ServiAstro
ServiAstro is the website for public outreach on astronomy of the Astronomy and Meteorology Department
(DAM) of the University of Barcelona.
It offers information about the past and future astronomical events visible from Catalonia. Also about the most important ones, no matter the geographical visibility. In some especially outstanding cases, such as planetary transits or Solar and Lunar eclipses,
ServiAstro offers live webcasts which can be enjoyed anytime, thanks to our permanent galleries.
Furthermore,
ServiAstro publish the public outreach activities carried out by the
(DAM). Visitors will find a compilation of astronomical ephemerides, tools for astronomical calculations, news, answers to frequently asked questions and links to lots of other websites about astronomy, organized in sections.
Not visible from Catalunya
Picture of the day
- Uranus auroras glimpsed from Earth, 25th of april:
for the first time, scientists have captured images of auroras above the giant ice planet Uranus, finding further evidence of just how peculiar a world that distant planet is. Detected by means of carefully scheduled observations from the Hubble Space Telescope, the newly witnessed Uranian light show consisted of short-lived, faint, glowing dots – a world of difference from the colorful curtains of light that often ring Earth's poles.
- Herschel spots comet massacre around nearby star,13 de abril:
ESA's Herschel Space Observatory has studied the dusty belt around the nearby star Fomalhaut. The dust appears to be coming from collisions that destroy up to thousands of icy comets every day.
- Space Observations of Mercury Transits Yield Precise Solar Radius, 20th of march:
a group of scientists from Hawaii, Brazil and California has measured the diameter of the Sun with unprecedented accuracy by using a spacecraft to time the transits of the planet Mercury across the face of the Sun in 2003 and 2006. They measured the Sun’s radius as 696,342 km (432,687 miles) with an uncertainty of only 65 km (40 miles). This was achieved by using the solar telescope aboard a NASA satellite, thereby bypassing the blurring caused by Earth’s atmosphere that occurs when observations are made from the ground.
- Powerhouse in the Crab Nebula, March 30:
the pulsar at the centre of the famous Crab Nebula is a veritable bundle of energy. This was now confirmed by the two MAGIC (Major Atmospheric Gamma-Ray Imaging Cherenkov) Telescopes on the Canary island of La Palma. They observed the pulsar in the area of very high energy gamma radiation from 25 up to 400 gigaelectronvolts ( GeV), a region that was previously difficult to access with high energy instruments, and discovered that it actually emits pulses with the maximum energy of up to 400 GeV -- 50 to 100 times higher than theorists thought possible.
ServiAstro
