Category → Astronomy
It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s a plane and a Shuttle!
Ran down to Tallman Mountain to watch the shuttle fly up the Hudson river on its way to JFK airport and ultimately the Intrepid. Pity I didn’t find out about it sooner, I would have brought a camera along. All I had was my phone. The flyby was at about 1000 feet, so there was plenty to see:
Makes me wonder what seeing a launch must be like.
Saw the Venus transit
Saw the Venus Transit today with my Meade ETX90-RA. I projected the sun onto the telescope manual:
Saw the ISS
When I went out to the car yesterday at 6:30am, I saw a bright object moving across the northern sky. It years past it could have been the Shuttle or Mir, but nowadays it had to be the International Space Station. Using NASA’s J-Pass webpage, I verified it was the ISS:
Blast from the (lunar) past
Surfing around on the web, I found the website for an experiment I participated in 16 years ago: building a simulated lunar base in an underground lava cave. In the picture below, from this article, we’re assembling the “sanitation unit” (read: toilet). I’m the fellow in the center of the picture in the background. Fellow Spartan Al Shupp is the shorter fellow in the right foreground:
Hard to believe that was 16 years ago!
Star Gazing at Wawayanda
As a member of the Rockland Astronomy Club, I have a permit to go observing at Wawayanda State Park all year ’round. This past Saturday night, the club had a scheduled viewing night there, so I packed up my stuff and headed out there for the first time. I took along Alan, one of the Brits from Yeshiva.
By the time we got the scope set up (I took my strutted 8″ dob) it was about 11:30pm. We looked at Mars for some time. I tried out my new color filter set – the red filter did seem to bring out more detail as promised. In the past, when I’ve looked at Mars, I haven’t been able to make out any detail, but this time I was able to see the Southern Polar Cap, as well as the large dark area Syrtis Major on the left equatorial area and the smaller dark area of Mare Erythraeum to the right (you can check this out using Sky and Telescope’s Mars Profiler – enter “8/22/2003” for the date and “21:30” for the time to get a feel for what we saw (our view wasn’t nearly that detailed, but the basic shapes were there)). The blue, green, and yellow filters didn’t seem to do much.
After Mars, we looked at some deep sky objects – I showed Alan some objects I had seen before: M45, M57, M71, M27, M31, M32, and M110.
…I also sighted four new Messier Objects I had not seen before:
M26 – unimpressive – just a diamond of four stars.
M11 – was nice – largish, with one bright star and hundreds of dimmer members.
M72 – was dim fuzzy patch (at least at with my 32mm lens, which is 38x on my 1220mm focal length telescope).
M73 – quirky asterism.
We got home around 4am. The skies were surprisingly good – Its only a 40 minute drive, and we could see the Milky Way nearly from horizon to horizon.