A latest news buzz from telegraph.co.uk says that an amateur astronomer Peter Shah, 38, staying in the English Hillside town of Meifod has been able to capture stunning shots of the galactic signatures from his own backyard with a modest 8-inch telescope.

What the multi billion dollar tech baby of NASA - the Hubble space telescope has been doing all this while has been acheived at a lesser scale (but with good quality) from a modified backyard garden shed that cost Peter a modest £ 20,000 for buying a good telescope and mounting it on the roof.

What is so baffling and incredible is that the images caught on tape through his telescopes attached to his computer are no mean feat. You will understand what I mean if you visit his gallery at his webpage here . Though it is an amateur astronomer’s effort, the results look as good as any professional astronomer’s clicks.

Peter Shahs telescope at his backyard

Peter Shah, an office worker and a hobbyist astronomer says he has been fascinated at being an astronomer at a very tender age of seven when his mother got him a tiny £ 5 telescope and this legacy still lingers as his hobby of sky watching and star gazing. Images in his collection include the Monkey’s head nebula, M33 Pinwheel Galaxy, Andromeda Galaxy and the Flaming Star Nebula.

This is what he had to say about his feat in an interview to the site opticstar.com

“On my seventh birthday my folks got me my first telescope which started my interest in astronomy, I sat for hours looking at the moon as a child. I remember pointing my scope at a bright star to the east, I put my eye to the telescope and saw Jupiter for the very first time, and I felt like I had discovered something and ran around telling everyone. I pointed a camera at the sky in my early teens, when my uncle, who was a keen amateur photographer, gave me an old SLR camera and tripod, which I did simple exposures of the constellations and experimented with star trailing.”

His images have been brought together for the first time in a book called Mirror Image. Images from the book and other photographs can be viewed at http://www.astropix.co.uk

Well, contrary to the adage, for persons like Peter Shah, even sky is not the limit !!

To sit in a idle room and do a think-tank  inside your skull of how to do something different without getting out of your cozy couch ? For all those couch-potato geeks  here is a chance to be part a adventure and discovery - be a part of Planetquest.org’s distributed computer platform Planet discovery Project.

Are you still thinking that there are just nine planets known to mankind ? Huh, this NASA site for Planetquest count for number of planets discovered takes its tally at a whopping 424. Can’t believe ? Well its gotta be difficult to do all this discovery all by NASA, so they devised a grid computing project involving interested netizens who can dedicate a part of their CPU time for processing the enormous amount of data from NASA’s dedicated planet hunting missions like Kepler as well as other ground based telescope data.

Planetquest.org is a non-profit research organisation involved in projects for finding exo-planets and they have developed what is known as ‘Transit Detection Algorithm‘ or TDA for short to automatically detect planets during transit ahead of stars.

To become an amateur astronomer all you need is a computer with a decent internet connection. Log on to Planetquest.org, sign up and download their sophisticated distributed computing software based on the BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) platform. With this you become an astronomer and your comp your vitual observatory. Cool Ain’t it ?

P.S: Though its exciting the alpha testing is going on for this software and the beta release is expected to be on floors very soon. Planetquest is in search of funds to organise the necessary infrastructure to handle the tremendous response expected. Of course you can be a proud donor by spending a penny or two for this great scientific breakthrough to happen soon.

The most favourite telescope of all astronomers, Hubble, the space based telescope in orbit, is back with a bang after it has been repaired and overhauled by NASA astronauts in May. NASA has released stunning images from this veteran telescope today. Enjoy them here:

Oops ! The Lord is without his Rings !! Gosh, where are the rings gone ? Is it an eclipse phenomenon ? Nops, it is a line-of-sight phenomenon.

One of the celestial phenomenon that is quite a “hide-and-seek” is the Saturn’s rings getting invisible. This  celestial event that occurs once every 14.7 years is not very popular since it cannot be viewed by unaided eyes unlike a Solar or Lunar eclipse.

As Saturn revolves around the sun, the massive giant’s geometry with respect to view angles from earth changes and the rings come along the line of sight after every 14 years that leads to this phenomenon.

This phenomenon will extend for a span 15 days to a month. If you’re interested in star gazing or sky watching, you surely don’t want to miss this too ! But alas, saturn without rings is harder to find even with telescopes on.

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When I stumbled on to Google today, I could find it sporting a designer logo as it does on occasions.  This time around it was difficult to guess from the logo without mouse over on it !

This year has been marked for many scientific anniversaries -  200 years since Charles Darwin’s birth and 150 years since the publication of ‘On the Origin of Species’, and I had to give up my guessing and click on the logo to know that it was for the 400th anniversary of Galileo’s telescope !!

Gosh, what a persona Galileo was ! as an Italian professor of physics he demonstrated a simple contraption of two lenses at the two ends of a leather tube to the Italian senate exactly 400 years ago - which has now revolutioned the birth of Astronomy and Planetary sciences ! Galileo and Kepler were the two pillars responsible for this feat to happen. NASA’s recently launched Space telescope was named Kepler ! Hope Kepler makes some ground breaking discoveries and Lets remember these greats on this occasion !

Ever wondered what those shooting stars that light up the night sky like a short lived splinter are ? Well, there have been many legends on them but the plain truth is that they are nothing but interplanetary dust and particles or left over debris of a passing Comet which on entering into the earth’s atmosphere attracted by earth’s gravity ultimately burn up to light up our skies.

While 90% of them burn up completely in the earth’s atmosphere itself, some sizeable meteors do reach up earth’s surface, which are called meteorites.

Tonight, we are expecting meteor showers termed as ‘Perseids‘ - which has been known to mankind for about 2000 years ! The Perseids are so-called because the point they appear to come from, called the radiant, lies in the constellation Perseus. The stream of debris is called the Perseid cloud and stretches along the orbit of the comet Swift-Tuttlethe major contributor for these showers is a popular comet called ‘Swift Tuttle‘.

Watch this below video from National Geographic about Perseids:

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Exoplanet orbiting close to its sun. Image credit: NASA

Launched into space on march 6, 2009 - the world’s most powerful orbiting telescope has shown its muscle power in detecting alien planets even before the actual calibrations for beginning actual mission is completed.

As per NASA’s statement made on Aug 6, Kepler has “detected the atmosphere of a known giant gas planet, demonstrating the telescope’s extraordinary scientific capabilities”

The discovery would be published in the Journal Science, this weekend. Kepler’s highly sophisticated precision instruments helped in this finding and has stirred the hype of the scientific community of the promises that Kepler made before launch : to find alien earths sooner.

What this finding demonstrates is the capability of Kepler like a tip of an iceberg - The Planet Hunting is just on ! Lets hope that the grand entrance made by the invincible Planet hunter - Kepler makes some astonishing discoveries asap !

Eclipse photo by David Cornfield, a member of the MIT cruise ship tour group, shows the "diamond ring" effect as the sun emerges from totality. Photo / David Cornfield

Two MIT Alumni Association groups led by MIT professors were rewarded with clear skies for the total eclipse of the sun on July 22, possibly the most-watched eclipse in history.

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Do enormous cosmic entities like galaxies collide ? Yes is the answer from the astronomers from the Stony Brook University using the Subaru Telescope on Mauna Kea volcano in Hawaii. They have captured the so called “skid” marks or the collision trails of the gargantuan collisions between galaxies, which are called as “Antennae”. The  tidal debris left as an aftermath of the collision helps them to find the history of the collision, like the way one can do for a car accident.

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Moon, our fellow wanderer of the night sky, has some strikingly interesting facts and SpaceBoy brings you those “luna”tic info right on your desktop!

>> Indian astronomers of the vedic period as early as 1500 B.C determined the orbit of the Moon precisely based on the phases of the Moon and developed the lunar calendar.

>> Hipparchus, an ancient Greek Astronomer, using only his observations and mathematical formulae measured the distance to the Moon as well as the Sun with surprising accuracies.

>> The mean density of Moon is just 3.35 g/cc whereas that of our Earth is 5.52 g/cc.

>> Moon does not have a substantial molten core like earth and hence no magnetic field.

>> Moon exhibits extremes of temperature. During the daytime mercury soars up to +110 degrees Celcius where as the nights are notoriously cold reaching -180 degrees Celcius.

>> The terrain is basically classified into

1. Highlands : rugged ; very ancient.
2. Maria : smooth ; younger lowlands.

>> The mountains or highlands in Earth are formed by the crustal deformation or the so called “Plate Tectonics” which is absent in our neighboring wanderer.

>> Maria ( Latin for “Seas” ) are relatively flat areas produced by massive lava flow during earlier Lunar Volcanism, comprising about 16 % of the lunar surface. [Click here to view enlarged image]

>> Maria is associated with gravity anomalies also called as “ Masons ” ( Mass Concentrations )

>> A spacecraft would accelerate as it nears the Maria region and decelerate as it moves away due to Masons.

>> Lunar surface is covered with a gently rolling layer of powdery soil and rock fragments called ‘Regolith’

>> Regolith – is a powdery formation as a result of the debris created by the meteor impacts which cause craters. [Click here to view enlarged image]

>> The juiciest information is: there’s a relative abundance of Helium - 3 isotope (a fusion element) on the moon, compared to earth.

>> This may be due to the fact that over a 4 billion year history of moon tons of He-3 from the solar wind have impacted directly onto  the surface of the moon and got trapped in minerals like Ilemenite [ a compound of Iron and titanium oxide : FeTiO3 ]. Though He-3 has high diffusivity and escapes from the lunar soil, Ilemenite has a very high retentivity for the same. [Click here to view enlarged image]

>> The lunar surface where Neil Armstrong set his foot is called – “ The Sea of Tranquility ”

>> Selenography – is the study of the physical features of the Moon.

Hope you enjoyed this nutty compilation of fragments of information about our lovely friend of the night sky !