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My heart leaps up when I beholdA Rainbow in the sky:-- The Rainbow by William Wordsworth Painters, poets, and photographers have long tried to convey to us through pictures and…

In the first installment of this series on atmospheric optics we touched on various aspects of rainbows that one can witness. Now, let us turn our attention to those strange…

The Ursids meteor activity begins annually around 17th December and runs for for just over a week, until the 25th or 26th, with a peak on 22nd December. This meteor…

Armagh Observatory, 5th May 2006: A comet, currently breaking apart, is visible in our eastern evening sky in the constellation of Lyra. Comet Schwassmann-Wachmann 3 (SW3) has broken into at…

The GeminidsThe Geminid meteor shower officially begins on December 7th, but it doesn't peak until the morning of the 13/14th. Unlike the Leonids, the Geminid's broad maximum lasts nearly a…

The Lyrid meteor shower streams from a point in the constellation Lyra near Vega - a brilliant blue-white star about three times wider than our Sun and 25 light years away. The…

The words "solar system" refer to the Sun or a star and all of the objects that travel around it. These objects include planets, natural satellites such as the Moon,…

In 1610, shortly after viewing the sun with his ‘new telescope’, Galileo Galilei made the first European observations of sunspots. Daily observations were started at the Zurich Observatory in 1749…

Our planet takes just over 365 days to orbit the Sun – the basis of our calendar year.The Earth's axis is tilted at an angle of 23.5 degrees.This means that…

The annual Perseid meteor shower is coming. The shower begins, gently, in mid-July when Earth enters the outskirts of a cloud of debris from Comet Swift-Tuttle.Dust-sized meteoroids, hitting the atmosphere,…