Stephen Hawking about “Quantum Black Holes”
Stephen Hawking is currently attending a historic conference in Stockholm - organized by the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics (Nordita) and Laura Mersini-Houghton, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. As an astrophysicist I was especially ...
Aurora Borealis – observed from Vallentuna
It is an amazing spectacle when a solar storm of charged particles hits the Earth's magnetosphere. The particles following the magnetic field finally collide with particles of the Earth's atmosphere - mostly oxygen and nitrogen. These collisions lead to either an ...
Measuring Linearity, Readout Noise and Gain of a ATIK383L+ CCD camera
Today I did some tests with my 2-year old ATIK383L+ CCD camera. I am using the camera regularly and you can find some results at my astrophotography page. The camera uses the well-known KAF-8300 17.6mmx13.52m CCD chip with a resolution of 3362x2504 pixels and a pixel size ...
Comet C/2014 Q2 (Lovejoy)
Comet C/2014 Q2 (Lovejoy) is bright (around 5mag) enough to be easily seen with binoculars or small telescopes in constellation Eridanus. On really good sites one should be able to spot it even with naked eye. However, currently the observing conditions are hard, because ...
Ringsystem um Asteroid “Chariklo” im äußeren Sonnensystem entdeckt
Die Europäische Südsternwarte (ESO) berichtet in Ihrer heutigen Pressemitteilung von der überraschenden und erstmaligen Entdeckung eines Ringsystems um einen Asteroiden. Der Planetoid Chariklo wurde von mehreren Observatorien aus - darunter auch La Silla in Chile - ...
Erste experimentelle Bestätigung der kosmischen Inflation
Vor wenigen Tagen wurde von der US-amerikanischen BICEP2 Kollaboration ein neues, sensationelles Resultat veröffentlicht (siehe: BICEP2 I: Detection Of B-mode Polarization at Degree Angular Scales), was nun endlich bestätigt, was bereits vor über 30 Jahren von Alan Guth ...
