Jedolby

1:1 Size comparison of two moonrises The headlines yelled at us, "Don't miss the largest full moon of 2024!" and "How to see this year's super Hunter's Moon!" Did they work? Did stories like those make you want to go out on the evening of October 17th to see the super-duper Hunter's Moon? I've been seeing supermoon headlines since at least 2011, possibly longer than that. Somehow or other, the media picked up on the phenomenon and never let go. What is so darned fascinating about a supermoon? I seriously don't get it! A supermoon is not noticeably larger than the average moon. Anyone can plainly see that for themselves. Can't the news jockeys hear their readers yawning loudly and scrolling on by when they see another meaningless supermoon headline?  Well, I suppose there's a sucker born every minute, and that's what keeps the supermoon clickbait alive, year in, year out. You gotta admit it: A supermoon is a hard sell. It's kin...

Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS on October 19, 2024 The comet is climbing a little higher in the western sky after dark. Unfortunately, as it does so, it is moving further away from the earth and sun, which causes it to get smaller and dimmer each night. Technically, you could say it is still a naked-eye comet. But that would be misleading. It is more correct to say that if you know where to look and allow the sky to get dark enough, you can just barely see it. As always, binoculars help a lot, and so do digital cameras. If you've been following the comet from night to night this week, perhaps you've gotten to know some of the stars and constellations beside it in the western sky. A good one to become familiar with is Corona Borealis, or "The Northern Crown." Although it's not a very bright constellation, you can see it without optical aid, as long as your night sky isn't too bright from city glow or moonlight. Its brightest star is magnitude-2.2 Alphecca, which means...

In my previous post, I shared a picture of the comet that I took with a DSLR and 28 mm camera lens on a fixed tripod. As I was taking those pictures, I was looking forward to shooting the comet through the CPC-1100 and HyperStar combo. Tonight, I carried out that plan, but the results were not as good as I had hoped! There seemed to be two problems with the comet. First, it's just very dim. Even with an f/2 optical system, the comet lacked "punch" in my pictures. Longer exposures washed out with sky glow. Shorter exposures were lackluster. I couldn't win. Second, there were no interesting features in the tail structure to be revealed in the better resolving power of the telescope. The tail looked as smooth as it did with the lower-powered camera lens.  One feature that did show up, however, was the comet's anti-tail. You can look up "anti-tail" if you wish, but I'll save you the time and just tell you here that the anti-tail is not really a comet...

  Tsuchinshan-ATAS on October 14, 2024 I began hearing about this comet in May of 2024. So I took some images of it then, before it looked like much. At the time, it was a cute little comet, with a tail stretching just 7 arc-minutes long (about a 10th of one degree) in images I took through my CPC-1100 telescope and HyperStar (see image at bottom of page). But according to the comet experts, it showed some promise even then and was predicted to possibly reach naked-eye visibility by perihelion. I had my doubts (we amateur astronomy types learned long ago that we should never trust the early predictions of how bright a comet will get).  Last month, the comet made the news again as it approached the sun in the predawn hours. Images from earth and space showed a brilliant comet, but it was lost to me, due to the mountains east of my house that block a good chunk of sky in the predawn hours. I knew I would have to wait until the comet rounded the sun and became an evening object b...

  Aurora on October 10, 2024 Last night was the second night in 2024 when an aurora reached as far south as Tucson, Arizona. At least, as far as I know. The first one, last May, caught me by surprise. I had seen some nice sunspot groups and I know that solar flares and coronal mass ejections (CMEs) can give beautiful auroral displays in the far north. A few days later, I got a notification on my phone from, of all places, the MyRadar app. It said, "Aurora visible now!" I was skeptical that we'd see anything this far south. But I went outside to look anyway. As I expected, I didn't see anything unusual in the evening sky. Then my daughter used her iPhone to take a picture and there it was! Spectacular red color and vertical bands! Astonishing!  Tonight's aurora was a wee bit more visible to the unaided eye than that one. But it was still much better and plainly obvious in pictures. And MyRadar hadn't said a word. My sister in Pennsylvania alerted me to the auro...

  The Russian Space Station Mir , circa 1992 It's strange to admit that life in the late 1980's and early 1990's was a bit like living in the Dark Ages, compared to now. In those days, we felt as if we had come a long way from the even darker times of the previous years. After many decades of the Cold War, the fall of the Russian Wall gave us the illusion of peace in the world. Instead of looking to the skies with fear inspired by movies like War Games (1983), we occasionally saw the serene light of Mir, passing silently through the stars.   A gleam of hope, a heavenly reminder of "Peace" from the Russians. But for all of the technologies that were spun off of the race to put communications satellites in orbit, send humans to the moon, and build space stations in low earth orbit, we were still not much ahead of our grandparents, when it came to everyday modern conveniences in those years. Take photography, for instance. I was still using the same emulsion films...

A "blink comparison" of asteroid (5272) Dickinson Seems like just yesterday that we learned of the passing of Terence Dickinson, a prominent figure in amateur astronomy for more than 50 years. Can you believe it's been over a year? Terence Dickinson was an editor of Astronomy magazine in its very first issue back in August of 1973. Indeed, you'll find quite a resume of Terence Dickinson on page 27 in the September 1973 issue of the magazine. All of those accomplishments before his 30th birthday. Wow! It would be more than a decade later, however, when I first saw his name in print, as the author of the popular astronomy book NightWatch . Now in its 4th edition, NightWatch remains one of the most popular introductory books for the fascinating world of backyard astronomy. My purpose here, however, is neither to review his book nor to offer a biography of Terence Dickinson. You can learn all about those things from Amazon and Wikipedia. No, my subject matter is very na...