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Old 20-02-2018, 07:21 AM
Weltevreden SA's Avatar
Weltevreden SA (Dana)
Dana in SA

Weltevreden SA is offline
 
Join Date: Apr 2012
Location: Nieu Bethesda, Karoo, South Africa
Posts: 216
Three new online publications from Dana in S Africa

Yo over there, lads . . .

I haven't been writing much on IIS because I'm neck-deep in writing articles for the Astro Soc. of S Africa (ASSA). This month has a real bumper crop for any of you who like deep-sky objects and historical astronomy charts.

First up is our regular quarterly issue of Nightfall, a general deep-sky reader. There's a good summary of the beautiful world of astrophysics simulations in "Around the Universe in Eighty Sims". There's a nice profile of one of the sadly overlooked women astronomers whose objects many of us know by name but not who named them. She was Paris Pismis and lived most of her career at the Tonantzintlia Observatory in Mexico. She discovered the tough globular Ton 2 and 23 Pismis open clusters. Then there's a piece called "Seeing the Dark", which is a heavily imaged feature about the dark molecular clouds we see so often but don't actually observe very much – Coal Sack, Dark Doodad, Chameleon I, II, III; Corona Australis; the fascinating complexities of the Orion–Eridanus Molecular Complex.

For you chart and history buffs, there is "The Oldest Star Chart in the World". It is about a scroll of silk paper found in a cave on the edge of the Taklaman Desert which had been sealed off for over 1,000 years. The chart was made around 650–680, used by caravan guides to cross the Gobi on the Silk Road, was squirreled away in a cave whose door was cleverly concealed with stones, found only in 1903, examined for the first time by scholars in 1953, and only in 2010 did some professional astronomers investigate its history to find it is an amazingly accurate depiction of a sky with 423 "asterisms" (not one of which resembles any of our constellations) and 1400 plotted stars. A wild and beautiful tale with exotic pictures of the caves where the chart was found.

Finally, for you Magellanics buffs. do you recall occasional comments about a ghostly stream or bridge of light stretching from the bottom of the LMC across & under Chameleon, to as far as Tri Austr? The third ASSA article "Magellanic Mystery" tries to ferret out what exactly is causing the glow. It can be seen only in the darkest, high-altitude skies, and this article takes some 60 pages of pretty detailed astrophysics to come up with a suggestion.

All this is posted on a public-access cloud site whose link is <https://mega.nz/fm/tvYS2BAQ> If it asks for a password it is <ACu-qox-UHS-T2w>.

Hope you all enjoy!
=Dana in S Africa

Last edited by Weltevreden SA; 20-02-2018 at 07:31 AM. Reason: correct typos
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Old 20-02-2018, 08:36 AM
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skysurfer
Dark sky rules !

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Join Date: Dec 2011
Location: 52N 6E (EU)
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Nice to see a South African amateur here. I was in SA a few times a few years ago... with my telescope.
The Karoo is very dark, I've been in Prince Albert and in 2016 in Olive Grove 20km south of Beaufort West with pitch dark skies and did astrophotography.
And now I am on trip in Australia (and also do some AP), I live in Europe, in the most light polluted and cloudy country: Holland.
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