Caoimhín's Content

Astronomical and Educational content, in English and Irish

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  • December’s Morning Mercury: The Smallest Planet’s Greatest Elongations

    Today, we are going to be looking at the planet Mercury. We’re going to start just a couple of days ago, when Mercury was at its greatest elongation. We’re coming back to sunrise on the 7th of December, when Mercury reached its greatest elongation. Thankfully, it will be close to this greatest elongation for a…

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  • Classes of Stars: Spectral Classification

    Today we are going to talk about stars, as we often do, but we’re going to talk about a way that stars are classified. Stars can be classified in various different ways, but one of the easier ways, one of the more immediate ways to classify stars, is by their color. Taking a look at…

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  • Winter Stargazing: Stars and Constellations

    Today we are going to take a look at the winter night sky very generally. We’ll start just around sunset in early December, but we’ll go through the night and across a few months around midwinter. As we’re going to be taking a general look at the night sky, we’re going to ignore the planets…

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  • December Night Sky: Occultations, Elongation and More!

    Today, we are taking a look just a few days into the future and further ahead into the coming month of December. To start with, the Sun is nice and low in the sky here in Ireland once we get just to the first of December. The time of sunrise for the 1st is just…

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  • The Geminids and 3200 Phaethon: December Meteor Shower

    Today we are going to be looking at a meteor shower that is coming up in the month of December. Taking a look at the sky for mid-December, just coming up to 8 o’clock Gemini is already in the sky. We’re looking for the Geminids, the Geminid Meteor Shower and the radiant is up in…

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  • Comets and Meteor Showers: The Leonids and 55P/Tempel-Tuttle

    Today we are going to begin by looking back to the Leonid meteor shower which happened, which peaked just a couple of days ago. To see the radiant of this meteor shower nice and high, we need the constellation Leo to be up, which it is now at about 3 o’clock in the morning. With…

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  • Latitude and the Celestial Pole: North and South

    Today, we are going to take a quick look at how you can figure out, and the limitations to figuring out, roughly where you are using the sky. Of course, we’re mostly going to be looking at the nighttime sky, so we will move into nighttime as usual, with a view from Ireland and some…

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  • Looking back: Halley’s Comet in 1986 and Comet Encke

    Today, we are going to hop into the past, but we’re not going to go particularly distantly into the past. Going into the past isn’t something that I regularly do on this channel, but it is something that we have done before and I may do more regularly, there are some interesting things that have…

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  • An Eclipse from the Earth, Sun, and Moon: 2186 Eclipse!

    Today, we are yet again heading far into the future to take a look at an event that won’t be occurring for hundreds of years. We are looking all the way forward to 2186 and we’re going to be looking for the 16th of July. Starting as normal, from Ireland and during the day, it…

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  • Comet 3I/ATLAS: How Close will it Get? Plus other Comets!

    Today, we are going to have a quick review of a couple of the major comets that have come through our sky in the past couple of months and will continue through our sky in a few months to come. We’re also going to take a look at one of those comets, 3I/ATLAS, from a…

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