Click again on the “Astronomical Calendar 2017” tab above. I’m adding. It will be an intermittent process.
You now see, instead of just the list of events, links to two things: that list, and a “Mercury and Venus” section. This is a PDF (portable document format), and I hope it opens for you. As far as I can tell, it opens on tablets and mobile devices as well as computers. I think you will find you can enlarge it and it will retain its sharpness (unlike the JPG screenshot above). You should be able to see charts as delightfully magnified as I do when I am adjusting details on them.
I will be able to respond to your suggestions and complaints. This “Mercury and Venus” section doesn’t as yet look very friendly. It contains as yet only a subset of the illustrations and explanations used in the former books.
I’m touched by the many comments on my Astronomical Calendar’s rising from the dead in electronic form – the Ghost Astronomical Calendar? Especially by Charles Bloomquist’s endeavor each year to understand; I can be thinking of ways to make that easier. Alastair McBeath said: “Wot, no meteor showers?” They, and comets, will be among the phenomena to be added later. Several said they’d be glad to pay something for access; well, I don’t know how to engineer that – yet. Warren Hart asks for “(1) a list of the resources you rely on to publish your data and (2) how you use that data to calculate the resultant information.” Maybe I’ll try to answer those with a future post.
If you intend to respond to all of our suggestions and complaints you might soon get frustrated with a sort of repeat of the stressful Astronomical Calendar process but in on-line format :-)
What we all want is obvious (the Astronomical Calendar on and on!) and you explained candidly your desire not to do that anymore. So let’s allow Guy do whatever he wants whenever he wants however he wants to, and just enjoy!
Thank you so much! Just today someone at work (I work at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory) asked me a question about astronomical events in 2017. I had the new dose-2 version bookmarked, and was able to answer the question immediately! Thanks for so many years of astro assistance, and so glad you’ve found a way to balance to calendar back into existance.
So glad to see this! I think you should charge for it, or at least solicit donations. I just scanned part of the Mercury page of the 2016 calendar for a Facebook post about the current appearance of Mercury (gave full credit and a link to you, of course).
I like what you’re doing on line without your calendar. I understand what a chore it must be, getting all the future stuff prepared for us. PLEASE, add some asteroid stuff; I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen one, although I’ve seen Neptune in the heyday of my telescoping days, not so much any more :( I’ll get as used to your blogging as well as I’d gotten into you publicated Astro Cals. I think you do wonderful work. Keep it up.
Excellent! Thanks very much for keeping us astronomically informed in 2017, Guy!
Whoo hoo! Thanks!
Hello Guy:
Thank you very much for sharing this. It drives me to keep working on my own diagrams, modeled after yours. I have basic versions of a few (in JavaScript), but I look forward to many, many hours of reading Jean Meeus, Joachim Schultz, etc, and programming to keep up with your wonderful calendar!
François
I’m doing an Astronomy project on Dark Matter and would like any information you might have on the subject. It’s a Power Point Project so any pictures would be appreciated or a good site where I could get the information I need.
I have nothing on Dark Matter, but in the current (October) issue of Scientific American, p. 15-16, there is an article on the current state of research on it. (A frustrated state: it hasn’t been found, and theorists are toying with many explanations and alternatives.)
I think it would be nearly impossible to get any pictures of dark matter since it’s so dark and invisible. (lol)
A picture of the Coma galaxy cluster could be used to illustrate the fact that there is not enough visible matter in the cluster to hold the individual galaxies in the cluster. There must be more matter in the cluster than we can see. Fritz Zwicky realized this in the 1950’s.
A picture of the Andromeda galaxy could be used to illustrate Vera Rubin’s finding in the 1970’s that the stars in the outer parts of a spiral galaxy orbit the center of the galaxy much faster than they would if the visible matter were all the matter in the galaxy. (Vera Rubin is old and in ill health, but she is still alive, and she deserves a Nobel prize in physics much more than many of the men who have been awarded one before her. The Nobel prize can only be given to living persons, so time is running out.)
A picture of the bullet cluster could be used to illustrate the best image we have so far of the gravitational presence of dark matter in a large distant galaxy cluster.
You can find images of these objects easily online, many of which are in the public domain and can be used for free. It is good practice to give credit for each image, noting who created the image, when it was published, and the equipment used to create it.
Follow http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html daily (Astronomy Picture of the Day). The pictures, often from amateurs, are amazing and the paragraph of descriptive text that goes with it has dozens of links to articles, papers, other imges, and sometimes humorous (to use its propeur speulling) web sites. All of which you can learn a lot from and get ideas for areas in which to focus on. You can also look at every previous picture (and accompanying text) going back to June 16 1995.
I just want to know what software you use to create the wonderful charts!