“The Geminid meteor shower from the mysterious asteroid Phaeton (the only one of its kind) begins on December 3rd and peaks on the night of December 13th/14th, and will be best seen after midnight, once the Moon is down.”
“Percival Lowell, famous or infamous for the ‘canals’ on Mars, also started the search which led to the discovery of Pluto. “
Explore the planets and their moons with Duncan Lunan, includes fabulous images
S P O T (Strange Phenomena Over Tea) is a monthly discussion group about strange phenomena.
“There’s an opportunity this month to find Ceres, the largest of the asteroids, as it passes through the V-shaped Hyades cluster in Taurus.”
” The curious thing about Iapetus is that one side of it is more than ten times brighter than the other.”
“Saturn takes 29½ years to orbit the Sun and is passed by the Earth at intervals of little more than a year”
“This really is a previously unrecognised phenomenon” – Dr Simone Scaringi, Centre for Extragalactic Astronomy, at Durham University
The mineral resources of the asteroids will be of great importance in the future
“Like most people, until the 1960s I greatly underestimated the hazard from incoming asteroids and comets, and greatly overestimated the size that would be needed to cause serious harm. “
