The Astronomy Thread

[noraina]

Assalamu alaykum

I have the firm belief that within each one of us is an amateur astronomer . The awe and amazement of the vast universe and beyond has always been fascinating, you really appreciate the immense power and beauty of the creation of Allah swt. And if you look back at the Islamic Golden Age, astronomy was one of the religiously-motivated fields the Muslim scientists excelled in.

Everyone's free to contribute any interesting pieces of information to do with astronomy, or just admire the beauty of the vastness of it all.

My love of astronomy goes way back to me when I was 10 years old, standing in the freezing cold until my teeth were chattering, well after midnight, me and my father peering through a telescope. We saw some of the most amazing, otherworldly things subhanAllah and my love of the night sky never went.

How beautiful is this ma'sha'Allah, the Large Megallanic Cloud

 

[ardianto]

Wa'alaikumsalam, young sister.

You remind me to my childhood time when I observed the night sky through my father binocular and wrote note about what I have seen on my book.

I love astronomy too.

 

[noraina]

I'm quite sure in Indonesia someone would get a much better view of the night sky than here in cloudy England, .


Some interesting facts I found:

. When you look at the Andromeda galaxy (which is 2.3 million light years away), the light you are seeing took 2.3 million years to reach you. Thus you are seeing the galaxy as it was 2.3 million years ago.

. Light from the sun takes 8 minutes to reach you, thus you see the sun as it was 8 minutes ago. It might have blown up 4 minutes ago and you wouldn't know about it!



. The Earth is not a sphere! It actually is an oblate spheroid, it is squashed slightly at the poles and bulges out at the equator due to its rotation.



. Spare a thought for the constellations that never made it into the official list... these include Machina Electrica (the electricity generator), Officina Typographica (The Printing Office), and Turdus Solitarius (the solitary thrush)



. When Galileo viewed Saturn for the first time through a telescope, he described the planet as having "ears". It was not until 1655 that Christian Huygens suggested the crazy theory that they might be an enormous set of rings around the planet.



. If you could put Saturn in an enormous bathtub, it would float. The planet is less dense than water.



. A teaspoon-full of Neutron star would weigh about 112 million tonnes.



. Jupiter is heavier than all the other planets put together.



. Even on the clearest night, the human eye can only see about 3,000 stars. There are an estimated 100,000,000,000 in our galaxy alone!



. The tallest mountain in the solar system is Olympus Mons, on Mars at a height of about 15 miles, three times the height of Mount Everest. It covers an area about half the size of Spain.



. If the sun were the size of a dot on an ordinary-sized letter 'i', then the nearest star would be 10 miles away.



. Half-a-billionth of the energy released by the sun reaches the Earth



. Temperatures on Venus are hot enough to melt lead.



. If you could travel at the speed of light (186,000 miles per second) it would take 100,000 years to cross our galaxy!



. Only one side of the moon ever faces Earth. The moons period of rotation is exactly the same as it's period of orbit.



. Betelgeuse, the bright star on Orion's top-left shoulder, is so big that if it was placed where the sun is, it would swallow up Earth, Mars and Jupiter!



. If you stand on the equator, you are spinning at about 1,000 mph in as the Earth turns, as well as charging along at 67,000 mph round the sun.



. On the equator you are about 3% lighter than at the poles, due to the centrifugal* force of the Earth spinning.



. The atmosphere on Earth is proportionately thinner than the skin on an apple.



. On Mercury a day (the time it takes for it to spin round once) is 59 Earth-days. Its year (the time it takes to orbit the sun) is 88 days- that means there are fewer than 2 days in a year!



. If a piece of the sun the size of a pinhead were to be placed on Earth, you could not safely stand within 90 miles of it!



. Its estimated that the number of stars in the universe is greater than the number of grains of sand on all the beaches in the world! On a clear night, we can see the equivalent of a handful of sand.



. Every year the sun evaporates 100,000 cubic miles of water from Earth (that weighs 400 trillion tonnes!)



. Jupiter acts as a huge vacuum cleaner, attracting and absorbing comets and meteors. Some estimates say that without Jupiters gravitational influence the number of massive projectiles hitting Earth would be 10,000 times greater.



. Astronomers believe that space is not a complete vacuum- there are three atoms per cubic metre.



. Saturn is not the only planet with rings- Neptune has it's own ring system.

 

[Serinity]

I love to explore the universe.

In Jannah, In shaa' Allah, I will be able to touch the stars, up close, etc.

And Allah :swt: knows best.

 

[anatolian]

2:117 "Wonderful Originator of the heavens and the earth, and when He decrees an affair, He only says to it, Be, so there it is"

 

[anatolian]

86:11 وَالسَّمَاء ذَاتِ الرَّجْعِ (Was samâi zâtir raj’i) (And the Sky which has "turn back")



everything in the universe is turning..and the universe is turning back to it's beggining

 

[talibilm]

Assalamu alaykum

I have the firm belief that within each one of us is an amateur astronomer . The awe and amazement of the vast universe and beyond has always been fascinating, you really appreciate the immense power and beauty of the creation of Allah swt. And if you look back at the Islamic Golden Age, astronomy was one of the religiously-motivated fields the Muslim scientists excelled in.

Everyone's free to contribute any interesting pieces of information to do with astronomy, or just admire the beauty of the vastness of it all.

My love of astronomy goes way back to me when I was 10 years old, standing in the freezing cold until my teeth were chattering, well after midnight, me and my father peering through a telescope. We saw some of the most amazing, otherworldly things subhanAllah and my love of the night sky never went.

How beautiful is this ma'sha'Allah, the Large Megallanic Cloud

Sister

Jazakallah for starting this very important needed thread which Allah has ordered us to do in the Noble Quran.


Noble Quran 10:101 '' Say, "Observe what is in the heavens and earth."


ALLAH SAYS STARS ARE BIGGER,GREATER

Noble Quran 15:16 '' And We have placed within the heaven great stars and have beautified it for the observers.''

Noble Quran 25:61 '' Blessed is He who has placed in the sky great stars and placed therein a [burning] lamp and luminous moon.


''And indeed, We have put the big stars in the heaven and We beautified it for the beholders.''

Note : We have seen the noble Quran describing the sun ONLY as a Lamp but never called it as GREAT But Note Allah , the All Knowing describes the Stars as " GREAT '' in the above two verses and is proved absolutely true in our era but would have perplexed a person before few centuries when the telescope was not invented yet since Sun appears brighter than against all the stars put together. When i was lad some hadith confused me when it said something like that the parents of memorizers and implementers of the Noble Quran will be honored on the DOJ with a crown brighter than the sun when lay men on the earth sees the Sun is brighter than all the stars put together but Astronomy says that there are plenty of stars 1000's of time brighter than the sun. Subhanallah

 

[Serinity]

There are blackholes that are 2 billion times the mass of the sun. Then there are hypergiants, etc. Amazing really.

And Allah :swt: knows best.

 

[sister herb]

Oooo... this thread reminds me how I was standing in the middle of snowy garden looking to the night sky and tried to see the comets. I saw both Hyakutake and Hale-Bob with binoculars. Plus I got the feeling of the icy toes too.

;D

One total solar eclipse I saw too. It was scary moment, cold and lonely mood like the sun would never will shine again but terrible darkness and freezing cold would stay here forever.

 

[noraina]

Jazakallah for starting this very important needed thread which Allah has ordered us to do in the Noble Quran.


Noble Quran 10:101 '' Say, "Observe what is in the heavens and earth."


ALLAH SAYS STARS ARE BIGGER,GREATER

Noble Quran 15:16 '' And We have placed within the heaven great stars and have beautified it for the observers.''

Noble Quran 25:61 '' Blessed is He who has placed in the sky great stars and placed therein a [burning] lamp and luminous moon.


''And indeed, We have put the big stars in the heaven and We beautified it for the beholders.''

Note : We have seen the noble Quran describing the sun ONLY as a Lamp but never called it as GREAT But Note Allah , the All Knowing describes the Stars as " GREAT '' in the above two verses and is proved absolutely true in our era but would have perplexed a person before few centuries when the telescope was not invented yet since Sun appears brighter than against all the stars put together. When i was lad some hadith confused me when it said something like that the parents of memorizers and implementers of the Noble Quran will be honored on the DOJ with a crown brighter than the sun when lay men on the earth sees the Sun is brighter than all the stars put together but Astronomy says that there are plenty of stars 1000's of time brighter than the sun. Subhanallah

Wa alaykum assalam,

SubhanAllah....something I love about astronomy is how it is quite closely intertwined with Islam, in a sense. From when Allah swt tells us to observe the universe as one of His signs (and what amazing signs they are!), to observing the movement of the Sun and Moon for salah times, Ramadan, ect, and to how Muslim astronomers were the leaders of this field for centuries. It's just awe-inspiring.

JazakAllah khayr for sharing this.

There are blackholes that are 2 billion times the mass of the sun. Then there are hypergiants, etc. Amazing really.

And Allah knows best

Wa alaykum assalam,

It's good you mentioned black holes, I have been obsessed with them since I first heard of them. They are probably the most *amazing* thing I found about space - how a dying star becomes a black hole with gravity so intense not even light can escape...subhanAllah.

Oooo... this thread reminds me how I was standing in the middle of snowy garden looking to the night sky and tried to see the comets. I saw both Hyakutake and Hale-Bob with binoculars. Plus I got the feeling of the icy toes too.



One total solar eclipse I saw too. It was scary moment, cold and lonely mood like the sun would never will shine again but terrible darkness and freezing cold would stay here forever.

Ma'sha'Allah! I've never managed to catch any comets...and neither have I ever seen a full total eclipse. Can imagine it must have been such a ghostly experience.

And I've always found winter skies are the best for star gazing....firstly because it gets dark more quickly, lol, and there's this strange atmosphere in the cold, I don't know why but they're just amazing.

 

[talibilm]

There are blackholes that are 2 billion times the mass of the sun. Then there are hypergiants, etc. Amazing really.

And Allah :swt: knows best.

Yes Blackholes are Hypergiants just found from astronomers about 3 decades ago but the Noble Quran had mentioned it before 1400 years ago . The below video (unfortunately muted from its Islamic Nasheed by some selfish...and also sounds of tapper, knocker etc from the Noble Quran about those stars has been muted by jealous islamphobes) carries the best info with all the exact MULTIPLE references from the Noble Quran whose different meaning were understandable depending on the era when its read. All are applicable and All are true, subhanallah

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7BPeVRqBRM


and a description from tafsir of late Dr Israar Ahmed (rah alay)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a55Mb6cVzjs

 

[sister herb]

...and neither have I ever seen a full total eclipse. Can imagine it must have been such a ghostly experience.

As I remember, all birds stopped their singing. It was like all the nature would hold it´s breath during those moments of eclipse. It made me to think how fragile everything is here in the earth and how fast the life might be threatened.

 

[Kiro]

Err so much reading... must... increase... post count

 

[aaj]

Wa'alaikum as'salaam,


I took astronomy in uni. It was a fun class and I learned a lot. I've seen eclipses, solar and lunar, the dippers, planets, and a shooting star. My professor was sweedish, we used to discuss astronomy up to 30 mins at a time after class. We also talked about evolution vs creationism and he said that most scientists won't admit it in the open for sake of their career but in secrete they believe there is a Creator who is responsible for all this. How can you not fathom a Designer when seeing so much and are awed by it's majestic complexity and vastness.

 

[noraina]

Assalamu alaykum,

Okay, I haven't been organised about this. I'm a pretty serious self-researcher when it comes to astronomy and I want to share everything I learn here inshaAllah, anyone else can contribute or discuss anything. Such a fascinating subject and the more you read into it the more you're like....subhanAllah. There are some amazing abstract concepts which just leave your mind spinning.

So I'll be started from the planets in our Solar System, then to the different types of Moon, then the different types of Stars, and Galaxies, and Superclusters, and the Universe itself, and everything in between. InshaAllah

 

[Scimitar]

Be careful not to awaken Astronomy's ugly sister, Astrology - when you do your thing.

Scimi

 

[noraina]

Be careful not to awaken Astronomy's ugly sister, Astrology - when you do your thing.

Scimi

I've been careful to avoid that - although the two are very different disciplines which shouldn't be difficult to separate.

Astronomy is pure science and facts - rational signs of the existence of Allah swt.

Astrology is just trying to search for jibberish in the movements of the cosmic bodies and assuming they have some sort of implication for the lives of people on earth.

I remember once I told an aunt who had a poor grasp of English I liked astronomy - she went and told her family I had a thing with astrology. Astaghfirullah took me a long time to clear that up, but I reacted with enough horror to convince them how serious I was.

 

[Scimitar]

I've been careful to avoid that - although the two are very different disciplines which shouldn't be difficult to separate.

Never underestimate the stupidity of Muslims.

On Wake Up Project, circa 2011, there was a thread titled "Comet Elenin is coming". Muslims took some hadeeth and an ayaat out of Qur'an and rn with the "comet elenin is coming to earth in ramadhan and will be in our solar system in the middle of ramadhan - this is the blast in ramadhan we were told of"

Pure and blatant shirk. They gave the asma was-sifaat of Allah to a comet in space. I told the forum this, with evidences from the scholars copy pasted into that thread for the benefit of the members - but they just went off and started to character assassinate me instead, so I left the forum and made a video titled "the hidden shirk" and embedded it in that thread as my "goodbye post".

Two days later I had a PM on youtube, so I read it and was told to check the thread out after I posted the video... to my surprise, everyone had repented for their shirk and apologised to me for the character assassination.

What surprised me the most was the fact that they took info from a video but not in writing - the video was no different to my posts in that thread. Indoctrination via pixel is very effective it seems.

Anyway, There is a very fine line between astronomy and astrology - it's not clear as clear cut as you think.

Scimi

 

[noraina]

Never underestimate the stupidity of Muslims.

On Wake Up Project, circa 2011, there was a thread titled "Comet Elenin is coming". Muslims took some hadeeth and an ayaat out of Qur'an and rn with the "comet elenin is coming to earth in ramadhan and will be in our solar system in the middle of ramadhan - this is the blast in ramadhan we were told of"

Pure and blatant shirk. They gave the asma was-sifaat of Allah to a comet in space. I told the forum this, with evidences from the scholars copy pasted into that thread for the benefit of the members - but they just went off and started to character assassinate me instead, so I left the forum and made a video titled "the hidden shirk" and embedded it in that thread as my "goodbye post".

Two days later I had a PM on youtube, so I read it and was told to check the thread out after I posted the video... to my surprise, everyone had repented for their shirk and apologised to me for the character assassination.

What surprised me the most was the fact that they took info from a video but not in writing - the video was no different to my posts in that thread. Indoctrination via pixel is very effective it seems.

Anyway, There is a very fine line between astronomy and astrology - it's not clear as clear cut as you think.

Scimi

Sadly, ignorance and jahilliyah is so widespread throughout Muslims nations. Like the concepts of pirs and shrines in the subcontinent...need I say more?

But your warning is heeded, jazakAllah khayr.

 

[Scimitar]

Maryam al Astrolabiya

Date: 10th Century CE
Country: Syria


Mariam Al-Ijliya lived during the 10th century in Aleppo, Syria. Her father was an apprentice to a famous astrolabe maker in Baghdad and she in turn became his student.

Her hand-crafted designs were so intricate and innovative that from 944 AD-967 AD, she was employed by the ruler of the city, Sayf Al Dawla.

An astrolabe is a historical instrument used to predict the position of the sun, moon, planet, and stars. It was perfected during the Islamic Golden Age and the European Middle Ages and Renaissance. Many prominent historical figures (including writer Geoffery Chaucer and possibly ancient astronomer Claudius Ptolemy) have written about or made use of astrolabes. Astrolabes were made of several different disks and star charts.

Astrolabes were used in the fields of astronomy, astrology, and horoscopes. Muslims used it to find the Qibla, determine prayer times and the starting days of Ramadan and Eid.

Scimi