Tag: planets
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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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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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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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The Occultation of Saturn: Saturn and the Moon Align in August
Today we are going to look ahead just a little, to the 20th of August. As usual, we begin at sunset, so we will begin on the 20th. For those of us here in Ireland, we will be waiting until the morning of the 21st to catch the occultation of Saturn by the Moon. The…
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Neptune: The Most Distant Planet in the Solar System
After taking a c loser look at all the other planets, we are finally moving on to Neptune. Previously, we took a look at the dwarf planets as a group and some other minor bodies. Once we’ve dealt with Neptune, I will move on to taking a closer look at those distant objects, as well…
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Dwarf Planets and other Small Distant Objects
In today’s piece we are going to be taking a look at a different class of objects, the dwarf planets. Almost every month I briefly highlight a given planet, you can go back through the archives if you’d like to see some examples. Later this month we will be talking about Neptune, so I will…
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Venus in the Evening at Different Latitudes
I’ve mentioned the planets quite a lot recently, and with good reason. Over the course of the month of August, particularly in the morning, there are going to be a lot of planets in the sky. Even early in the month we have Jupiter, Mars and Saturn all together in the sky. If you caught…
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