Kasun Somaratne's Blog (7)

I have been wanting to see Neptune for a very long time. On many occasions I have tried to observe this distant world but I have failed for various reasons. Mostly due to the not so dark skies around my house in Surrey. Sometimes it is confusing to find the 7.8 magnitude faint Neptune among a bunch of 5 or 6 magnitude stars near by. But my lucky moment arrived in the early morning of July 10th (2009). I read on SkyNews magazine that Jupiter was passing by Neptune for the next few days. So I dec… Continue

If you are into stargazing this site is a must know. heavens-above.com gives you pretty much everything you need to know about those mysterious slow moving stars that you might come across if you stare at the sky for just as little as 5 minutes. After you have created an account with your location on Earth it will tell you when you could see ISS, Hubble, Iridium flares, other major satellites, and occasionally the space shuttle when it is in orbit. What… Continue

So I heared about this comet from one of my friends and decided to check it out myself. This comet actually looks green. That is due to C2 and CN gases that gets released due to sunlight as the comet gets closer to the sun. This comet is in a highly eccentric orbit which means that it will not come around the sun for another long long time. So I went outside at around 8.30pm despite the bitter cold wind with my 20X50 binoculars to find the comet. Before I went outside I looked online where the… Continue

It's been 400 years since Galileo first had a look at the stars through his telecope. This Galileo moment was the first step in our current scientific understanding of the universe. Wonder how Galileo felt when he saw phases in Venus, moons of Jupiter and rings of Saturn for the first time? Well if you haven't seen these already you will have a very good chance of seeing them yourself this year as the whole world turn towards the night sky. The United Nations has declared the year 2009 as the I… Continue

Meteors are one of the many facinating things about the night sky. But for city dwellers like us spoting a meteor can be a challenge. What better chance is there to see a meteor than in a meteor shower! The annual Perseid meteor shower peaks on August 12th. According to Bill Cooke at NA… Continue

I've been observing the sun for quite a time, but this is the first time I got a picture of it. I was using my binoculars (20X50) with a home-made Baader Solar filter. I took this photo by holding a digital camera closer to one of the eye pieces of my binoculars, which is not by far… Continue

Arthur C. Clark was one of the famous science fiction writers who wrote books like 2001: Space Odysse, 2061:Odysse three 3001: The Final Odysse, The other side of the sky and much much more.... He was a fiction writer, an Inventor an a futurists. He was the first one to suggest that telecommunication around the globe is possible and the first one to propose the idea of geosynchronous (geostationary - satellites with orbital period equal to the rotational period of Earth) sa… Continue