As promised, here’s the collage I made of the supermoon total lunar eclipse last night from New Hampshire at the McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center.  Feel free to use these images just give credit if you do please.  Thanks all!

Here’s a quick collection of low-resolution images from tonight’s supermoon lunar eclipse from the McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center here in Concord, New Hampshire.  This was my first time imaging an eclipse of any kind so the adjustments were all on the fly but I’m pretty happy with how they turned out.

Thanks to everyone who came out, it was a great turnout and thank you MSDC for hosting a great event as well as WMUR for covering the event.

In a few days, once I sleep and dig through the 5oo or so images that I took I’ll try and put together some collages as well as some other things I’ve been wanting to try.

McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center: http://www.starhop.com/

Most people are probably unaware of this but the length of a solar day, which is the natural day measured by the rising and setting of the Sun, varies throughout the year and that September 18 is in fact the shortest solar day in the year. This post discusses this curiosity, which is not widely known.

The variation in the length of the day.

Although a day for practical timekeeping purposes is always 24 hours, the actual length of a solar day, which is the time difference between two successive occasions when the Sun is at its highest in the sky, varies throughout the year. As shown in the graph below, it is at its longest, 24 hours 30 seconds, around Christmas and is at its shortest, 23 hours 59 minutes 38 seconds in mid-September.

The graph above shows how the length of a solar day differs from 24 hours. The y-axis shows the difference between…

This post, the latest in my series about cosmology, the study of the origin and evolution of the Universe as a whole, talks about the Steady State theory. This is an elegant alternative theory to the Big Bang which was very popular among astronomers in the 1950s, although it has now been discarded.

What is the Steady State Theory?

The Big Bang theory states that the Universe originated from an incredibly hot and dense state 13.7 billion years ago and has been expanding and cooling ever since. It is now generally accepted by most cosmologists. However, this hasn’t always been the case and for a while the Steady State theory was very popular. This theory was developed in 1948 by Fred Hoyle (1915-2001), Herman Bondi (1919-2005) and Thomas Gold (1920-2004) as an alternative to the Big Bang to explain the origin and expansion of the Universe. At the heart of the Steady State theory is…