Category Archives: Astronomy

December 14, 2020 · 23:15

The Great Conjunction – December 14th

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.

Tomorrow we try again…

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December 13, 2020 · 22:54

Cloudy Sunday

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.

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December 10, 2020 · 23:54

The Great Conjunction – December 10th

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.

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December 3, 2020 · 23:59

Maybe Tomorrow

The Chinese have landed a robot probe on the moon. It’s scooped up samples and then taken off to lunar orbit, heading back to Earth in a little bit. It will be the first time since the mid 1970’s that samples have been brought back from the moon.

The Japanese had their own asteroid sample pick up a couple years ago and on Saturday the vehicle with the sample will be coming back to land in Australia.

Meanwhile, yesterday the Arecibo radio telescope collapsed in Puerto Rico.

We could use a win. Maybe tomorrow, maybe next week, SpaceX is going to try to take a 30-story rocket that looks like something out of an Isaac Asimov novel and send it 50,000 feet up into the sky, then try to land it like they do their Falcon 9 rockets.

It’s insane. It will be cool. Let’s do it!

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November 29, 2020 · 23:35

Put A Ring On It – Full Moon Edition

It’s a full moon tonight, and in and hour and a half or so there will be a penumbral lunar eclipse. Despite the big name, it’s not something that’s even likely to be visible to the naked eye. In short, the Earth’s shadow has a dark, inner part (umbra) and a much, much fainter outer part (penumbra) and the Moon will be going through a portion of that thin outer part. If I didn’t tell you it was happening, you wouldn’t know it by looking or noticing anything different.

Now, when the Moon goes through the inner, umbral part of the Earth’s shadow, it can be spectacular and the Moon can appear to get dark, turn red, or orange, or even dark brown and almost disappear for up to an hour or more. (See my pictures from the 2014 lunar eclipse here, and the 2015 lunar eclipse here.)

Nothing so dramatic tonight. BUT…

I took a peek just now, and there’s a very high, thin layer of clouds over SoCal. That means the moonlight is passing through a very fine layer of ice crystals, which makes a 22° arc all the way around the moon, sometimes known as a moon ring or winter halo.

It’s not a subtle effect and the sight is spectacular, but it doesn’t make for a nice crisp picture, especially with the full moon being so, So, SO much brighter than the ring. But the iPhone does a pretty good job of capturing it.

And with that, the four-day holiday weekend ends. Monday lurks, but at least we have an amazing, beautiful sight in the sky above us. And in twenty-four days we have the Christmas and New Year’s break with just a couple days of work over a ten day period. And in fifty-one days…

Hang in there!

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November 28, 2020 · 23:19

Wild Turkeys

We just had THAT holiday and most of us had some sort of turkey – and most of us are STILL eating turkey.

Turkeys’ range is known to cover most of North America east of the Rockies, but west of the Great Plains the range is spottier. The map actually doesn’t show them much of anywhere down in Southern California – but I have evidence that they’re here, at least in the San Diego / Mount Palomar area as of 2007.

The Mount Palomar Observatory with the world famous 200″ telescope is extremely cool to visit. I recommend it if you visit the Southern California / San Diego area.

The problem with getting down the mountain is that our brakes started overheating, and when they heat up they don’t brake. This is bad.

There are pull-outs and rest stops for just this sort of thing, so we stopped for a few minutes to let the brakes cool. It’s a heavily wooded area and after a couple minutes, on the other side of the road, I noticed movement in the bushes.

Naturally, I grabbed my camera, crossed the road, and hoped it wasn’t bears or something hungry and fanged. It wasn’t, it was a flock of wild turkeys.

They were off in the bushes, moving in and out of sunshine, so it was tough getting a good photo. There were seven or eight total, and the coloration on them was astonishing. Their feathers were iridescent when the sun caught them.

So believe it or not, there are wild turkeys in the Southern California mountains. I have proof, and now so do you!

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November 4, 2020 · 23:57

The Day After – Maybe

Four years ago I was still stunned but trying to regain my psychological balance. Humor, sarcasm (I tried to spell that “scarcasm” and it occurs to me that it might not be that inaccurate), and snark seemed to be my primary weapons (BIG surprise:)

When in doubt, do something really outrageous responsible, insane adult-like, and over the top mundane! That’s the way to stick it to the Man be boring as dishwater! George Carlin My mother and Abby Hoffman Sister Mary Thecla would be proud!

Well, this time around it’s better, in large part because what my brain and about a zillion pundits had said would happen has and a shit-ton of mail-in ballots got counted and more states started getting declared for Biden and very few for Beelzebub and as of the moment we need one more state of four outstanding to fall for Biden and it’s over. Well, except for the bazillion lawsuits and the threat of martial law and an actual coup…

So let’s all breathe. Drink some water.

Let’s watch something fun and/or funny – we watched the “David Byrne’s American Utopia” special on HBO (fourth viewing for me), then I caught the last 2/3 of “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” which was funny and wonderful, then I caught the last 2/3 of “Good Will Hunting” which was gut-wrenching and wonderful.

Tomorrow may or may not have answers. But we’ll get through it. Maybe we’ll even go to space again tomorrow – there’s a SpaceX satellite launch scheduled, you can watch online in the afternoon.

In the meantime, here’s a picture of the almost-full-ish moon and Mars from Sunday night, through some high clouds. It was taken with my iPhone and a nasty blue lens flare from the super bright moon edited out in Photoshop, but it’s still a pretty cool photo for an iPhone 8. I’m trying a new app (Halide) that someone recommended for über low light and astrophotography.

We’ll get through this, together.

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November 2, 2020 · 23:59

On The Precipice Of The Future

So… We all know what tomorrow is and what’s at stake. I’m feeling confident, but then again, I was feeling fine four years ago too, so once burned, twice shy.

But while contemplating the future for us all, I wanted tonight to make sure everyone had seen a couple of things that relate to a bigger, better future that’s important to me and all of us, even those not in the US.

First, today’s the 20th anniversary of the day the first crew boarded the International Space Station.

For every single day for the past twenty years, there have been at least two or three folks off the planet. Always. Every day.

That record is still fragile. If there were an emergency on ISS (and there have been a couple times when things could have gone south that badly) the crew can always escape in their Soyuz or Shuttle or Dragon or (soon) their Starliner and come home. But that endurance streak would be snapped.

Some time in the next few years there will probably be a Chinese station, independent of ISS. And there’s talk of the Russians taking their modules from ISS and breaking away to join with some new modules they’re building to make an independent station, separate from the ISS. And there might be independent, commercial stations, or even hotels and tourist stations, within the next ten years or so. And before that we’ll probably have folks living permanently in a station orbiting the moon or down on the lunar surface.

We just have to get there from here.

Meanwhile, way out in the solar system, an American robot spacecraft called OSIRIS-REx has been orbiting a “tiny” asteroid called Bennu for a couple of years. In that time it’s mapped the miniscule gravitational field (you or I could easily just jump off the asteroid with escape velocity) and mapped it to astonishing precision.

That biggest boulder in the lower right is 10-20 meters across, with the whole thing being roughly 490 meters in diameter. It’s a “rubble pile” asteroid, debris left over from the formation of the solar system a few billion years ago.

One key goal of the OSIRIS-REx mission was to get a sample from the surface and return it to Earth for study. To do this there’s an arm on the spacecraft with a collector plate that’s about the size of a large pizza pan and six or seven inches thick. OSIRIS-REx was designed to do a Touch And Go (TAG) maneuver where the head would come in contact softly (-ish) with the surface for a few seconds, a stream of gas would get sprayed, causing debris, dust, and rocks to get sprayed up into the collector plate and captured.

They had no idea how well or how poorly this would work. Put the plate down on a rock and you get nothing but a broken spacecraft. Put it down crooked or not flat and you only collect a few grams of material. A lot could go wrong, and this was all being done by a robot acting on its own. At the time of the sample retrieval, Bennu was 233 million miles from Earth, over 18 light-minutes away. We couldn’t control it “live,” we just had to program it and hope for the best.

Two weeks ago, on October 20th, they made their attempt. The surface had been mapped and a flat spot was targeted, but it was the size of a couple of parking spaces, with larger rocks all around that could destroy the arm. Was the surface going to be hard or rocky? Or super soft and fluffy so the collector plate would sink down in and be trapped? Or somewhere in between?

It was spectacular! The targeting was perfect, just a couple inches off after seven years in space, billions of miles traveled. The surface was soft and fluffy and the blast of air kicked up a HUGE cloud of material, much of it being trapped in the collector plate. The collector plate head actually sank down into the surface a foot or so, so it’s a good thing you or I weren’t there trying to jump off the surface. It’s so fluffy and loose we would probably sink right down in.

They were hoping to maybe collect 60 grams of material, about the size of a candy bar. Instead they filled the collector head with an estimated 4,000+ grams of material, so much that the mechanism for keeping it in got jammed open and they were starting to leak material. Before they could lose very much, they skipped a few anticipated steps and moved on to stowing the collector head and its treasure for the journey back to Earth.

My point is that we are capable of amazing things as a people, when we work together and dare to dream. Obviously the last four years have shown what can happen if we allow fear and hatred to separate us, and this year has shown what can happen and how many of us can die if we ignore science and reason.

But tomorrow that can change, and I’m hoping it will. We can start to fix the damage done in the last four years and to set sight on the stars again.

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October 4, 2020 · 20:51

Smoky October Full Moonrise

Three days ago, back before I realized that I would be triggered by a software “update” (done no doubt for “my benefit”) (YES, I’m still pissy about it, I’ll start behaving now, sorta), I was down the block looking for the first full moon moonrise of October.

There was a LOT of smoke still being kicked out by the Bobcat Fire off in that direction. (Hey, they’re all the way up to 88% contained now!) That streak above it is a plane going into Runway 08 at Burbank – we’re looking right down the flight path.

It was incredibly orange! This doesn’t even begin to convey it.

Shorter exposures that don’t show the landscape but bring out the detail in the moon do a much better job of showing what it actually looked like. Let’s hear it for the human eye with a MUCH higher dynamic range than even the best digital cameras.

Twenty-five minutes or so after rising, the moon was out of the worst of the smoke and just looking a bit brownish.

That’s one – look for a second full moon, a “blue moon,” on Halloween night, October 31st!

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September 20, 2020 · 23:04

Bobcat Still Burning

After last night, when some defensive backfires were set on the east side of the Mount Wilson Observatory, which looked scary but were actually controlled and to prevent worse, we were hoping that Mount Wilson was out of danger from the Bobcat Fire.

Not so fast.

This afternoon another flare up occurred on the north side of the mountain. You can see it start just after 12:30 (time stamps in the upper left) in the 12:00 to 15:00 time-lapse video, then blow up in the 15:00 to 18:00 video, and continue to spread to the north in the 18:00 to 21:00 video. (All videos and images from the HPWREN webcam system unless otherwise noted.)

Here’s where we are now:

The good news is that all of this new fire growth is pushing away from the Observatory grounds. This is all about a mile to the north on the next ridge over, pushing up toward Highway 2.

(Image from Google Maps – incredibly professional graphics from yours truly.)

There have been a LOT of water and Phos-Chek drops today. At one point someone monitoring the radios tweeted that all air tankers had been diverted to Mount Wilson to make a stand there. It obviously worked.

These are the TV and radio transmission towers on the ridge just west of the ridge where the observatory is. You can clearly see them in the HPWREN pictures I shared on Thursday. But as I said, the flare up isn’t super close to the observatory – just close, not super close.

Also, while I’m obviously invested in the Mount Wilson Observatory site being protected, this fire continues to grow almost out of control for the fifth day with thousands of homes being threatened on the south side of the mountains where the San Gabriel Valley is and on the north side where the Antelope Valley lies.

Up in the Antelope Valley, they were using our pair of Canadian Super Scoopers, refilling them on the fly from Lake Palmdale. Since that lake is a recreational site and at least the shore facilities aren’t closed off, it’s drawing crowds to watch.

(Video credit to Matt Winheim, Executive Director/Superintendent of the Palmdale Aerospace Academy)

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