Category Archives: Space

It was orange, and about 99% full, and bright, and orange, and right there outside the back window and over the hill and the San Fernando Valley.

The iPhone algorithm wants to make the whole scene bright, so it’s a long exposure and horribly overexposes the moon. The good news is that it saves some of the color.

The “good camera” (Canon Rebel XT DSLR with a 75-300 mm Tamron telephoto lens) set at 75mm does the same thing, but I can override that, manually focus, and so on. I just wish that I had had the time to grab and set up a tripod, but it was a complete spur of the moment opportunity.

But the really good part about digital cameras instead of film is that photons are dirt cheap, so if you shoot enough hundreds of photos in the five minutes you have, statistical fluctuations say that you’ll get one that’s decent. And that’s what I got – one.

I’m going to call that a win.

Tonight’s pass was fairly low to the horizon and not that bright (low = lots of atmosphere to look through = dimmer), but the winds had died down and while it was cool (52°F), the crescent moon was up there, so let’s give it a try! Practice, practice, practice!

Not bad! Low, almost due west, climbing at a shallow angle up and to the right, where it doesn’t even get high enough to get above that huge pine tree across the street.

Image from Heavens-Above.com

As the prophecy foretold!

Shift a little to the right as the ISS clears the big pine tree, only to watch it fade into orbital night just before it gets to the Italian cypress trees. The airplane track starting just above the cypress trees and heading north (bottom center)? That’s Fedex #1839 from San Diego to Oakland, at 36,000 feet.

But wait – there’s more!

The faint line coming from center upper right to center lower left? That caught my eye just as the ISS was fading. It’s going due north to due south, so it’s got to be some sort of polar satellite. Possibly a weather satellite, or a spy satellite. Possibly ours, possibly theirs. No clue.

But I shot a much longer string of photos, continuing after the polar satellite had faded into darkness. Merging all of them you can get a great view of how stars near Polaris, the North Star, the pole star (at the lower left) don’t appear to move at all in a time lapse photograph like this (they’re dots) while stars much further away from the pole (on the right) will trail into little arcs as the Earth turns beneath them.

Still can’t find Polaris? Here’s your handy-dandy tutorial, learned lo these many decades ago on some Boy Scout camping trip. Find the Big Dipper (outlined in magenta), it’s easy, a big, bright constellation. On the far end of the dipper portion are the two “pointer” stars. Follow the direction they point (green line) about five times the distance between the two pointers, and you’ll se the one semi-decently bright star in the area – that’s Polaris!

Now go back and blow up that first picture up above. Polaris here is to the upper right of the top of the telephone pole. Again, a dot, not an arc. Now look at the stars on the far left side. See how much they appear to have moved in the two minutes of time covered by this series of pictures?

Flat Earth my ass!

(Should be another great pass tomorrow night, much higher, much brighter!)

As of 18:00 there were a few scattered high clouds and I thought it would be a great night to watch a fantastic ISS pass.

Image from Heavens-Above.com app

At 19:45 I went out – and it was about 90% clouded over. Thin clouds, so I could see the moon and the brighter stars in Orion, Sirius, but that was about it. I figured I wouldn’t see much at all, but what the heck, give it a try, right?

DAMN! I love this new lens. It is a razor sharp light bucket. With the naked eye through those thin clouds I could see about four, maybe five of those stars…

The green blobby thing in the lower left is that damn street light – I would pay good money to be able to switch it off for about twenty minutes.

And that white & red & green streak coming from the bottom, straight to the top? Alaska Airlines #1495, out of LAX to Spokane.

Then the ISS was overhead…

The clouds were much thicker overhead, not nearly as many stars poking through as it headed off to the north (lower left).

Stupid trees. A quick shift of the tripod, and off the ISS went, fading into the orbital night just before it went behind the roof.

If you’re in Los Angeles, there are passes every evening through the 21st, with the best one on Friday night, the 19th at 19:56. (Can’t make this shit up… Some of you will understand. The rest of you – take my word for it.)

It was a good day to land an SUV-sized, two-ton, nuclear-powered robot on Mars. I was properly dressed for the occasion.

These are “EDL socks,” displaying Entry-Descent-Landing, otherwise known as the “Seven Minutes of Terror.”

They’re available from sciencesocks.co – they’re also very comfy.

There’s also an image of the launch from Earth on the back, but I forgot to take a picture of that.

The hat I got from JPL years ago. I actually had to miss the landing live due to a long Zoom call that came up at the last minute (okay, I had it on one monitor with the sound off) and during the call I was referred to as “the guy wearing the baseball cap.” It’s so much more than a baseball cap…

Perseverance is down safe and has started sending back pictures and data. The truly annoying hints from a number of folks at JPL tonight (via Twitter) indicate that they have some truly SPECTACULAR images to share coming up. Keep your eyes open for a press conference in the next day or two.