Last night I had some friends over and we were outside and saw four or five meteors in the span of fifteen minutes! The Perseid meteor shower peaks on August 12th so I’m thinking that these may be a prelude to the shower. I had Andrew point out the stars and constellations to Stefanie that I taught him.
Then tonight I went outside with my binoculars and sat down with Fat Cat in my lap while I observed Sagittarius and all the wonderful nebulas, globular clusters, and open clusters that were filling the night sky. I saw five more meteors stream across the sky coming from the SE!
Went for my evening walk re-listening to an astronomy lecture on colliding galaxies, galaxy clusters, more on dark matter, and the Hubble’s law that the receding galaxies redshift is proportional to its distance and are speeding away at 72 kilometers a second per megaparsec. A parsec is 3.3 light years or 30 trillion kilometers, so a megaparsec is a long ways away! The Andromeda galaxy is .077 megaparsecs away and that is the closest galaxy to the Milky Way. Our Galaxy belongs to “The local group” that has around 36 galaxies with a diameter of 10 million light years. There are larger clusters, one the super cluster in Virgo has around 1300 or more galaxies and extends 2.2 megaparsecs out from its center, mighty big!
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