Karl's Astro-Journal
"The universe is like a safe to which there is a combination, but the combination is locked up in the safe." -- Peter de Vries, novelist
November 13, 2024:
Last evening I was looking from my porch to the southeast, noticing lights on the hilltop about a mile away. Later, bright star Sirius was rising over the same hilltop. An interesting constrast. One light is roughly a 20 minute walk away and the other, an unreachable, unimaginable distance. Yet, from my perspective, about the same brightness. Sirius is the brightest star in the evening sky and a mere 8 light-years away making it one of the closest stars to our solar system. Huh, ... "a mere 8 light-years", or in more relatable units, 50,000,000,000,000 miles (50 trillion miles). Ouch!, ... that's a lot of miles. I wonder how many pairs of sneakers I'd wear through walking that distance?
The picture shown was taken through window screens so it's kind of fuzzy/blurry but still makes the point. Even relatively nearby objects in the night sky are remarkably far. Yet, for Sirius to shine as bright as it does is astounding, evidence of the tremedous power being unleashed. Our humble Sun would be unremarkable, barely visible from 8 light-years away. The known galaxy stretches out to a distance of roughly 13 billion light years, ... or, (drum roll please) 80,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles (80 sextillion). I think I just broke my calculator.
October 17, 2024:
Comet C/2023 A3 is on its return trip to the outer solar system. Will it visit the inner planets again? Only future generations 80,000 years from now will know for sure. Meanwhile, on a long awaited clear evening in present day Binghamton NY, the comet was difficult to spot given competition from city lights and a full Moon rising in the east. But with binoculars Comet C/2023 A3 was eventually found in the western sky hovering along the edge of setting twilight. Observing from a pedestrian bridge over the Susquehanna River, the comet was a nice target for a Canon 60Da with a 70-200mm lens. Based on the magnitude of nearby stars a reasonable guess of the comet's brightness would be about magnitude 2.5. Definitely a naked eye object. But from the city and with a full Moon?, ... not so much.
Several other comet-curious folks came onto the bridge and were happy to snap a few photos of fairly good quality on their iPhones. Is it time to retire my DSLR equipment and switch to the ever improving mobile-phone technology? Hmm, ... I'm not quite ready for that.
The featured photo has a couple squiggly lines near the comet which are the result of sunlight reflecting off Starlink satellites. Usually considered a nuisance by astro-photographers, they were helpful in this case picking out the steadiest image since the multi-second exposures were being taken from a wooden walkway along the bridge's western side. So, the straighter the satellite streak, the steadier the picture.
Additional Images:
Image-#2,
This one shows a faint anti-tail:
Image-#3,
And my final word on Comet C/2023-A3, a combination of 2 of the best images from the evening:
Image-#4,
October 11, 2024:
A vivid Northern Lights display was visible over much of the United States last night.
In Broome County NY, the overcast skies finally cleared around 8:00pm, just in time to see an arc of greenish aurora light stretching from the Northeast to Northwest horizon.
Around 10:00pm the Northern Lights really cut loose and filled the Northern sky with bright red columns of light reaching nearly overhead.
Probably the best display I've seen since 2002, maybe the best ever!
Clouds began to drift in again around 11:00pm so I called it a night, but ... Wow!
My astro-photography skills have gotten a little rusty over the past few years.
Case in point: I had the brightness of my DSLR LCD set at maximum for use in normal daylight photograph.
But at night, this setting made the LCD far too bright and made my photos look overexposed.
Unfortunately, I forgot about the LCD brightness setting and adjusted my camera's ISO and exposure settings instead, to give the images what I thought would be a better brightness appearance.
Oops.
As a result most of the aurora shots I took were under-exposed.
Photo-editing-software helped restore much of the images brightness but there's only so much you can do with a bad photos out of the camera.
Hopefully, more bright aurora displays are in the offing this year and next, giving me another chance to capture them from here in NY.
Additional Images:
Image-#2,
Image-#3,
Image-#4
August 23, 2024:
For sky-watchers, early August is a time for meteors.
Arguably, the most well known meteor shower, the Perseid Meteor Shower ("The Perseids") peaks each year around the nights of August 12-13, as the earth moves through the dusty debris left behind by Comet 109P/Swift-Tuttle.
So, how busy does the night sky get during this famous meteor shower?
The most common figure given on websites is 100 visible meteors per hour, as compared to just 2-3 meteors on an average non-shower night.
My own experience watching showers, even from very dark sites, is less impressive with only a handful of bright meteors/hour being visible, ... with one exception.
The Leonid Meteor Storm of Nov. 17, 2001 filled the early dawn sky with more meteors than we could observe, several per second with flashbulb type fireballs occurring every few seconds leaving smokey trails in their wake.
The image shown with this post compares two graphics from
NASA's All Sky Fireball Network which consists of a collection of all sky cameras positions through out the U.S.
From the images captured by the network meteor trajectories can be calculated and plotted. The image shows the meteors tracked on a typical non-meteor shower night with that of the peak of the Perseids on August 13th of this year.
May 28, 2024:
A softball, a ping-pong ball and about 9 feet of string, ... viola!, all you need to show the Earth-Moon system to scale. It's surprising to many just how comparatively small the Moon is and how far it is from Earth when shown to scale. This is likely because there is never enough space on the printed page of a science textbook to show the Earth-Moon separation properly. As a result, we become accustom to the compressed view we see in books. Similarly, with the Sun approaching the peak of it's current 11 year cycle, I was curious about how the recent X-Class solar flares look in an Earth-Sun system drawn to scale, ... well, roughly. The Earth's distance from the Sun is about 116.25 solar diameters. In the image shown above, which includes a slightly modified frame from a recent
SOHO
movie, the Sun is roughly 30 pixels in diameter, therefore 30 * 116.25px = ~3487px distance to Earth. On the same scale the Earth diameter would actually be about a third of a pixel. It's shown as 4px just to make it visible. That's more than a 10X diameter upgrade. But no worries, I magnanimously decreased Earth's density in proportion, so gravitationlly, i.e. weight-wise, we're still good!, ... and let's look no closer at the diameter change implications than that! Disclaimer: The math and reasoning in this post are solely those of the author who makes no claim as to the accuracy or sensibility (or lunacy) thereof.
May 11, 2024:
A tempting thought last evening, to hop in the car and drive to a cloud-free location to see the massive aurora display that occurred overnight and continues to occur around the world. The Kp-Index was maxing out at nine indicating an extreme geomagnetic storm in progress, the first time I'd seen that since Sept 07, 2002 when bright red aurora were visible over NY filling the sky from the northern horizon to the zenith. But last night, after carefully looking at the weather forecast, radar maps and satellite images, I could not for the life of me find any location within a several-hours drive that would lead to cloud free skies. Such is amateur astronomy in NY (see the April 09th eclipse posting as evidence). The nearest places that had guaranteed clear skies were at least a day or more of heroic driving away and I'm getting too old for those kind of "drive till you drop" adventures. Besides, in a day's time the aurora display could easily subside leaving me holding an empty-aurora-bag wondering what the hell I was thinking, making such a trip on a whim.
So, I decided to do what I have done many-a-night in NY after realizing the spiteful clouds were consciously thickening, purposefully intent on dousing any spark of hope that the stars might emerge, I went to bed and awakened the next morning to enjoy the many images of the northern and southern lights on the web.
Spaceweather.com
has a huge collection of images from observers all over the world and even from as far south as
Arizona
.
Here's a particularly beautiful one from
Ireland
with what looks to be the light of a setting crescent Moon peeking through the clouds.
Places most noted as prime aurora viewing locations are also missing the show as many of these are near or above the arctic circle wherein this time of year they are experiencing 24 hours of daylight or twilight skies, never darkening enough to see the wispy glow of the aurora.
Heightened solar activity is expected to continue in the days, weeks and months ahead as the Sun approaches Solar-Maximum, the peak of it's eleven year solar-cycle of activity which could lead to many more displays of the Northern Lights.
April 14, 2024:
The dust of the April 8th Eclipse is settling. The local TV News has moved on to other stories. Astronomy websites are still posting some spectacular photos of the event.
You can check out some at these sites:
APOD April 9th,
April 10th,
and April 11th,
and April 14th, and
Space Weather Eclipse Gallery
But, life goes on. While unpacking all the equipment that had been loaded in the car for the Great American Eclipse, including 2 telescopes, multiple solar filters, multiple eyepieces, 2 cameras, tripods, multiple lenses, ... etc., I found about 50 eclipse glasses still in their original wrapper. Seems wrong to just toss them and I suppose they do have some value for looking at sunspots from time to time. But having no plans to try and see another total eclipse in my lifetime, perhaps I'll send the spare glasses to a random unbeknownst individual who lives in Australia in the path of totality for the Great Australian Eclipse in July 22, 2028 that has totality cutting right through the heart of Sydney.
Hmm, ... Australia, ... hmm, ... Sydney, ... hmm, ... 2028, ... hmm, .............. Road trip? Maybe time for this ole dag to take a walkabout, find a cozy billabong, kick back with a stubby and enjoy the eclipse down-under. (pardon the certainly misused Australian colloquialisms, ... but, no worries?)
April 09, 2024:
A crystal clear day here in Upstate NY. Not a cloud in the sky the entire day. That was April 7th, the day before the 2nd Great American Eclipse sent the Moon's shadow racing over cities and towns along Lake Ontario's shore. Eclipse Day, April 8th was a different story weather-wise. At about 12:00 pm clouds began rolling in and they kept rolling in and stayed throughout the afternoon preventing any direct view of the eclipse. Still, ... I have to say it was a very interesting experience, unlike any other. With the Moon's shadow racing along the cloud tops at nearly twice the speed of sound, the rate at which the darkness set in as totality occurred was uncanny. It wasn't just that darkness fell, it's that the speed of the darkness was so noticeable, so palpable, so strange it was as if the darkness itself were a substance forming, materializing in the air around you.
The image shown here is from a time-lapse series with the shutter set to take a picture every 5 seconds.
That interval was far to slow to capture the speedy supersonic shadow that crossed the sky in just a few shutter clicks.
Here's a very short movie clip slowed down quite a bit to allow some of the shadow's movement to be seen.
This will likely be the last total solar eclipse I try to see in my lifetime. They are rare events, but that's true of many things in life and sometimes these events work out and sometimes you just get close. In my case, it was a small adventure just to make the effort, as well as a great experience to share with family members, with laughter, food and fun. All in all, it was a good eclipse.
April 01, 2024:
As April 8th, Eclipse Day approaches, preparations for the upcoming Solar Eclipse in Upstate NY are well underway. News outlets are airing and printing information about how to best view the eclipse featuring stories and articles about local events and organizations that will be hosting eclipse viewing parties. On Easter Sunday I traveled north to visit family and noticed along the way, on Route 81, highway notification signs were already prepping drivers for the expected influx of traffic heading north towards the path of totality. "Expect Delays" was the primary message as well as signs trying to encourage a more distributed influx and egress by suggesting, "Arrive Early, Stay Late". I'm guessing that the amount of traffic will depend on the weather forecast as April 8th approaches. A Mostly Sunny forecast will definitely inspire the largest number of would-be observers to head north for the event. The image shown is from my dash-cam while driving into Binghamton, NY about 7:30pm.
February 24, 2024:
The
2nd Great American Solar Eclipse is a little over 6 weeks away. Occurring on April 8th, parts of NY, from Buffalo, all along the Lake Ontario shore, and up through Lake Placid, will fall under the swath of totality. The Sun is very active this year as it approaches solar maximum in 2025, the peak of its 11 year cycle of activity. The photo shown here is of sunspot AR3590, a humongous active region that has been unleashing a steady stream of
X-Class solar flares. The photo was taken with a makeshift solar filter made from a pair of solar-safe glasses taped to a piece of round cardboard and slapped onto the front of a Canon DSLR. Even amateur astronomers love duct tape! (or simple cellophane tape in this case.)
In order to prepare for photographing the eclipse I hope to take my telescope to
Otsiningo Park and relearn my solar photography skills (we're talking about some serious rust here. i.e. it's been a while). Today, upper air turbulence prevented even a remote chance of getting a clear sunspot picture. But by using a little bit of software magic even some atmospheric turbulence can be dealt with. Hopefully, more to come.
WARNING!!!: Every self respecting astronomer, amateur or otherwise, always feels obligated to tell folks "Never look directly at the Sun without proper eye protection". If you don't know what that is, go to the Eclipse link above or just google "Safe Solar Eclipse Viewing." From a NASA website: "When watching a partial or annular solar eclipse directly with your eyes, you must look through safe solar viewing glasses (“eclipse glasses”) or a safe handheld solar viewer at all times. Eclipse glasses are NOT regular sunglasses. Regular sunglasses, no matter how dark, are not safe for viewing the Sun."
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