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Thursday, 12 October 2006 15:30
In 1609, Galileo had set a telescope in the garden behind his house and turned it skyward. Never-before-seen stars leaped out of the darkness to enhance familiar constellations; the nebulous Milky Way resolved into a swath of densely packed stars; mountains and valleys pockmarked the storied perfection of the Moon; and a retinue of four attendant bodies traveled regularly around Jupiter like a planetary system in miniature.
 I render infinite thanks to God," Galileo intoned after those nights of wonder, for being so kind as to make me alone the first observer of marvels kept hidden in obscurity for all previous centuries. 

Nearly 400 Years later, we follow the Steps taken by Galileo!

Astronomy club is a platform independent, non profit,  scientific and educational organization dedicated to fostering communication and  participation between individuals interested in astronomy  & allied  sciences and also assisting them in fulfillment of  their curricular,  educational, charitable, research  and other  such activities.

It's  an association of individual amateur astronomers and  group of  persons who share the same interest in astronomy  and  allied sciences encompassing all aspects of ancient, classical &  modern astronomy, astrophysics, celestial photography, cosmology, optics and  space mission. The club maintains a network of  such  people interested  in  astronomy  and allied  sciences  and  contributed towards  promoting interest in the field in form of  observation, field trips, research or pure entertainment.

What is 1AU!

Our planet is the third rock from the Sun. One astronomical unit (AU or au or a.u. or sometimes ua) is a unit of length approximately equal to the distance between the Sun and Earth.

The currently accepted value of the AU is 149,597,870,691 ± 30 metres (nearly 150 million kilometres or 93 million miles)

Originally, the AU was defined as the length of the semi-major axis of the Earth's elliptical orbit around the Sun. In 1976, the International Astronomical Union revised the definition of the AU for greater precision, defining it as the distance from the centre of the Sun at which a particle of negligible mass, in an unperturbed circular orbit, would have an orbital period of 365.2568983 days (one Gaussian year). This definition gives a value that is slightly less than the mean Earth-Sun distance. An alternative way of stating the definition is that an AU is the distance at which the heliocentric gravitational constant (the product GM?) is equal to (0.017 202 098 95)² AU³/d².

Last Updated on Friday, 05 September 2008 01:11