Caoimhín's Content

Astronomical and Educational content, in English and Irish

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  • A Look Ahead to October: Another Supermoon!

    Today we are going to be looking ahead to the night sky for the month of October. As always, my default perspective is from here in Ireland, and because I will be talking about the sky at night from here in Ireland, I won’t be dealing with the annular solar eclipse that is going to

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  • An Spéir ar Oíche Chultúir 2024 / The Sky on Culture Night 2024

    In todays piece we will be looking at the sky for Culture Night. Culture Night is the 20th of September, the day after the day this piece will have gone up on this website. Just in case you are getting to this article a few days later, most of the details presented here will remain

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  • Betelgeuse/Beetlejuice

    Today’s piece is mostly about the star Betelgeuse, however I will start the article the same way I started the video, by mentioning Culture Night. The 20th of September is Culture Night in Ireland, so it is coming up soon. If you are in Ireland, Culture Night puts on a lot of amazing events and

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  • Asteroids and Comets, What makes them Different?

    In today’s piece we are going to talk a little bit about asteroids and a little bit about comets. Firstly however, in the most recent piece I showed off some of the basic features of Stellarium, it was more of a walk through of the different kinds of things that Stellarium can do than an

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  • The Basics of Stellarium and How to Use It

    Today, we are going to have a quick look at Stellarium. Stellarium is the software that I use for these videos, and it’s free. It’s available online and regularly updated. I just updated it, so I am currently using the latest stable version of the software, Stellarium 24.2. You can download it from stellarium.org. The

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  • Pluto, and What is a Planet Anyway

    In today’s piece, although we are going look at the dwarf planet Pluto, this serves mainly as a background to a discussion of the naming conventions around what planets, dwarf planets and asteroids and comets, also known as minor planets. There are different usages of the word planet, but I wish to be upfront here

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  • Opposition: Saturn and Neptune at Their Closest to Us!

    Today we are going to be looking at oppositions, specifically Saturn and Neptune coming to opposition, as they will both do so this month. I have taken a look at Neptune specifically quite recently and only a couple of months ago we took a close look at the planet Saturn as well, so although I

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  • The September Lunar Eclipse and October Solar Eclipse!

    After alluding to these events last time, we are today going to take a look at the upcoming partial lunar and annular solar eclipse. The Partial lunar eclipse will occur in September, but we will look all the way forward into early October to catch the solar eclipse as well. All lunar eclipses happen during

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  • A Look Ahead to September: 6 Planets and a Supermoon!

    As usual, now that we’re coming to the end of the month, we’re going to take a look ahead to the next one. September is going to be a jam packed month, so this overview will skip over some of the details, but I will return to them as they occur. We will begin as

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  • Planetary Nebulae, Nothing to do with Planets!

    Today we will begin by revisiting an object that I have mentioned a few times before, the Ring Nebula in Lyra. The Ring Nebula in Lyra is a fantastic object to try and take a look at, as well as being a fantastic example of a planetary nebula. Medium to large telescopes will give you

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