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dance of the planets (Friday, June 16, 2006 - 12:02:43 PM)
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Since I keep up with the weather, I knew that this weekend was going to be a bust for stargazing. It's a shame, too, since we had finally planned to go out to my parent's place in the boonies to enjoy the dark skies. I'm sure they would have enjoyed seeing some of our wonderous universe, as well.
Last night was clear as I could hope for, though, so I wanted to catch two sights before we get clouds for a straight week or more. With these events, it was more important to just see the planets themselves instead of any kind of detail on them, so I just used Carolaina's astro binoculars.
The first is the conjunction of Saturn and Mars. The actual event will take place a few days from now, but last night Mars was right in the middle of M44 (also known as the Beehive Cluster). I've doctored up a screenshot from Stellarium to show you how it looked to me:
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| Not quite as many stars were visible through her binoculars in the light-polluted skies, but this gives you a fairly close idea of how it looked to me. As usual, you can click the image for a full version of the doctored screenshot. |
Mercury is also visible in the early evening skies for the next few days. Last night it was nearly as high in the sky as it ever gets from our vantage point. I was really hoping to catch it since the weather may keep me from trying until it gets too low in the sky. I managed to see it! I had to go back inside and look at the sky in Stellarium to get my bearings, but I did find it. If you get the chance, here's how to find it: Thirty minutes after sunset, go out and make sure you have a clear view of the horizon to the west. Make an imaginary line through Saturn and Mars and it should point straight towards the stars Castor and Pollux to the right. Then, look a degree or two to the left of the left star, Castor, and drop straight down towards the horizon. It should be there looking a bit reddish from the low elevation in the sky. I saw it plainly enough through the binoculars, but as I tried to set them up on the camera tripod, the planet disappeared into the "muck" of the atmosphere near the horizon. But, I did get to see it again after many years, though, and that's more than Copernicus could have claimed!
Here's an image showing it's path through the western sky. I grabbed it from the June 10, 2006 archive page on SpaceWeather.com. It seems the image is origionally from Astronomy magazine, which we now have a subscription for!
In other personal news, I've pretty much given up on using Carolaina's digital camera for astro-imaging. It's timer and consecutive photo features won't work together, making it useless for trying to get good steady photos. So, on Wednesday night I got out my old webcam, hoping that they now have XP drivers for it--and, lo and behold, they do! I also downloaded the free program Registax and learned how to use it. Now, I just need a digital camera mount, the K3CCD Tools software, and I'll be ready to rock!
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my first astrophotography (Friday, June 9, 2006 - 11:25:49 PM)
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We've been having clear skies the past few nights, and I've been itching to get out our telescope. Tonight, I allowed myself to since I can stay up late and sleep in tomorrow morning. As expected, though, the nearly full moon is an 800-pound gorilla in the night sky--outshining nearly everything else. After failing to definitively find any Messier objects, I got a bright idea--grab Carolaina's digital camera!
Keep in mind all I did was hold the camera up to the eyepiece to get these photos, so they ended up looking really crappy, but it is a start. The scope has much more clarity and detail when you look through it with your own eyes. Here's the best of the pictures I got of the Moon and Jupiter.
| Jupiter and it's moons |
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| I used Paint Shop Pro to increase the gamma enhancement to see the moons and to decrease the oversaturated light from Jupiter. As a result, the moons ended up looking a bit smudged. You can just barely see Jupiter's cloud bands in the photo, but they look well defined and detailed when you look in the scope itself. This reminds me rather strongly of how Jupiter looks through my old toy telescope. |
| Moon |
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| This photo hasn't been digitally enhanced in any way. All I did was rotate and flip the image so that it's oriented as if you were looking at the left side moon with your own eyes. The camera couldn't seem to look at the whole field of view in the eyepiece, so the top-right viewing area in the eyepiece got fuzzed out by the camera itself. The smooth curve on the bottom-right was the edge of the viewing area in the eyepiece. This 11mm eyepiece zooms in too close to see all of the moon at once. Unfortunately, this is the best moon photo of the bunch I took. |
I was already interested and wanting to do this kind of thing before, but now I'll definitely have to get one of those webcams that can be used for astrophotography.
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Doctor Who!!! (Wednesday, June 7, 2006 - 12:23:06 PM)
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The latest episode of Doctor Who, The Impossible Planet, has transcended! It is the best bit of sci-fi I've seen in a LONG time, if ever. It mixed the best parts of the Alien movies, Doom (video game, not the horrendous movie) and the movies The Abyss and Event Horizon. Add in the fact that we watched it yesterday (6/6/2006) fit in well with the storyline. This episode and it's continuation next week has transcended Doctor Who completely and become something really incredible on it's own. If you're interested, you can see screencaps from the episode at the doctorwho.time-and-space.co.uk site.
I may be a bit biased, but this is the absolute best thing on TV ever. I can't wait until the continuation episode next week.
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fascist America (Wednesday, May 31, 2006 - 12:18:35 PM)
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Sorry about another political post, but this is important to me.
I came across an article that was posted as a comment to a Slashdot story about a recent Supreme Court decision. A user reposted an entire article from a magazine called Free Inquiry. It sounds like a magazine equivalent of all those kooky free press newspapers you can find in any mid-to-large sized city. Despite that, the article is very well written and researched. The original author found patterns of behavior common to all fascist regimes in history and listed them. It seems to describe the current state of America very well. I've said for a while now that we're increasingly living in a police state. Read the article and see if you don't agree:
Fascism Anyone? by Laurence W. Britt
Free Inquiry magazine, Volume 23, Number 2
Are you angry at our current administration yet? If not, what will it take? How long will it be before they do something against you personally?
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on the highest mountain (Sunday, May 21, 2006 - 5:33:29 PM)
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UPDATE [5/24/2006 12:46 PM]: Photos from the trip have been posted on the CAAS site. You can see Carolaina and/or me in a few of them.
http://www.caasastro.org/gallery/view_album.php?set_albumName=album55
This weekend, I managed to get Carolaina to go on a camping trip with me. Keep in mind that her idea of "roughing it" is a decent hotel room. Of course, it happened to be a bit more than just camping out. Mt. Magazine State Park had the grand opening of their new lodge and celebrated by having a lot of neat programs and activities. We've recently joined the Central Arkansas Astronomical Society and they (plus a couple of other area clubs) put on a program about the Sun after lunch and a star party overnight. After ordering a good sized tent online, getting an air mattress and a larger SD memory card for my new MP3 player, we were ready for the trip.
On the way in, I knew we'd pass by a couple of other state parks, and Lake Dardanelle in particular. Since I work on the website, I knew they had recently (within the last year) put in an impressive aquarium exhibit in the visitor center. Carolaina was interested in seeing it on the drive up, but we mistakenly visited the southern half of the park. We would have had to backtrack to Russelville to get to the main park. Since I wanted to get to Mt. Magazine in time for the solar program, we decided to visit on the way back home.
We got there just after noon and ate sandwiches for lunch in the picnic area across from the visitor center. At 1 pm, Bob from AOAS gave a presentation about the wonders of our own star, the Sun. Most of it I had heard before, but it was a good reminder of the massive and awe-inspiring processes and energies that occur there. At the end, he put it all into perspective by reminding us that our sun is considered an ordinary yellow dwarf star--there are many other larger and more impressive stars out there. After the presentation, a few members set up their scopes for solar observing.
Afterwards, we went down to the Horse Camp area to set up. The park had planned for us to have the star party there, I presume because it was such a large, open field. I found us a nearly perfect spot to put up the tent--in the shade and near the restrooms!
The other club members came back from the visitor center soon after I finished setting up our camp. We all sat around and chatted for a couple of hours and enjoyed the wonderful weather and company. Carolaina had napped through the first hour of it, though.
Since I know that Mt. Magazine is the tallest in Arkansas, I wanted us to hike up to Signal Hill--the highest point in the state. Luckily it's an easy half-mile hike from the parking area along the road. Here's a couple of the photos I took while there:
large photo
The sign says:
Mount Magazine
Signal Hill
Highest Point in Arkansas
Elevation 2,753 Feet
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large photo
U.S. Department of Interior Geological Survey
Unlawful to Disturb
For Information Write Washington D.C.
1964 - Elev. 2753 Ft. Above Sea - 43T |
Around 8:30 pm, we began setting up our scopes. A few other members from the Oklahoma club showed up with some MASSIVE telescopes. I saw Jupiter's Great Red Spot through their behemoth 20-inch Dobsonian! As I was looking through it, he asked me if I wanted to see Jupiter bigger and handed me a higher-power eyepiece. Those eyepieces looked like they cost a small fortune, so I switched them out very carefully! It was then that I saw the Red Spot clearly. Later on we also managed to see quite a few Messier objects through our own humble 5-inch scope once it got dark enough. The two park rangers helping us out estimated that we had around 30 visitors wander through. The public viewing ended after 10 pm, but this wasn't a hard and fast rule. I thought I saw a few hanging out after that, and we were happy to have them stick around and enjoy the night sky with us.
I should mention the weather at this point. The sky was as clear as we could've asked for, even if it was a little hazy at first. The only problem, though, was the wind. It howled all night long--starting at dusk and going until dawn. Some of the guys were talking about how the terrain on that part of the mountain seemed to focus the wind right over us. It was so bad that I was constantly in fear of our scope blowing over and crashing hard. Thankfully that never happened, but I didn't mingle, chatter, and look through the other gargantuan scopes as much as I would have liked because I wanted to keep a close eye on it. I now realize that I should have just packed our scope away and enjoyed the evening with the group. Carolaina was worn out from our busy day and went to bed around 10:30 pm. I stayed up observing until midnight, then sat and chatted with the group until I started dozing off at 1 am.
Despite bringing an extra blanket, I still got chilled overnight. :(
Before we left in the morning, we both wanted to check out the new lodge. It is a really nice place. Pictures just don't properly convey the sheer size of the lodge building. The view from the back windows and deck area is absolutely stunning. Since pictures weren't capturing the scope and breadth of the view, I took a brief video with the camera and panned across the beautiful skyline:
Mt. Magazine skyline (AVI 1.1Mb)
On the way home, we found and stopped by Lake Dardanelle State Park. That place is simply beautiful. The visitor center is dominated by 3 to 5 large fish tanks that hold numerous examples of the species you can find and catch in the lake and the Arkansas river. The catfish in the back-most tank are HUGE!! Most of the fish there do seem quite a bit larger than what you might actually catch, but you could get lucky and get one like them, I suppose.
Overall, we had a wonderful time on our trip and met some really good people. Before leaving, we were invited to a regional, 5-day star party that takes place every fall down in southwest Arkansas. Since I have vacation time coming up around then, we're making plans to be there.
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