for stars and other objects...

Little Green Men (Article 110) A casual observer may not know what it is, but Mars’ distinctive reddish-brown glow in the night sky, especially when it is closest to us, is hard to miss. Mars regular appearances have been recorded from the earliest times. The Babylonians, about 400 BC, called it Ner...

November night sky (Article 109) Sometimes the interesting things in the night sky are at inconvenient times. For November we suggest one very attractive object called The Pleiades (pronounced ‘Plydayz’) requiring nothing but your own ‘peepers’ to observe and is on view at a most reasonable time. Kn...