Jupiter and Venus will be bright tonight! Here is the news item.
Astronomy events awe scientist and backyard skywatching enthusiasts. No I don't own expensive telescopes nor binoculars. I live in city and have little chance of being able to see anything other than the sun and moon (because light from city and smog). However I did go to the plantarium and observed the red planet Mars at its closest to earth in 50000 years in 2003.
It seems that scientists know a lot about astronomy. The weatherman can predict EXACTLY sunrise, sunset time and say meteor shower will occur when and where. Astronomy books are big with beautiful photographs along with charts such as oh this planet has certain diameter and mass and has so many mooons, and revolve around in exactly so many earth days. They can even tell you what gases are in their atmosphere.
Actually scientists only know some very basic information about the universe we live in. People are studying hard from the dusts of Mars... There are many, gosh so many unknowns in space. It is the final frontier.
I think every one should take an intro to astronomy class in college, unfortunately I didn't have time to do so! Astronomy 101 should be fun; beyond that may be too difficult for most! I have seen a TA dealing with very difficult looking Riemann non-Euclidean geometry and those equations make me faint. See here for a taste of it. Folks, relativity and Einstein is not just the easy looking equation E=mc2.
Unfortunately I don't know any astronomy enthusiasts/experts in person... I'd like to ask: how do you know that certain bright objects are planets and not stars millions of lightyears away?
But how many people care about astronomy? Unless a huge meteorite is going to hit the earth, not many people will look up. We are like a bunch of working ants... (many of them in suit-and-tie talking about the stock market) could there be some other beings watching us like people watching ants?
2 comments:
I was enthusiast when i was in high school. I can recognize Jupiter and Venus, you can too, by bare eye. I used to help giving a talk in space museum.
And planets can be distinguish from star by looking at their light spectrum. It's the fingerprint of stars, one can know all the materials that compose the star by looking at its spectrum.
I have an opposite feeling that we already know a lot about astronomy already - with centurys of investigations, astronomy is a not a frontier anymore and there're standard textbooks on it.
I for one don't care about astronomy.
Space Science near the Earth is way cool. We got GPS today because of genius visionaries who dreamed up that network of satellites. Got Live TV today? satellites again.
Mars science is super cool only because it's hard rocket science.
Even if we find some bacteria in Mars, it is still no big deal at all. Mars ice? no big deal, we've got plenty of ice here on Earth.
And no, silly serious scientists, we can never colonize Mars.
Astronomy way out there? I have zero interest. Some points in the sky, draw some random pictures around it and call it a constellation? Not fun.
Meteorite showers? Not fun, not romantic, nothing worth seeing.
Note: ZhuGeLiang pretends he can see the future in the skies. That's as laughable as chasing the moon dog away during an eclipse. And no, he did not see any real revelations in the skies. He speculated.
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