Rapt in Awe: My Journey

RAPT IN AWE is  an astronomical journal – a sort of book/blog that I see as a companion text to my course on experiential astronomy: Prime Time: Your Journey through the Astronomical Year.

The Rapt in Awe experience has two tracks – a series of posts on the right which I view as the”Rapt in Awe: The Book.”  I like to stress that observing should consist of three equal parts – first your preparation to observe by informing yourself about what you will see; thent he observing itself, and finally, reflecting on your experience. These are the reflections and in the book part may be more general – less tied to a specific observing session. . They’ve been written over the past several years and I’m continuing to write them. Maybe some day I’ll attempt to publish them on paper.

The second is “Rapt in Awe: The Blog” -  a traditional blog  that is an ongoing journal of reports and reflections on my astronomical observations. If you’re looking for notice about upcoming events, those are one the blog on the course site. The blog entries here  are organized under the “category”  drop down menu, with the newest entries being under “recent posts. ” You can, of course, use the search menu, or calendar menu to find posts on specific topics or from specific dates.

Thanks for stopping by and your opinions are always most welcome – please take advantage of the comments menu under each post.

Driftway Observatory Clear Sky Clock – Click for details!

Ahhh sixty millimeters and solitude!

Sometimes it’s just feels betters than others – this morning was one of those times.

I’m talking about solitude. There’s a rough line between solitude and loneliness, a sort of no-man’s-land where it’s not good, but not bad. Loneliness is bad. But if you can make it across that line, you discover the wonder of solitude, and that’s where – through no particular effort of mine – I found myself this morning.

It was cool – 34 degrees – and it was clear, with a few high, thin clouds – and there was a pretty powerful Moon washing out large chunks of sky and making my backyard seem more like twilight than 4 am. I frequently retreat to the Observatory on such mornings – it has a feeling of security. but I’m discovering I feel just as  secure iu the open on the Observing Deck. So that’s where I went this morning, quickly attaching the Televue 60 mm scope to the large Universal Astronomics T-Mount.  This is much more mount than is needed for this scope, but it moves oh-so-smoothly and it means i can pull up a comfortable chair, sit in one place, and still reach about one third of the sky before I have to move the chair. And that’s what I did.

And almost immediately an incredibly deep serenity settled around me.  I had a few observing goals in mind – and as I was settling down I sought out Saturn, which is now chasing Leo up the eastern sky. But I didn’t linger. It was still low and the atmosphere was making it dance. Higher up, Mars was still flirting with the Beehive and was much steadier. It’s disc is still very small – it’s abut 100 million miles away right now – and I didn’t expect to see anything on it, but I was wrong. Using the 2.5 Nagler (144X) I actually could make out the features in the same gross way that you might look at a very blurry map of the Earth and be able to discern the continent of Africa. It looked like a faded red marble with some olive-green splotches and a hint of a polar cap on the north end. We never see Mars well – but right now it’s disc is only about 8.5 seconds of arc across. That’s roughly one third as large as it can get,  about one fifth of what Jupiter is right now, and about 1/200th the apparent diameter of the Moon. Mars will offer the best viewing this time around in February 2010 – but it still will be quite far awayand its disc will only get to be about 14-seconds in diamter.  On it’s closest approach, the Mars disc can be 24 seconds in diameter, but that happens rarely.

Right now the real fun of Mars is seeing it – 10 light minutes away – in the same field of view with the  Northern and Southern donkeys that bracket the Beehive cluster whose stars some 600 light years away.  I won’t belabor this. I was looking at it the other morning as well. But it’s one of those sites that illustrates so well how what we see tells us very little about what we are looking at.  That is, there are few or no clues here that Mars is 600 trillion times closer to us than the stars of the Beehive, but that’s  a valaid rough estimate.  Such thoughts meant more to me this morning because of the sense of solitude – they penetrated a little deeper because I was  not reaching hard for them. I was sitting, relaxed, sipping tea and letting them reach me.

After a while I turned to a new sector of the sky, the Northwest, and did a futile search for Kemble’s Cascade. Actually, I may have found it, but I’m not sure – the moonlight was really washing out this area of sky and I had no chart with me, so I let it drop in favor of marveling at the stars around Mirfak. Why don’t people rave about this “cluster?” I hardly ever see it mentioned. I thought of this a couple years ago when Comet Holmes was passing through it. What a wonderfully star-rich region. I put Mirfak to one edge of the field and with the 24mm Panoptic (15X, 4.5° fov) quickly counted more than 60 stars – and this with  the moon not that far away! If nothing else, this makes a great binocular field, but in the 60mm it was perfect.

Here’s how it shows up in  Starry Nights Pro with the field flipped the way my 60mm refractor flips it, horizontally.

Click for larger image - Starry Nights Pro screen shot.

(Hmmm . . . Burnham’s Celestial handbook does mention it and says about 120 stars here have been identified as all moving in the sam egeneral direction and presumed to be part of a cluster – but it still has no name.)

Also perfect was nearby M34. This is a long-time favorite because the brighter stars are in a pattern that always reminds me of a Klingon battle cruiser.  Really.  And again, even with the Moon, they looked great, especially with the 5mm at 72X. This is another object  I need to return to when there’s no interference from the Moon.

By this time I had been observing for more than an hour and my tea was getting cold, but I had a few more things in mind. I checked out Rigel very carefully, looking for its companion. I could not see it, though I did a few night ago, It was getting pretty low – about 22 degrees – so I was looking through alot of atmosphere. However, I did find W Orionis, the carbon star, very quickly – in less than 30 seconds, really, using the new technique of searching from the shield rather than the belt. Jumped rioght out at me – and looked redder than I remember. Maybe because I was less frustrated from searching too long

I also just sat back and marvelled at the impresison made by Rogel 800 light years away, and Sirius, just at eight light years away and much brighter.  What I saw was two bookends of modern American political history. Thel ight from Sirius started its journey about the time of the 2001 terrorists attack on America – an event that I’m sure will shape us for years.  Rigel, on the other hand, brought to mind the roots of our democracy – the signing of the Magna Carta.  All of what we might think of as modern history takes place in the span of time it took the light to travel from Rogel to me.

‘W’ tracked down and Algieba was simply beautiful!

Boy, the carbon star W Orionis gave me more trouble finding it – and this isn’t the first time – than anything in recent memory. I’m not sure why, but I was trying to get there by starting with the belt stars in Orion and it should have been easy. It wasn’t. I finally gave up and started instead with the shield stars and found it immediately. Lesson learned – I hope.

Was it worth it? No – not with a nearly full moon a short distance away – this was about 4:50 am. It certainly is red, but not as dramatic in the TV 60mm scope as the carbon star in Draco is in the 15-inch. Now, that could be a difference in the stars, a difference in sky conditions, or most likely the simple fact that the 15-inch gathers a lot more light and so does a better job of revealing color.  In any event, I’ll have to check it again when there’s no moon nearby. (Hmmm… I guess why I didn’t start with the shield stars were they were nearly impossible to see with the naked eye in the moonlight, but the belt stars, of course, were easy to see.)

That said, the color in Algieba (Gamma Leonis)  was wonderful – gold and green and superb at 144X in the 2.5mm Nagler. It was OK at 72X. At 40X it was a figure 8 – no clear break. Both of these stars are giants, one a Class K, the other a Class G. They appear spearated by  about 4 seconds of arc.

I checked out my old favorite, Mizar, as well. It was very nice at 40X, fine at 28X, and I could not split it at 15X. If i were showing it to someone, I’d choose 40X.

Also looked at Mars and the Beehive again, this time making sure to note the “asses.” Fun. The Beehive is actually surrounded – caught in a triangle  – of three fairly bright stars, two of which are the asses. What do donkeys have to do with Beehives? Nothing. But one traditional name for this cluster is “Praesepe” which means “The Manger.” Now the asses makes sense! Actually, the Latin names for these stars are Asellus Australis and Asellus Borealis which translates into “southern donkey colt” amd “northern donkey colt.”

More important, however, my vision of Mars near the Beehive played right into an essay on the “timescape” I was preparing for my class tomorrow. Now that it’s done, I need to figure out how it fits into the Prime Time mix.

 

The 60mm Universe – scope gets smaller, awe gets larger!

Well, you could never have convinced me, even just a few years ago, that I could have a very satisfying observing experience with nothing but a 60mm telescope  – especially when there’s  a full moon with perhaps 70 % cover of drifting cirrus/stratus clouds! But I just observed for over an hour last night. And I followed up with two hours this morning – moon still full, but no obvious clouds, just some high haze. It was wonder full.

Major thing learned? In a word – context!

I’ve frequently pushed context as important, which is why I want folks to look through binoculars or a smaller telescope at low power before stepping up to the 15-inch. But what I have never encountered before is the context that can be provided by moonlight. This first hit me last night when I turned the little scope on Jupiter and at 40X found I had a nice view of the planet, it’s four bright moons, and the leaves of a foreground tree! It was the tree, of course, that provided a unique context. Sure, we’ve all seen Jupiter with our naked eye near some foreground object -  a building, or mountain, or whatever.  It was the impact of seeing it magnified with the foreground object clearly lit by the moonlight that gave me the unique experience. And yes, the fact that I was using a small scope at low power with a correspondingly wide field of view certainly helped.

That experience was repeated this morning when I looked at  the Pleiades at 15X as the branches of a nearby cedar reached up to enwrap them.  Tennyson’s fireflies became tiny Christmas tree lights, tangled in the branches. Context?  Yes – the branches were about 40 feet away, the Pleiades about 400 light years! Nice thought to tickle your mind.

This is a simulation from Starry Nights Pro planetarium software - not a photo or drawing - but represents wel what I saw.

And  I had entirely forgotten about Mars and the Beehive. But near the end of the morning I turned the little scope towards Mars and here was a different sort of context, not aided by the moonlight, but not diminished by it either.  At 40X the planet revealed a small disc as it nibbled at the edges of the star cluster in which I quickly counted 60 stars visible under these conditions in this small scope. So now I had Mars, perhaps 10 light minutes away at that moment, playing dodge ball in a star cluster roughly 600 light years away. Nice!

All of which I think makes the point that you can not only have an essential astronomy experience with a small scope, but you can actually expand your experiences breaking new ground. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not recommending everyone switch to small scopes. And I’m not at all certain they’re a good idea for beginners. All I’m saying is that for me using a small scope offers some special advantages that move me closer to  my essential goal of experiencing the universe. Perhaps the key is it’s a machine that is of a size I can easily accept and incorporate as an extension of my eye. In any event, three hours of use were filled with several highlights, including, in chronological order:

• Splitting the Double Double in Lyra at 144X using a 2.5mm Nagler eyepiece. The split was clean and steady, which also says something about the seeing last night and got me off to a great start.
• Picking out the Ring Nebula – M57 – at 40X. Hard to believe this is larger than Jupiter in angular size, but I’ll leave careful examination for a darker night.
• Splitting Albireo – easy, of course, even at 15X, but real nice at 40X.
• Capturing the Coathanger cluster with plenty of room to spare using the 24mm Panoptic.
• Splitting Almach – Gamma Andromeda – at 40X. The gold of th =e brighter star has more orange in it than the gold of Albireo’s primary.
• Examining the full moon with plenty of space around it – again, the 9mm Nagler at 40X gave a real nice perspective,

And in the morning:

• Splitting Castor, high overhead, with a 5mm Nagler delivering 72X. The fainter of the two companions was, well, quite faint.
• Splitting Rigel about as well as I have ever seen it split in any scope – no kidding. This is a challenge star. Again, 5mm was used, as well as 2.5mm.
• Context came into play again, this time all in the sky, as I took a wide field view of the Great Orion Nebula. The 13mm (28X) gave such a view, yet enough power to split the Trapezium – charming!
• Mintaka split in the 24mm at 15X which gave a wonderful view of Orion’s Belt with plenty of breathing room around it.
• Fainter star clusters like M35 did not fare as well, diminished by both the small objective and the moonlight. I look forward to seeing them under dark skies, though.
• Only real frustration came in trying to track down W Orionis, a carbon star. I think I eventually did, but I need to go back and make my own charts so it isn’t such a challenge in the future.

Bottom line – wow! This was fun. Of course, being seated in a rolling office chair in the observatory while using the little scope on the massive (for it) Universal Astronomic T-Mount certainly helped!

The beauty of carbon stars

Bren and I were out a few nights ago and I pointed the 15-inch towards the carbon star, UX Draconis, to show her. There was a gasp as she looked in the eyepiece, a rare  reaction for Bren.  But then, carbon stars are rare and the 15-inch gathers enough light to really make these red gems stand out.

Given that reaction I decided a carbon star really has to be a must for public sessions, for nothing illustrates star color so well. Sadly, there are only a few of these and the brightest are barely in reach of the naked eye and show no color that way. They do show nice color with a small scope, but the bigger the scope, the more obvious the color.

I posted here about UX when I first saw it a year or so ago. Since then, I’ve found a better way to track it down – and learned of a neat little telescopic asterism, “The Little Queen,” that’s on the path I use to find UX.

My first step in fining this beautiful star is to simply draw a line through the “Guardians of the Pole” much as you do the “Pointers” in the Big Dipper.  The Guardians are the two easily visible stars inthe cup of the Little Dipper.  In any event,t his arrow points to Aldhibain, and I use that to then move along to Nodus 1 and finally to Chi Draconis.

Click image for larger chart.

With  Chi in the finder, it’s easy enough to shift a little west and latch on to “The Little Queen.” In a low power eyepiece it bears a strong resemblance to the “W” of Cassiopeia, the Queen. Here’s a chart showing the path from Chi to UX.

Click image for larger chart.

As you can see, you can star hop along three magnitude 5 stars, easily visible in the finder, to get from Chi to UX. Even in the finder it should look reddish, but as I said, the larger the scope the more dramatic the color.

Having located this, I learned there is another carbon star of about the same brightness in Orion and it’s actually much easier to find. I spotted “W Orionis” for the first time this morning and it fairly jumped out and bit me. It’s right off the end of Orion’s shield in the general direction of Mintaka, the western most belt star.  Here’s a chart.

Click image for larger chart.

I was using the 12omm Skywatcher and as near as I can tell it was as red in that scope as UX appears in that scope, so I trust it will appear even redder when I get a chance to look at it int he 15-inch. In any event, it will be a nice winter showpiece.

Having located this I decided to record afew notes on how I go about finding a couple of other popular objects in the winter sky, M1 (Crab Nebula) and “Eskimo” nebula in Gemni. Here’s the M1 finder.

Xeta Tauri is the fainter, more easterly, of the two stars that mark a horn tip of Taurus, Find it nd M1 will be in a very low power eyepiece. Click chart for larger version.

The Eskimo Nebula was right near Mars this morning, but, of course, that will change rapidly. Here’s my finder chart for it.

The key here is Wasat - find it and the Eskimo will bein the same finder field, though it will look simply like a faint - maybe a tad fuzzy - star. Click chart for larger image.

Alll charts inthis post have been slightly modified from screen shots of Starry Nights Pro software.

Pre-equinox morning – and I’m caught off guard!

Yeah, east is east and west is west and I sure as hell should know where, exactly, after living in this house for45 years, but I was still caught off guard by the autumal equinox sunrise this morning – well, a bit shy of the equinox, but as I photographed the sun through the trees it had risen a tad and I suspect was just about due east for all practical purposes -  and not where I expected it.

I guess my mind set is more magnetic – that is, magnetic north is about 16 degrees west of true north – so that would make magnetic east about 16 degrees north of true east and while I knew that east was actually a bit south of the magnetic setting, just how much south caught me by surprise this morning.  Turned out if I stand near the door and look over my radio mast to  the southeast corner of the property, then I’m looking due east.  And as I look around thi smatches up nicely with where I see the north star – but I still wasn’t prepared for east being this far “south.”

Sun rising pretty much due east as seen from my upstairs deck on September 19, 2009.

Yesterday should have helped, but it didn’t. It was a beautiful morning on September 18, as well,  and we’ve had too few of those in the past several months, so I decided to watch the sunrise and note horizon landmarks fromthe eastern end of the yard, since the sun is just a couple degrees north of east now. First, I checked out Venus.

Venus from Driftway Observatory. The top of the tree comes pretty close to marking east for me. At this point Venus was about 23 degrees up and about as far south of east - 2.5 degrees - as the Sun will north of east 20 minutes later.

Trees block my view of sunrise from the Observatory area , so I went down to the River (East Branch)  just below us where we have a right of way. There I found two cow pasture cedars that formed a nice sighting device with my neighbors Pt. Jude sailboat and a tree on the eastern horizon about half a mile away.

And a few minutes after I took the above picture, the sun rose right over that distant tree.

That river view felt about right to me – but it didn’t seem in sync with what I see from my upper deck – though I trust the Sun is a good indicator 

A 3D Jupiter and an unexpected epiphany

Watching Jupiter get stripped of its four dancing, Galilean moons last night brought me one surprise even before the event started: With Europa overtaking and passing Ganymede there was a real sense of seeing the planet and its system of moons in three dimensions. That was a genuine rush – one of those feelings that nibbled at the edges of the ineffable – a sudden intuitive grasp  of the enormity of what I was seeing.

This particular route to that feeling was new to me. In astronomy the two-dimensional, flat view dominates because things are just too far away and we are usually looking at them with one eye anyways. Without binocular vision depth is an illusion at best – but still a very interesting illusion.  And I was looking with one eye – but a very good one – my 120mm Skywatcher refractor, which just got a rave review in the latest Sky and Telescope. The review was deserved. This is a terrific scope at any price, but for $1,500 it is fantastic. Add to that a 6mm Ethos eyepiece (150X) and ideal conditions for this relatively rare event – each of the four moons was out of sight at the same time – and all the ingredients were there for a great observing session.

My evening didn’t start that way. I hadn’t intended to observe. I had a full day the next day and I’ve seen the moon’s do their things before – though never all at once – and I was just plain tired. The timing – from near midnight to 3 am was roughly the time when I am usually getting my 4 hours of sleep.  But I went to bed at 9:30, woke up at 10, having had just enough sleep to take the edge off my exhaustion. So I grabbed the 60mm and it’s eyepiece case and headed for the observing deck to see if Jupiter was over my trees. It turned out to be peaking through them – right through the notch between the trees that is due south and so I could see it with the 120mm in the observatory. Great.   I went back, got some tea and my Ipod (nothing like a little musical accompaniment), and came out again to settle into some serious observing.

Skies were both clear and steady – an unusual combination. (When Jupiter was in the trees later I took a quick look at the Double Double in Lyra  and was rewarded by two perfectly split pairs with hard-edged, round stars. Charming – and a sure indicator of steady seeing!) The moon was drowning out any faint stars, so naked eye visibility just bordered on 4th magnitude. I like to experience that from time to time. Gives me a sense of what folks usually see in a light-polluted suburb and I know that’s a lot of the folks I’d like to help learn the night sky. So seeing what they see is handy.

I watched from the observatory until about 11:15. At that point I knew the trees on the west side of my gap were going to cover up Jupiter soon, so I moved out to the observing deck with the Televue 60mm to watch Io and Europa vanish. The view with this scope wasn’t as good, of course, but I could crank it all the way up to 240X with a 2.5mm Nagler and so could easily watch the action. Turned out the observing deck gave me a little more time with my gap in the trees than the Observatory did, but not enough. I was looking for the 11:43 pm occultation of Io and by 11:30 I knew I had to move again, this time to a comofrtable spot outside the observing deck – no problem with the 60mm on its lightweight tripod.  I set up, settled down, and saw the occultation start – I checked my Ipod. Yep – 11:43.  But I had lost the slip of paper where I had written down the time of the next event – the start of Europa’s transit.

Turned out this was 11:58 pm -but  I had in my head it was to be 10 minutes earlier.  Still, I kept watching and waiting and eventually Europa was lost in what seemed to me the light-colored equatorial region of Jupiter. I could not see any trace of it. Meanwhile, Ganymede was making a steady march towards the same general area. But I knew that event was roughly an hour away, so I decided to put the 60mm away and hope the trees had moved enough to allow me to use the 120mm scope in the Observatory.  No luck on that score, which is why I went prowling around Lyra looking for the Double-Double and a few other favorites.  Jupiter remained just out of reach during the time Ganymede was starting its transit. I could see it as I stood at the telescope. The little finder scope on top of the 120mm could “see” Jupiter, but the large scope itself was still being just blocked by the trees and what I saw was a grossly distorted image. Talk about close . . . but no matter. It was beautiful night and I was thoroughly immeersed in it despite the little hassles with trees.  By the time Jupiter popped into the vision of the large scope it was 1 am and Ganymede was gone. (It had started the transit 17 minutes earlier.)

But I had wanted to use the improved resolving power of the large scope to see if I could detect the transiting moons. I couldn’t. What I did see immediately was the sharp black dot of  Europa’s shadow. It was unmistakable, having entered the planet’s disc at 12:56 am.  Also hard to miss, however, were the high stratus clouds covering maybe 60% of the sky and drfiting towards Jupiter.  But I enjoyed looking for detail on Jupiter for another 15 minutes – and watching the progress of Europa’s shadow – and, of course, seeing Jupiter in that rare – moonless – condition.  Eventually the clouds gave me permission to call it a night and get some sleep. Not before, however, I had an opportunoty to reflect on the incredible size/distance examples I had  before me.

Afterall, here was our own, brilliant, 13-day moon glaring just 5 degrees away from Jupiter – about half a fist as I measure the sky. Now the moon is about 3,476 kilometers in diameter. Europa – at 3,120 km a bit smaller, and Ganymede at 5,268km signifcantly larger. Yet, in my telescope I felt good that I could easily tell Ganymede was larger than Europa and both showed discs so tiny that to the casual viewer they looked more like stars than solid bodies. And that, of course, drives home the incredible distance difference. Light takes little more than a second to reach us from our moon. From the moons of Jupiter it was taking more like 30 minutes, the exact time depending on the exact distance of the moment which I don’t know – but one second versus 30 minutes is a ratio of 1,800-to-1. Hmmm . . . and our moon appears to occupy about 30 arc minutes in our sky – that’s 1800 arc seconds – so if we put our moon out at Jupiter it would appear to be labout an arc second in diameter and even Ganymede would be half again that large – 1.5 arc seconds.  Oh, I know this is crude figuring – but I also know it’s in the ball park and is the sort of thing that gives me an appreciation of the larger reality. (Ganymede is actually 1.7 arc seconds when Jupiter is closest to us – Ilooked it up

OK – enough with the left-brained stuff!  In  the final analysis that larger reality – the ineffable feeling – is what I treasure about this evening’s observing  and it doesn’t come out of the numbers. It comes out of being there. It comes out of having the numbers and such in your head somewhere while your senses  deliver the visual experience of the great fan dance that;’s taking place unimaginably far away, and is being carried out by objects whose size and make-up also escape anything I can experience directly – and all with predictable precision. Awesome.

Of winks and ghosts and one brilliant Perseid

I never expected this to be a good Perseid year, but I did at least get in one solid hour of very enjoyable Perseid watching. The score?

1 wink

3 ghosts

2 Perseids in full bloom

1 Wrong Way Corrigan

1 brilliant Perseid that rushed in between the clouds  – a real  curtain dropper that brought an appreciative “wow” from my lips.

I had awoken from a sound sleep at 2 am wondering why.  One glance out the window told me. My clear sky alarm clock in my head must have gone off.  Sure, I get up at 2 am many mornings, but in this case I had gone to bed under cloudy skies and I was so solidly asleep that at first I thought something was wrong with the air conditioner because I couldn’t hear it. It seemed to take forever to drag myself to a level of consciousness where I could hear it and reassure myself nothing was worng – except now I was wide awake.  That, for me, means I had been solidly asleep. And I have to admit, when I looked up at the quarter moon the first thought that went through my mind was – “real nice moon – I’ll meander out to the observatory.” It wasn’t until five minutes later when I checked the “Clear Sky Clock” on my computer – and saw that the second night of the Perseids would be a total washout -  that it really occured to me that right then I had a window of opportunity to see some Perseids and it probably was my only one for this year. Net result? By 2:20 am I had a sweatshirt on, my tea and binoculars were in hand, and I also had two pillows to make the upstairs deck a bit more comfortable for flat-on-your-back meteor watching.

As I surveyed the sky I was pleased to see stars to fourth magnitude – and as I checked with binoculars in key areas I found the transparency was great – the problem was, of course, that pesky last quarter moon. It was high in the southeast and washing over the radiant point for the Perseids, as well as everything else.  That’s when it dawned on me that what I was likely to see were “winks” and “ghosts” of meteors and not the usual bright streaks.  And the first three fit this bill. Two were ghosts. I’m pretty sure my eyes weren’t playing tricks on me. I saw them – but they must have been right near the level of visibility – just faint flashes. The third was a kind of brilliant wink right over head between Perseus and and the “W” of Cassiopeia.  Very near the radiant point. Meteors are not the same intensity throughout. Some of them have several spurts of brilliance along a trail that in total is much dimmer – and most have one brilliant point in a longer trail. So in the case of the “wink” I was seeing the brilliant point, but not the trail that lead up to it. That would have been too faint. Or maybe it was coming straight toward me? Or maybe a little of both?

Then I got a couple of real nice ones that looked like what you think a meteor should look like. One went through the Northern Cross and another was over by Aldebaran, pretty low in the southeast. That came when I was checking on the Pleiades, the Hyades, Aldebaran and Mars with with my 12X36 IS binoculars. (OK – I admit – I kept a pretty good watch for meteors, but I also did some binocular touring, so I could have missed some. But even in these conditions it’s fun to check on bright clusters like the Pleiades and Hyades. It’s also fun to know that a few hundred billion stars in the form of the Andromeda Galaxy are high overhead and looking down on you and you can look back!  All of this was easy to see in the binoculars, as was Mu Draconis, a favorite binocular double that was just above my maple tree to the northwest. )

There were a few clouds around, especially to the north and along the eastern horizon, but most of the sky was really transparent  – a 5 on a scale of 1-to-5 – and while I did check on the moons of Jupiter over in the southwest a couple of times, for the most part I kept a steady watch in the sweep of sky that goes from Capella in the east to Vega in the west and down to the “guardians” of the pole, hanging below Polaris. (No I could not make out any of the fourth magnitude stars in the Little Dipper, but I could identify stars of magnitude 3.5 and a few fainter, so I suspect my limit was right around magnitude 4. I also suspect that had there been no moon – and if my horizon were less obstructed than it is from the upper deck -  then in these skies I would have been averaging 15-30 Perseids an hour. Given that the shower doesn’t peak until roughly mid day today, that’s about right.  It’s also a very firm reminder that  in astronomy you have to seize your window of opportunity when it appears. It’s easy to get it in your head that the Perseids come every year and so there will always be another chance. There will, of course, but given the fickleness of weather, your personal schedule, and the very predictable interference of the moon, seeing a good “shower” is a rare event. So I grab what I can when I can – and frankly, it was just darned nice to  be out in the cool night air and enjoying this peaceful interlude. It ended nicely as well.

About 3:15 am the clouds were building in the north and west and even in the east Venus had put in appearance, but was very red which meant it was shining through some haze. To the north a solid bank of overcast was reaching for Polaris. To the west, scattered high clouds were obscuring parts of the Summer Triangle. But I still had a window  – a wide rectangle between Perseus and Polaris. “Wouldn’t it be nice,” I thought, “if a brilliant fireball choose this moment to put in an appearance in that clear rectangle?” And bingo – there it was! Not quite a fireball, but it rivalled Jupiter in brilliance. I would put it at magnitude  -2 and while I continued to look for another minute or two, I was certain that was the finale on my 2009 and Perseid meteor “shower” experience. And real nice curtain dropper it was!

Oh  -  I forgot the “Worng Way Corrigan.”  That was a stray meteor that didn’t belong to the shower – it was in Andromeda and moving towards, rather than away from, the Perseid radiant point – but it was a very respectable meteor, just going the wrong way. Instead of heading for California, it was heading for Ireland – and I suspect both it and Corrigan knew what they were doing, but it’s more fun to think of them as confused.

Jupiter – and how the love-sick fox ate my homework

Let’s face it, I really am not a planetary observer – I’m what you might call a tourist – one of those who drops by and goes “ooh” and “ahh” and then moves on.

And that’s how it was with Jupiter on Monday morning, July 20, right after an alert Australian amateur spotted a huge new scar on Jupiter probably caused by a collision with a comet. I think of it as a black eye and except for the fox I might have seen it, but I doubt it. Heck, if I’m honest with myself I might have seen it anyway and just didn’t know what I was seeing!

My little adventure began at 2:30 am when I was enjoying the special solitude of my observatory and was observing Jupiter because, although low in the south, it was just passing through a large gap in the trees that usually would mask anything in that area of the sky. All four moons were visible and I noted how each showed a tiny disc, but Ganymeade’s disc was bigger, as it should be. I could see more detail than usual on the planet and I looked for the Great Red Spot, but didn’t see it.  Also I looked for Neptune, which is very near Jupiter right now, and then I suddenly heard  barking. Just a single bark or two at a time, but quite chilling at that hour from someone with an active imagination – and given my poor hearing – very unusual – so it meant whatever was doing it was very close.

I got up from the scope, grabbed my bright flashlight, and climbed the little ladder so I could look out the open shutter  of the observatory and see around the yard.  My light picked up a pair of bright, gleaming eyes about 50 feet away. He/she barked gain. Then he trotted right toward me – well , in my general direction. That was surprising. I had always assumed that if a fox – or much worse, a coyote – came near me and I caught it in the light it would run away! I kept the light on him and when he got about 25-feet away, he broke into a trot. Then  he started in an easy run and vanished to the other side of the observatory – but I heard him again several times. As near as i can tell, his barks were a mating call and I suspect someone with better hearing would have heard another fox in the distance.

So that was my highlight of observing Jupiter!

It wasn’t until I got in an saw the message from Dom that directed me to a news story about the discovery Sunday night of this new spot on Jupiter. I might have seen this spot they’re mentioning, but I didn’t make note of it. I did not attempt any drawings and I don’t know Jupiter well enough so that if I had seen it, I’m not at all sure I would have thought it was unusual. In other words, I’m perfectly capable of looking at something important on Jupiter and not even knowing that it is important without someone else telling me. So the fox was an exciting distraction, but I won’t blame it for my not seeing this new spot.

Now untold thousands have seen it – but I have been clouded out all week – and even the Hubble Space telescope has gotten intot he act, as this NYT story shows.

Distance, place, and planets – a morning’s revelations

I felt it first as I tracked down M27, the Dumbell nebula.

M27 - Driftway video image.

This shell blown off by a dying star suddenly looked more than three dimensional to me with faint stars blinking on and off at the edge of my vision as they shone through it. Here, I thought, is the universe as kaleioscope. For this star the kaleioscope has been turned, the pieces are being scattered – and in time they will come together again with other material and form a new pattern – perhaps a star, perhaps a planet – and perhaps they will find their way into the formation of life, perhaps even intelligent life. To paraphrase John Dobson, give it 3 billions years or so and it will be chewing bubblegum.

And this is why I get up at 1 am when I think it might be clear. This morning it wasn’t. No large clouds, but transparency was horrible – until about 2:45 am when I check one more time and am met by cool and clear air, though not all that steady. I grab my tea, still warm in its insulated cup, and the Ethos eyepiece case and head for the observatory. In just a couple of minutes the 120mm is taking in the Andromeda Galaxy, as well as M32 and M110, its companion galaxies. They all fit in the 17mm Ethos eyepiece when used on the 120mm Skywatcher. Nice. But no magic. I rotate the dome about 60 degrees. The last time I remember looking for M27 there was a lot greater distance between Albireo and the point of Sagitta – the arrow. That’s the path I follow when homing in on M27. Of course the distance hadn’t really changed, but everything looks so much smalller as it passes the meridian. When Ilooked at it before it was much nearer the eastern horizon.

I’m not explaining it, am I? I can’t. The feeling – the knowing – is ineffable in the final analysis. All i can say, is it’s not for the seeing – the seeing with your eye. That’s only th ebeginning. It’s for the seeing with your mind’s eye, supplement by the whole experience.  The result I can’t articulate, but it’s there this morning. I couldn’t squeeze meaning out of a galaxy 2.5 million light years away – but I could out of this gas cloud. However, I didn’t spend nearly as much time with it as I would have liked, for Jupiter and Neptune were moving through an open gap in my trees to the south and I really wanted a good look at them both.

A real suze comparison of Jupiter and Neptune.

And as I thought it would, the 10mm Ethos nicely took in both. But Jupiter is so bright I quickly abandoned the 10mm for the 6mm and as I came in tight on Neptune, was able to exclude Jupiter from the fov. It is so small! – 2.3 seconds of arc, about one twentieth of Jupiter’s apparent diameter right now. You can tell its a disc and its dominant blue color is – well prominent. But your mind wrestles with its true size, far closer to Jupiter’s true size than its apparent size would indicate. I can see the disc, but . . . once more it grabs me. Another moment where I feel I have a legitimate grasp of what I am seeing. I can picture the huge, frozen globes in my mind – memories of images taken by spacecraft. There is and overwhelming feeling of reality brought about I suspect by how close the two planets are to one another. Nice. But the trees soon close in on both planets and I moved on to the double cluster in Perseua. It is captured nicely in the 17 mm with plenty of shoulder room, yet I don’t stay but a moment because dawn is starting to wash them out and I have an urge to move to the “captain’s seat” for Space Station Earth – my little area where I have a couple of chairs that give me a great view of the eastern horizon, Here there’s a real sense of sitting at the viewport of a space station where the scene constantly – but very slowly – changes.

I take my tea and the low-power, wide angle (11 degrees) Bushnel binoculars. And the little excursion is well worth it, for not only does Venus dominate this section of sky, but it is forming a beautiful triangle right now witht Mars and the Pleiades. And here to the naked eye comes that third revealing event of the morning, for I can easily see the true relationship between Venus and Mars, as well as our own place between them. Your mind has to do twist and turns here and they need to be done effortlessly. It’s a cosmic high dive, of sorts, and practice helps. Here’s what I mean.

The Orrery view of the inner planets on the morning of July 5, 2009 when these observations were made. (from: http://www.fourmilab.ch/cgi-bin/Solar

In front of you in the sky is a simple triangle. Venus is the dominant object, the rough twin of Earth, absolutely brilliant as sun light bounces off its cloud-shrouded body. That’s easy to visualize. It’s also easy to see the scene from “above” – that is from the perspective shown by an orrery where you look down on the orbits of all the planets. I can place Earth at its correct location and see Venus off in the distance, oriented to us and the Sun in such a way that it shines like a quarter moon displaying to us half of its lit side, half of its dark one. (This is fresh in my mind from having looked at it in the scope during twilight of the morning before.) And in that same mental picture, I see Mars, almost half its size and diminished even more for being in an orbit far more distant, yet still nearly in a line of sight, from our perspective, with Venus. And between the two I can see our future path. Then I switch to the Pleiades and here the line of sight game continues – Mars is to the right of Venus in this mental model, the Pleiades to the left – but oh my, the gap is huge! We’re talking perhaps 7 light minutes between us an Venus and maybe twice that between us and Mars – but when it comes to this most favored of star clusters, light has been traveling for 400 years – that is something in the order of 40 million times as far away. I have a sense of a huge zooming out – that’s all. The scale between the solar system’s little playground and the stars is too great and my mental model crumbles.

But it’s been a good morning. I feel so fully awake with all these impressions rolling in on me whole. These are the experiences I seek. They are nothing less than revelations. Yes, they remain beyond my ability to fully share – but they are certainly worth having and I am well paid for having ogttenupa nd gotten out at this hour.

Quick peek with Ethos

Well I have, what is for me, a complete Ethos set now and a few hours ago I got a quick peek using the 120mm Skywatcher in twilight.

“Wow” is appropriate I could see quite quickly that of the 3 new eyepieces (17,10, 6) the 10 and 6 are going to get a lot of use on this scope and become practically all that I use. The 17 – well, I’ve just bever beent hat thrilled with low-power, wide-field views and I am stillnot – unless, of course, you have an object that calls for it, such as the Double Cluster.

Yes, conditions could have been better. If I had only gotten out a few minutes earlier! But it was 4 am and we were already quite obviously out of astronomical twilight so that a quick look at M31 was unsatisfying – too much twilight there. And by the time I swung around to M57 in the west it too was pretty much wiped out. So I settled for the Double Double – just great in the 6mm (150X) and even later, brilliant Venus (like a first quarter moon) and Jupiter – just magnificent.

The field of view is, of course, impressive, but I expected that. What I wasn’t sure would be there – but is – is the all aorund quality I’ve come to take for granted with the Naglers. But getting back tot he fov – to cleanly split the Double Double so that someone seeing it for the first time would know they were looking at four stars – and still have plenty of breathing room around it – is a real pleasure. The 17mm gives close to a 2-degree fov, enough to capture the Double-Double on one side and Vega on the other, but at 53X a split would be more a stunt than anything useful. The 10mm did split it. But the best view was witht he 6mm and even with the 6mm, the space it occupies is more than 10 times what you need for the Double-Double, so it gives the split plenty of context and you have plenty of time to get a good look as it drifts through.

I was impressed with the view of Venus, but Jupiter blew me away. Seeing was good, but by now we were in bright twilight with only Jupiter and Venus obvious to the naked eye. Still, I could see three moons and several marking on the planet and colors I’ve never seen before. This is testimony to both the eyepieces and the 120mm Skywatcher, of course, plus to the fact that Jupiter is apporaching its largest size for us. It certainly means that as this Jupiter season moves on I will not hesitate to take the 120mm to where I can see the huge planet, for it will remain frustratingly low in the southern sky.

As for the quality of the eyepieces – well, that’s what impressed me. The fact that I could take the Double Double, set it on the edge of the fov, and have perfect star images as it drifted from edge to edge. That’s what I expect out of my Naglers and that’s what I also get out of the Ethos – at least in these initial tests.