Space cadet | Family dude | Photographer | Music lover | Traveler | Science fiction fan | Hugo Award nominee | Writer | 5x NASA Social participant | KC Chiefs fan | LA Kings fan | Senior Director of Finance & Administration for ALS Network | Member & former staff Finance Officer at the Commemorative Air Force SoCal Wing | Hard core left-wing liberal | Looking for whatever other shenanigans I can get into
Better results tonight – if you’re on the West Coast, go look *NOW* and you can probably still see it. (Assuming your skies aren’t cloudy, of course…) Look to the southwest!
Gorgeous! Jupiter (brighter) on the bottom, Saturn on the top.
Zoomed in (300 mm telephoto lens on a Canon Rebel XT) you can clearly see a couple of the moons on Jupiter.
Go look! Or if it’s too late tonight for you or it’s cloudy where you are, look tomorrow! Or Thursday!
Closest approach will be next Monday, December 21st!
The good news is that it was crystal clear tonight.
The bad news is that I need to get out a little earlier, before Jupiter and Saturn get down into the trees. They’re moving toward the west, heading for the morning sky not too long after the conjunction, which means they’re setting earlier than they did a month or two ago, or even a week or two ago. So they were sort of “down among ’em.”
The worse news was that it was again windy as hell, which means that any kind of a long exposure with the telephoto lens extended out had the camera bouncing around like it was on a roller coaster.
Yeah, don’t think NASA’s going to be asking to use that photo any time soon.
But if you’re dedicated and persistent (as opposed to stubborn and pig-headed – it’s a very fine line) you might get one decent photo at maximum magnification.
It’s a short one, so this photo didn’t collect as many photons as the ones on Thursday, but you can see that they’re getting closer.
Again, no good view of the Great Conjunction from our part of the planet tonight.
The clouds were thin enough a couple of times to see Jupiter through, and I was pretty sure I could see Saturn at one point, but conditions were far from ideal for astronomy.
Tonight’s the peak of the Geminid meteor shower, which by all accounts from those reporting in from across the world and country is doing pretty well, several bright meteors per hour, even from light polluted cities. I may stick my head out before I go to bed. But I’ll have to remember to be back in by midnight. Not a Cinderella problem, but a much more practical issue with the lawn sprinklers coming on promptly at midnight.
I’m cold enough – cold and wet sounds like a good way to get sick. Sorry, there’s enough of that going around without going out and doing something stupid.
We all know that the year sucked. But we’re desperately trying to keep some sense of normalcy in our Christmas decorating – primarily because it’s a last ditch attempt to submit to the horror and ennui.
Today was the day we put up the tree. I tried to play with the process a bit in some Facebook posts.
The first thing I noticed is that it seemed much shorter than in previous years. First troubleshooting step is to assume operator error!
Taller now, but seems to be strangely darker and less festive than nominal…
Very much better, complete with white lights, colored lights, bubble lights, and the most eclectic mix of ornaments covering nearly forty years that you’ve ever seen. No “theme” here (I remember a year as a child when my mother went nuts on a theme and got a white flocked tree, no green at all, and then put red spherical ornaments all over – it was very Malaria Trump-ish) other than the theme of “This Is The Willett Family History.”
One new ornament that I just got (after seeing a pilot/JPL acquaintance on Twitter get one and show it off):
Finally, this year we got the tree set up properly in the middle of the living room show window that looks out onto the front yard and street.
So many things actually accomplished today, so tired, feeling like so many things got left as loose ends… It’s Friday? Good, I guess…
Cloudy tonight, so no views of the Great Conjunction. Maybe tomorrow.
Meanwhile, the house is going insane.
Who knew that these fancy programmable thermostats could flip a digit, blow a fuse, crater a chip, or whatever it was and all of a sudden not allow any temp to be set except 40°? That might have been comfy if it were Celsius, but in Fahrenheit it’s a bit nippy for my taste.
The good news is that it wasn’t an intermittent problem – it was a fatal one, at least for the thermostat. It would have been extremely frustrating to have the landlord show up for repairs and have it then (of course) be working fine. Nope, it conveniently had turned into an electronic brick that would only reliably tell the time and the current temperature.
All better now, but not what I wanted to spend a chunk of my Friday dealing with.
How was your Friday? Onward, bravely, into the weekend!!
The planets move about the sky in their orbits, like clockwork, and sometimes they come near each other from our viewpoint. This is called a conjunction.
We’ve had conjunctions before, they’re not that uncommon at all. Jupiter and Venus get close pretty regularly. The Moon literally “runs over” planets from time to time (this is referred to as an occultation) and gets close to something (often Venus) pretty much every month.
You’ve probably heard news reports, possibly some rabid ones, about the “Christmas star” coming up in eleven days. The simple fact is that it’s just another conjunction, where Jupiter and Saturn will be in conjunction, close together from our viewpoint in the solar system. What makes this one special is that both planets are reasonably bright, and for this particular conjunction they’re going to be REALLY close together.
It should look gorgeous.
You don’t need a telescope. You don’t even need binoculars, although even a simple pair will show you some of the larger and brighter moons of both Saturn and Jupiter. You just need your naked eye and a clear sunset sky. Go out right after sunset, look to the southwest.
Jupiter will be very bright, white, and Saturn will be just a bit to the upper left of it, slightly dimmer, with a slight yellowish tinge if you’ve got a clear, dark sky.
If you’ve got binoculars or a big telephoto lens, zoom in a bit. Depending on timing, you may see four small dots in a line near Jupiter, and maybe one small dot near Saturn. Those would be moons.
Blow this (so-so quality) picture up and you’ll see two small dots at about the four o’clock position on Jupiter, and maybe one very near Saturn at about the seven o’clock position.
Over the next eleven days the two planets will appear to get closer and closer. They’ll be just a small fraction of this distance apart.
Tomorrow night I’ll try to get a better tripod setup so there’s not so much vibration, and I’ll try to get better pictures. I hope you’ll be out trying to see it as well.
I ranted and raved enthusiastically here when SpaceX first landed a Falcon 9 first stage booster on a barge, something I thought was insane to even try when I first heard of it, and I’m a space cadet with a science & engineering background. Obviously I needed to be thinking bigger, since not only did they prove it can be done, they now do it regularly and almost routinely. (Another launch scheduled for Saturday afternoon, a SiriusXM satellite.) They’ve now had 68 successful booster recoveries and one booster has been launched 7 times already.
But they’re going to retire the Falcon 9 sooner rather than later because they’re building Starship, a two stage monstrosity that will be bigger than NASA’s old Saturn V rocket. The first stage (Super Heavy) will fly back and land like the Falcon 9 does and the second (Starship) will go to orbit, the ISS, the moon, Mars, beyond (literally) and then re-enter the atmosphere like a cross between the Space Shuttle and a space capsule, landing upright like the Falcon 9 first stage does. To be used again, and again, and again…
Yeah. Right.
Today they had the first really big test flight of a full-size, early design of the Starship. SN8 is the 8th Starship test vehicle to be built, and it was scheduled to take off, fly to about 44,000 feet, cut off its engines, flip over onto its belly to coast and glide and slow down, switch fuel tanks, at the last second (and I didn’t realize just how much “last second” meant “LAST FREAKIN’ SECOND” until I saw them do it) relight the engines and flip back up to an upright position, and land gently upright. Elon Musk, head of SpaceX, gave it no better than a 1 in 3 chance of success. Most everyone at SpaceX would have been perfectly happy if it had lifted off and gotten to 44,000 feet before blowing up or spinning out of control. That would have been wonderful for a first test flight.
It. Was. Amazing!
(video from SpaceX – it’s a long video since there was a scrub and a re-set in there, so go to the 1:47:53 mark for the launch if it doesn’t go there automatically)
Take off with no explosion! ✅
Throttle back one engine, then a second one, to keep the loads on the vehicle in range ✅ (Those of us not on the inside at SpaceX didn’t know it was supposed to happen so it looked like a problem, but it was going just as planned.)
Reach 44,000 feet, shut down the engines, flip over onto our belly without going out of control. ✅ ✅ ✅
Maintain perfect control gliding back down toward not just the planet, but the precise point on the planet where the landing pad is! ✅
Perform that engine restart and flip back up to vertical thing! ✅ (They’re calling that maneuver the “Crazy Elon.” If you’ve watched “Hunt For Red October,” you’ll know why.)
Get vertical, get down right onto the landing pad, land upright… ✅ ✅ ✅
…way, way to freaking fast and end in a gigantic explosion ❌❌❌🚀💥💥💥😥
It was a test flight with minimal expectations and maximum hopes. We got much closer to the maximum than the minimum. And that’s how we get that much closer to doing it all next time. They’re already building SN9 through SN15, as well as the first Super Heavy, SH1.
I may yet get the chance to get this creaky, flabby butt of mine off the planet.
Finally, if you want to know just how insane that final “Crazy Elon” move is and just how “last minute” that flip is, watch this video that SpaceX released late tonight from a camera very near the landing pad, looking straight up at the incoming SN8.
The sunset was nice, if not spectacular. It’s chilly, and the winds are again really whipping up here on the hill.
How windy? Lemme tell you a story…
In my home office (aka one of the spare bedrooms) I prefer it warmer than the rest of the house, so I tend to keep the door closed. The computers and printers keep it warmer just fine. But unless I’m actually on a call or a Zoom meeting, I don’t necessarily want the door shut all the way, so I’ll leave it partially closed. Not latched, not open, but in that in-between position where the spring loaded latching mechanism has engaged and put some tension on the door frame, but it hasn’t clicked into the hole in the door frame yet.
Four or five times today the house has flexed enough with the pressure of the wind that it has torqued the rectangular, interior, hallway door frame enough to allow the latching mechanism to find the hole and snap shut. This sounds like a freaking rifle. And when it comes totally out of the blue, especially after it’s NEVER done this before in 2+ years here, it’s disturbing. Scares the shit out of me.
The CAF Southern California Wing’s hangars are at Camarillo Airport (CMA) and we have a neighboring airport just a few miles to our south, the Naval Air Station Point Mugu. It’s a great place for an airshow every couple of years (if we can ever get this COVID-19 bullshit behind us) and they fly some out of there, but there’s not a ton of air traffic in and out of there. It’s not like living next to MCAS Miramar or NAS Oceana where you can see a pretty steady stream of fighters, cargo aircraft, and reconnaissance missions.
But as I was leaving yesterday, this big guy was lumbering in from the north, hanging there exactly the same way that bricks don’t.
He was a ways off, turning to final approach, but I’m pretty sure that’s a C-5 Galaxy. Usually the cargo planes going into Point Mugu are the smaller C-130 Hercules (back when I was flying I had a couple of them on long finals that I gave a wide berth, because the wake turbulence can be a bitch and a half if you’re in a tiny Cessna!) but today we had something large being moved.
We Love The Stars Too Fondly 