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John Birmingham (astronomer)
John Birmingham (1816–1884) was an Irish astronomer, amateur geologist, polymath and poet. He spent six or seven years travelling widely in Europe where he became proficient in several languages. In 1866 he discovered the recurrent nova T Coronae Borealis. He studied and wrote articles on planets, meteor showers and sunspots. Early years He was born to Edward Birmingham and Elly Bell and grew up on the Millbrook Estate outside Milltown, County Galway and was educated at St Jarlath's College in Tuam. The Birmingham Family held one of the oldest titles in Ireland and were the last Barons Of Athenry and Earls Of Louth. Between 1844 and 1854 he spent several years travelling through Europe, and is thought to have studied in Berlin. In 1846 and 1847 he was active in Famine relief around Tuam. In 1852 he visited Rome. When he returned home in 1854 he built up a network of newspapers and magazines to which he started contributing articles on scientific and other matters. He first a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Milltown, County Galway
Milltown () is a small village in County Galway, Ireland. It is situated on the banks of the River Clare, 47 km from Galway City, 11 km from Tuam on the N17 road to Sligo. History The parish of Milltown is made up of the two civil parishes of Adergoole and Liskeevy, both of which are of medieval origin. The first historical record of Milltown dates back to 1589. According to historian Hubert Thomas Knox's ''History of Mayo'', Sir Murrogh O'Flaherty and his army came to attack Edward Birmingham. They stormed the castle, burnt half of Milltown and destroyed the castle's corn, but still failed to capture the castle after a bloody battle. On their return to Cong, they burnt sixteen other villages and seized three thousand cattle. The placename of Milltown or Baile an Mhuilinn (the town of the mill), is derived from the two mills located on the River Clare - O'Grady's mill at Milltown, and Birmingham's mill at Lack. O'Grady's mill was demolished in the 1950s during the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Corona Borealis
Corona Borealis is a small constellation in the Northern Celestial Hemisphere. It is one of the 48 constellations listed by the 2nd-century astronomer Ptolemy, and remains one of the 88 modern constellations. Its brightest stars form a semicircular arc. Its Latin name, inspired by its shape, means "northern crown". In classical mythology Corona Borealis generally represented the crown given by the god Dionysus to the Cretan princess Ariadne and set by her in the heavens. Other cultures likened the pattern to a circle of elders, an eagle's nest, a bear's den, or even a smokehole. Ptolemy also listed a southern counterpart, Corona Australis, with a similar pattern. The brightest star is the magnitude 2.2 Alpha Coronae Borealis. The yellow supergiant R Coronae Borealis is the prototype of a rare class of giant stars—the R Coronae Borealis variables—that are extremely hydrogen deficient, and thought to result from the merger of two white dwarfs. T Coronae Borealis, a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Robert Stawell Ball
Sir Robert Stawell Ball (1 July 1840 – 25 November 1913) was an Irish astronomer who founded the screw theory. He was Royal Astronomer of Ireland at Dunsink Observatory. Life He was the son of naturalist Robert Ball, and Amelia Gresley Hellicar. He was born in Dublin. and was educated at Trinity College Dublin where he won a scholarship in 1859 and was a senior moderator in both ''mathematics'' and ''experimental and natural science'' in 1861. Ball worked for Lord Rosse from 1865 to 1867. In 1867, he became Professor of Applied Mathematics at the Royal College of Science in Dublin. There he lectured on mechanics and published an elementary account of the science. In 1873, he became a Fellow of the Royal Society. In 1874, he was appointed Royal Astronomer of Ireland and Andrews Professor of Astronomy in the University of Dublin at Dunsink Observatory. Ball contributed to the science of kinematics by delineating the screw displacement: :When Ball and the screw theorists spe ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Telescope
A telescope is a device used to observe distant objects by their emission, absorption, or reflection of electromagnetic radiation. Originally meaning only an optical instrument using lenses, curved mirrors, or a combination of both to observe distant objects, the word ''telescope'' now refers to a wide range of instruments capable of detecting different regions of the electromagnetic spectrum, and in some cases other types of detectors. The first known practical telescopes were refracting telescopes with glass lenses and were invented in the Netherlands at the beginning of the 17th century. They were used for both terrestrial applications and astronomy. The reflecting telescope, which uses mirrors to collect and focus light, was invented within a few decades of the first refracting telescope. In the 20th century, many new types of telescopes were invented, including radio telescopes in the 1930s and infrared telescopes in the 1960s. Etymology The word ''telescope'' was coin ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Venus
Venus is the second planet from the Sun. It is sometimes called Earth's "sister" or "twin" planet as it is almost as large and has a similar composition. As an interior planet to Earth, Venus (like Mercury) appears in Earth's sky never far from the Sun, either as morning star or evening star. Aside from the Sun and Moon, Venus is the brightest natural object in Earth's sky, capable of casting visible shadows on Earth at dark conditions and being visible to the naked eye in broad daylight. Venus is the second largest terrestrial object of the Solar System. It has a surface gravity slightly lower than on Earth and has a very weak induced magnetosphere. The atmosphere of Venus, mainly consists of carbon dioxide, and is the densest and hottest of the four terrestrial planets at the surface. With an atmospheric pressure at the planet's surface of about 92 times the sea level pressure of Earth and a mean temperature of , the carbon dioxide gas at Venus's surface is in the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cygnus (constellation)
Cygnus is a northern constellation on the plane of the Milky Way, deriving its name from the Latinized Greek word for swan. Cygnus is one of the most recognizable constellations of the northern summer and autumn, and it features a prominent asterism known as the Northern Cross (in contrast to the Southern Cross). Cygnus was among the 48 constellations listed by the 2nd century astronomer Ptolemy, and it remains one of the 88 modern constellations. Cygnus contains Deneb (ذنب, translit. ''ḏanab,'' tail)one of the brightest stars in the night sky and the most distant first-magnitude staras its "tail star" and one corner of the Summer Triangle. It also has some notable X-ray sources and the giant stellar association of Cygnus OB2. Cygnus is also known as the Northern Cross. One of the stars of this association, NML Cygni, is one of the largest stars currently known. The constellation is also home to Cygnus X-1, a distant X-ray binary containing a supergiant and unseen m ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hans Schjellerup
Hans Carl Frederik Christian Schjellerup (8 February 1827 – 13 November 1887) was a Danish astronomer. He was born at Odense, the son of a jeweller. Initially he was apprenticed as a watch maker, but in 1848 he passed the entrance exam for the Polytechnic School of Copenhagen. He graduated by passing an examination in applied mathematics and mechanics. In 1851 he became an observer at the University Observatory in Copenhagen. He soon became an instructor at the Polytechnic School, then in 1854 a Professor of Mathematics at the Denmark Naval Academy. In 1866, after the new observatory had been completed, Schjellerup assembled a catalog of red stars. He also began a study of Arabic, Chinese and other oriental languages, and used his knowledge to study old astronomic records, including those of Abd-al-Rahman al-Sûfi (whose ''Book of Fixed Stars'' he translated into French in 1874) and Chinese records of eclipses. In 1869, he drafted a proposal for a Chinese telegraph dictionar ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Stellar Classification
In astronomy, stellar classification is the classification of stars based on their stellar spectrum, spectral characteristics. Electromagnetic radiation from the star is analyzed by splitting it with a Prism (optics), prism or diffraction grating into a spectrum exhibiting the Continuum (spectrum), rainbow of colors interspersed with spectral lines. Each line indicates a particular chemical element or molecule, with the line strength indicating the abundance of that element. The strengths of the different spectral lines vary mainly due to the temperature of the photosphere, although in some cases there are true abundance differences. The ''spectral class'' of a star is a short code primarily summarizing the ionization state, giving an objective measure of the photosphere's temperature. Most stars are currently classified under the Morgan–Keenan (MK) system using the letters ''O'', ''B'', ''A'', ''F'', ''G'', ''K'', and ''M'', a sequence from the hottest (''O'' type) to the coo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mare Frigoris
Mare Frigoris (Latin ''frīgōris'', the "Sea of Cold") is a lunar mare in the far north of the Moon. It is located in the outer rings of the Procellarum basin, just north of Mare Imbrium, and stretches east to north of Mare Serenitatis. It is just north of the dark crater Plato (crater), Plato. The basin material surrounding the mare is of the Lower Imbrian epoch (geology), epoch, while the eastern mare material is of the Upper Imbrian epoch, and the western mare material is of the Eratosthenian epoch. Like most of the other maria on the Moon, Mare Frigoris was named by Giovanni Riccioli, whose 1651 nomenclature system has become standardized. Previously, William Gilbert (astronomer), William Gilbert had included it among the Insula Borealis ("Northern Island") in his map of ''c''.1600, and Michael Van Langren had labelled it the Mare Astronomicum ("Sea of Astronomy") in his 1645 map. Pierre Gassendi called it the Boreum Mare ('Northern Sea').Ewen A. Whitaker, ''Mapping and Nami ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Earth
Earth is the third planet from the Sun and the only astronomical object known to harbor life. While large volumes of water can be found throughout the Solar System, only Earth sustains liquid surface water. About 71% of Earth's surface is made up of the ocean, dwarfing Earth's polar ice, lakes, and rivers. The remaining 29% of Earth's surface is land, consisting of continents and islands. Earth's surface layer is formed of several slowly moving tectonic plates, which interact to produce mountain ranges, volcanoes, and earthquakes. Earth's liquid outer core generates the magnetic field that shapes the magnetosphere of the Earth, deflecting destructive solar winds. The atmosphere of the Earth consists mostly of nitrogen and oxygen. Greenhouse gases in the atmosphere like carbon dioxide (CO2) trap a part of the energy from the Sun close to the surface. Water vapor is widely present in the atmosphere and forms clouds that cover most of the planet. More solar e ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Moon
The Moon is Earth's only natural satellite. It is the fifth largest satellite in the Solar System and the largest and most massive relative to its parent planet, with a diameter about one-quarter that of Earth (comparable to the width of Australia). The Moon is a planetary-mass object with a differentiated rocky body, making it a satellite planet under the geophysical definitions of the term and larger than all known dwarf planets of the Solar System. It lacks any significant atmosphere, hydrosphere, or magnetic field. Its surface gravity is about one-sixth of Earth's at , with Jupiter's moon Io being the only satellite in the Solar System known to have a higher surface gravity and density. The Moon orbits Earth at an average distance of , or about 30 times Earth's diameter. Its gravitational influence is the main driver of Earth's tides and very slowly lengthens Earth's day. The Moon's orbit around Earth has a sidereal period of 27.3 days. During each synodic period ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Birmingham (crater)
Birmingham is the surviving remnant of a lunar impact crater. It is named after the astronomer John Birmingham (not, as is often stated, the British city nor its Alabama namesake). The crater is located near the northern limb of the Moon, and so is viewed from the Earth at a low angle. All that survives of the original formation is an irregular perimeter of low, indented ridges surrounding the lava-resurfaced interior. The inner floor is marked by several tiny craterlets, and the surface is unusually rough for a walled plain. The low angle of illumination allows fine details of this boulder-strewn field to be seen more clearly. Location The Birmingham formation lies just to the north of the Mare Frigoris Mare Frigoris (Latin ''frīgōris'', the "Sea of Cold") is a lunar mare in the far north of the Moon. It is located in the outer rings of the Procellarum basin, just north of Mare Imbrium, and stretches east to north of Mare Serenitatis. It is ju ..., and to the east of th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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