News: BP's Latest Victims, a Dead Dolphin Covered in Oil

Well, i know this blog's about astronomy, but this won't hold me to write about this catastrophic disaster, which will reveal more more in the future than now.

News: Europa Has Enough Oxygen For Life

A hope seems to appear, as new research suggests that there is plenty of oxygen available in the subsurface ocean of Europa to support oxygen-based metabolic processes for life similar to that on Earth. In fact, there may be enough oxygen to support complex, animal-like organisms with greater oxygen demands than microorganisms.

Top 10: Space Weapons

Large nations are now racing for space age weapons. These are some of the most advanced and sophisticated weapons built to take the arms race to the next level.

News: Advanced GPS satellite launched

27th, may 2010,

The first of an advanced new fleet of navigation satellites for the U.S. Air Force soared into space late Thursday in a blazing night launch from a seaside pad in Florida.

The new global positioning system (GPS) satellite, called GPS 2F-1, blasted off atop an unmanned Delta 4 rocket at 11 p.m. EDT (0300 Friday GMT) from Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.

iPhone App: SkyVoyager

SkyVoyager is a powerful astronomy app for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch. It is designed for both beginners and advanced users. It contains a database of 300,000 stars to 10th magnitude, and 30,000 deep sky objects, including the entire NGC and IC catalogs. It renders the planets and moons in detail, using NASA mission imagery, and includes a database of several hundred asteroids, comets, and artificial satellites.

iPhone App: iStellar

iStellar is a mobile planetarium and astronomy app for iPhone and iPod Touch. Based on the time and location setting input by the user, iStellar able to display the stars on the night sky for the given location. Information obtained through the GPS function, iStellar will chart the location of stars and will rotate according to the position detected by the position sensor. It is optimized for Multi-Touch control, allowing you to operate intuitively; drag to move the star chart, pinch to zoom in and out, and so on.

Low budget Astrophotography

Astrophotography may sound to be a huge step for beginners and is only reserved to professionals who spend years and years in this hobby and with quite expensive gadgets. As a matter of fact it needs good experience, but you will educate yourself with trial and error time after time, but to be honest, it's very tricky and maybe impossible to have results like the powerful high-end imaging devices, especially when imaging deep sky objects, but with cheaper equipment you can create decent images if you know how to tweak'em to the limits, now we will see how it's done.

The Newtonian Reflector Telescope

This Uniquely-look telescope first developed by another pioneer in science, Sir Isaac Newton. The design of this telescope is fairly simple. Other than the lenses in the eyepiece, there is only one surface that has a curve in it (the primary mirror).

Light Pollution

We begin with the greatest impediment of all to observing the heavens in today’s world. Light pollution is excessive or misdirected artificial outdoor lighting. It does no one any good, and almost everyone considerable harm.

Sky Navigation: Altitude and Azimuth

Whatever the celestial object you desire to observe, you first need to find it(obviously), when we talk about stars (or any other celestial objects) we need to have a system for identifying where they are in the sky.

Refracting Telescopes

When a "Telescope" term come in mind, we always think of that tube with the big lens and the small one we look in. Though its inventor may be lost in history, this early kind of telescope is called a "Galilean" or simple refractor. The Galilean refractor consists of two lenses: a convex (curved outward) lens held in front of a concave (curved inward) lens a certain distance away. As you know, the telescope’s front lens is called the objective, while the other is referred to as the eyepiece, or ocular.

Telescope Accessories for beginners

There are some essential accessories and gadgets that you should consider buying with your telescope.

Starter Telescope Models for Beginners

What to consider ?

There are a wide rang out there you can pick from. And I will try here to review and show you some of these models which are recommend for a beginner, compared to the cost.

Buying a Telescope for Beginners

So, you intend to buy a telescope, my belief that there are three primary concerns a beginner should have when buying a first scope: cost, size (& type), and reliability. Those three aspects are very common when you decide to buy whatever you put in mind, so we will try to follow them from a amateur point of view or just a father who want to get his son the scope he always dreamed of.