The Draconid meteor shower is happening right now

If you have clear skies were you live, now is a good time to go outside, face north and watch the meteor shower in progress.

The one we are seeing right now is called the Draconids because the meteors appear to come from the constellation Draco to the North.

It's peaking tonight October 8th (actually right now) and we could see as many as 1000 meteors per hour.

I've been out watching for about 45 minutes and I've seen quite a few. Including one which lasted for 1-2 seconds and visibly broke into pieces as it burned up. Awesome as always :-)

A Geminid meteor from Dec. 2010. Picture from space.com

The Moon and the rainbow

As we were driving down the motorway today as the sun was setting and the rain had just stopped, we noticed a beautiful rainbow to the east, with a little twist.
(as always, click the images for larger versions)

As we were looking for a place to stop and take some pictures, my girlfriend took this one out of the car window.

Rainbow at speed

Unlike most of the rainbows I've seen, this one didn't stop at the horizon. It continued a bit and almost appeared to end right next to the road we were on. Quite cool.

The rainbow appeared to end behind those bushes

But that wasn't the coolest thing about this rainbow and it wasn't the reason we wanted to stop.
No this rainbow had a companion which made the view spectacular:
The Moon was peeking out behind the clouds right besides the rainbow.

Rainbow with the Moon

And here's a close-up. It isn't often you manage to capture the Moon inside a rainbow like this :-)

Rainbow and the Moon close-up

Book review: Arthur C. Clarke - The Collected Stories

It's about time I started reviewing the books I read again and the last one I've read is a massive one, by Sir Arthur C. Clarke called 'The Collected Stories'.
It's a collection of almost all the shorter than novel stories written by the master science fiction writer and the book contains more than 100 stories and is almost 1000 pages long.

Front cover (image from Wikimedia)

Sir Arthur C. Clarke, the author 
You may have heard about the author in relation to the movie '2001: A Space Odyssey', as the 'father' of modern science fiction or his predictions regarding things such as the communication satellite.
But make no mistake, not only was he brilliant in his understanding of science and the future he was also an excellent short story writer, as you'll see in this book.
He can create more suspense in a story which is only a couple of pages long, than some authors manage in an entire full length novel.
And even after reading 100 stories he'll still manage to surprise you and give you that 'Bloody hell, I didn't see that coming'-feeling.

He also manages to write 100+ stories which are different and refreshing all the way through. Not only are you guessing at what the story is about and how it will end, you are also being pulled into another exiting universe as each new story unfolds.

Besides the short stories in this book, Sir Clarke has also written a large number of full length novels and non-fiction books. So if you aren't a fan of short stories (you will be after reading this book ;-) ), there's a lot more to him.

The stories
I'm not going to give you a full synopsis of all the stories in the book (especially since many of them aren't much longer than your usual synopsis) and I'll just mention them in broad terms.

But there's stories about war, love, exploration, monsters, crazy inventions, family, space, Earth, many of the planets and moons, teleportation and everything else you could want in a science fiction story.
You'll meet many different intelligent species, experience time travel, supernovae exploding, alternative human races and history unfolding and ending.
Of course the end of the world and the undoing of the universe is also here.
And then you'll read the stories you never even imagined.

In short, this book has everything. Including the longest science fiction story ever told (hint: it's infinitely long) and a story consisting of nothing more than a one page memo.

Recommendation
In case you haven't noticed I really enjoyed reading this book and in case you like science fiction, I can highly recommend it.
Unlike other 1000 pages sci-fi monsters (I have several I'll never complete), this one is easy to read in small instalments and therefore is a book you'll eventually finish. you don't have to remember what happen on page 71 to understand the dialogue on page 852; the two stories are most like completely unrelated (though some of the stories take place in the same universe or use the same starting point, they do not require that you read them in order (mostly)).

So go get it, or one of the other many books written by Sir Arthur C. Clarke.

An alternative
In case you want to start out a bit easier, you can do as I did and start with another short story collection by him.
I started with one called 'The Sentinel' (which is also the name of one of Sir Clarke's most famous stories) which contains about 12 stories or so.

A small update on the previous images

I've spent some time going over the images again, trying to improve the quality and comparing them with the charts at AAVSO (enter 'SN 2011fe' as the name).
But the amount of stars in my pictures are just to high and I have no idea what's going on.
So I'm calling it quits for now. I consider this opportunity missed.

Black/White and levels improved
I tried making the star patterns more visible and easier to compare to the charts, but the result is that the image is even more confusing. See for yourself below.

B/W, inverse colour and grey levelled towards black

Too many stars
As an example of the amount of stars in the pictures, here's the bottom right part of the image above (only about 5% of the entire picture!). I can count at least 40+ stars in the small picture (the first image is normal and the last image is inverse colour).
As usual, click the images below to see the large version.

Small part of the larger image

Same image as an inverse colour picture

Looking for the supernova

I went outside to have another look for the recent supernova in the Pinwheel Galaxy yesterday, as the viewing conditions were still quite good. And also because the supernova is starting to dim again.

In order to not disappoint you completely, I'll begin with an amazing picture of the galaxy and supernova.

Picture from Rose City Astronomers

New instructions
Having failed to follow the instructions from 'Starts with a bang' I decided to try to follow the instructions at Sky & Telescope on their 'This Week's Sky at a Glance' page.
Because that page is updated every week, I'll repost the instructions here.

To identify which tiny speck is the supernova, use the comparison-star charts that you can generate courtesy of the American Association of Variable Star Observers. Enter the star name SN 2011fe, and choose the "predefined chart scales" A, B, and C. Print out all three. The two brightest stars on the "A" chart are the last two stars in the the Big Dipper's handle.

I did just that and followed the instructions. I managed to find the place where the galaxy is supposed to be and took a couple of pictures through the telescope.

The pictures
Unfortunately the only camera I have, which fits on the camera mount, is not that light sensitive I feared that nothing would be clearly visible and I wouldn't be able to see the stars.
It turned out to be quite the opposite. I've spent 2 hours looking at the pictures and I've decided to give up; I have no idea were the supernova is supposed to be in the pictures.
I'm not 100% sure that the pictures are of the correct small patch of sky but almost. So if you are feeling lucky or you are extremely familiar with the stars around the Pinwheel Galaxy go right ahead :-)


The pictures will appear to be almost completely dark unless you click the images to see the large full size pictures.

I've cleaned up the noise on the images a bit and converted them to black/white.
Up in the images is towards Zenith and I'm at around 56° 00 N, 10 º 00 E.