The Rambling Astronomer

When we see eta Aquarid meteors we are seeing remnants of one of the most famous comets. This is Halley's Comet. Sadly for observers in Britain people living in the southern hemisphere get a better display than we do.

The first meteor shower of spring time. The Lyrids can be seen in April and although not the most spectacular shower, it can sometimes surprise astronomers with he number of meteors that can be seen.

The first meteor shower of the calendar year. The Quadrantids is the only meteor shower named after a now defunct constellation. The Mural quadrant

The moons of the farthest known planet contains one, called Triton which appears to be a captured object orbiting Neptune .

Uranus was discovered in 1781 by William Herschel, its the only planet not to have its moons named after characters from Greek mythology, instead they are named from characters in English literature.

The famous ringed planet planet with, its largest moon Titan, the second largest moon in the solar system. Titan is the only place other than the Earth where liquid can be found. On Titan it is methane rather than water.

The 4 Galilean or largest moons of Jupiter were discovered by Galileo when he first used his telescope to look at the night sky in the in the winter of 1609/1610. One of them Ganymede is the largest moon in the solar system and is even bigger than the planet Mercury.

The two small moons of Mars, which were discovered in 1877, they are probably captured asteroids, this is their interesting story.

The Moon its our nearest neighbour in space and the only place apart from the Earth where people have walked upon. This is the Moon's 4.5 billion year story.

If you explore the night sky using a star atlas such as Sky Atlas 2000 don't be surprised if you come across some strange results when looking at stars that are and are not given Flamsteed numbers.

T Coronae Borealis is also know as the Blaze Star, its a nova which erupted on May 12th 1866 eventually reaching magnitude 2.2 it then took only 8 days to fade below naked eye visibility. The star then stunned astronomers when on February 1946 T CrB went novae again reaching magnitude 3.0. It is what astronomers call a recurrent nova.

September 10th 1784 was a night to remember in the city of York because Beta Lyrae was found to be variable by the deaf astronomer John Goodricke who was observing from the Treasurer’s House in the city. It was the same night that Edward Pigott also observing from the city of York on that same night discovered that eta Aquila was also a variable star. When I was Curator of Astronomy at the Yorkshi...

Rho was first described as a variable star in 1901 when until 1946 it varied in brightness between 4.1 to 4.5 then unexpectedly in that year it faded to magnitude 6.0 it then returned to about magnitude 4.5. The same thing happened in 2000 and 2001. Checking back even further the same thing was recorded in 1893. There appears to be a cycle of events every 50 or so years. So what is going on here?

Eta is among the most distant stars that we can see with the naked eye. It lies at a distance of around 7,500 light years. There is evidence to suggest that a 4th magnitude star located in the position of eta was recorded by the Dutch astronomer Pieter Keyser. In 1603 Johann Bayer who labelled the 24 brightest stars in each constellation with a Greek letter labelled this star as eta Argus. We must...

One of the most famous and most interesting stars in the sky. It is ranked as the 10th brightest star in the sky, but although being labelled as alpha it is usually slightly below beta or Rigel in brightness. It is a variable star normally varying between 0.3 to 0.8, its a semi regular variable star with a variable period of between 400- 1,000 days. However during during 2019 and 2020 it became mu...

Most variable stars are faint and either difficult to see with the naked eye or with binoculars and requires telescopes to see those stars. However one notable exception to this idea is gamma Cassiopeia. The star does not have a recognised name and is simply referred to by its Greek letter notation.

I have mentioned in the past couple of podcasts how important the Goodricke and Pigott era for variable star astronomy was. After Goodricke’s death Pigott was distraught and moved from York to the city of bath. But he did not give up his astronomy work. In 1795 while observing the small constellation of Corona Borealis he discovered yet another new class of variable star. This would be the prototy...

Possibly the most famous and arguably one of the most important of all the types of variable stars are the Cepheids. The first to be discovered, delta Cephei was from York in 1784, and you have probably all ready guessed it was discovered by John Goodricke.

This is the story of Algol 'The Winking Demon Star ' in Perseus as explained by the deaf astronomer John Goodricke in York

Our story starts in the year 1596 when a David Fabricius a Dutch pastor and astronomer was looking at the constellation of Cetus the Whale, these are of course in the days before the telescope was invented. He noticed a star of the 3rd magnitude, this was Mira the Wonderful.

Delta Ursa Majoris or Megrez which means the base of the bear’s tail or root of the ber’s tail is the faintest of the stars that make up the part of Ursa Major that is referred to as the plough which is one of the best known groups of stars in the sky,

Beta Taurus or El Nath which means the ‘butting one’, in the times of ancient Greece was a star shared by both Taurus and Auriga.

Shaula or lambda Scorpii is the star that marks the sting of the scorpion. The name Shaula means the ‘Stinger’ With a magnitude of 1.6 Shaula is the second brightest star in the constellation of the Scorpion. Yet lambda is only the 11th letter of the Greek alphabet. This rather throws the system introduced in 1603 by Bayer on his Uranometria star atlas into some confusion.

Gamma in Crux the Southern Cross is also known as Gacrux, it's the star at the top of the cross. Its 87 light years away and has a magnitude of 1.6 its a red M3 giant class star with a temperature of 3,300,C. Its the only red giant in the crux shape all the other three stars are blue white in colour and therefore much hotter and younger. It is the nearest red giant to the Sun.

Gamma or Alhena Gemini which means the ‘Shining One’ it is often described as shinning with a bright sharp light. There are some suggestions that Alhena together with the stars eta, mu, nu, and xi may have been part of the Babylonian constellation of the camel.