| Astronomy News - January 2012 | ||||||||||||||||||
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Hello, and welcome to the monthly astronomy news page! Of course the main goal of the Austin Planetarium is fund raising to make possible building a planetarium in Austin. But we thought it would be nice to also start offering some astronomy information. After all, a planetarium is all about the fun of astronomy and astronomy education. This page offers some limited information about astronomical events for the Austin area this month. Sections that will always be included on this page are:
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An almanac, like the famous Farmers' Almanac, is an annual publication with all kinds of data on weather or on the calendar. Astronomical almanacs show data like the rise and set times of the Sun and Moon for a given date. With the advent of computers and the internet, we can now generate data on the fly and display them in a variety of useful formats. So, instead of data for an entire year, often an astronomical almanac shows data for one day. This is exactly what we're showing in the table to the right: The Austin Planetarium Alamanac! The data displayed is for right now and updates automatically. Of course the Sun and Moon rise and set times do not change during the course of a day, but the illumination changes continuously. That may surprise you, but in 28 days, the Moon goes from New (zero percent illumination), to Full (100%) and back to new again. So in 14 days, we cover 100%, or about 7% per day. Divided by 24 hours in the day, the illumination changes 0.30% each hour! Additionally we are also showing a picture of what the illumination actually looks like, and we're also displaying when the next Lunar event takes place. |
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This page is maintained and developed by Torvald Hessel and Steve Rung. |
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