Comet Holmes brightens up !!!!!

The comet Holmes, which visits our solar system every 7 years, has suddenly brightened by nearly a million times (current apparent magnitude: 2.5, for comparison, Sirius-the brightest star in the night sky- is of -1.6 magnitude) for reasons unknown at present. Here is a link of the skymap to spot the comet in the evening sky from Northern hemisphere. I could easily spot it even from the polluted Kanpur sky. The comet is visible to naked eye and through binoculars it looks like fuzzy white disc of the size of a quarter rupee, as the tail of the comet is in opposite direction to the earth. Its a great start for my new binoculars :-) !!

Nainital

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New Binoculars

These are my new binoculars (30x35 ucf : For starters, the first figure indicates magnification factor and the latter indicates diameter of the objective lens in mm, Field: 100m/1000m, i.e. the field of view is 100 m, at a distance of 1,000 m). I purchased it for Rs. 500 at Nainital from a general stores ! Therefore, I was not very hopeful about its performance initially, but image clarity looks fairly good and free from chromatic aberration. The smaller aperture makes it lightweight, cheap and useful for daytime terrestrial observations, but I am eager to test it for star gazing as well. Now, from my personal experience, most of the people think of only telescope when they think of deep sky watching. For them here is an eye-opener. In a nutshell, in addition to the 3-d view, binoculars is a very handy tool for observing the moon, star clusters, messier objects and comets and sometimes planets also. Some disadvantages of the binoculars are: difficulty in holding it stable for a long period and observing objects that are directly overhead. Ideally, a larger objective would have been better for astronomy, but I will see whatever this little tool can explore...

Sticky innovation by IIT Kanpur Scientists

http://whyfiles.org/shorties/244frogfoot_glue/
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/318/5848/258

New templet and posts

I have selected new templet and will soon publish new posts. Meanwhile you may would like to visit the links given on this page.