Though the comet's position is moving upward yesterday it was just touching a bank of clouds. So it was visible but barely. The sky is tonight is clear Still needed binoculars. It is definitely starting to fade.
Welcome home Bob and Doug. Well done to all involved.
PH
Let's add one more bummer for the year 2020. Certainly not as serious as some but still sad. A wonderful astronomy event takes place on my birthday this year. A conjunction (a close appearance of two objects in the celestial sky) of Jupiter and Saturn like no other. It's the closest these two planets have been together since 1643. To give an idea of what that means, here's a picture my friend sent me that he recently took showing the moon with Jupiter the brightest of the two dots.
So, to get a sense of this the moon is about half a degree across in the sky. Extending your hand and looking at your pinky with one eye shut is about this width. You can see Jupiter and Saturn are about 3° apart. On December 21, at sunset, they will be .1° apart, or 1/5th of a moon width.
So what's the problem? This will be a spectacular sight in a telescope. You will not only have Jupiter and Saturn fitting into the field of view of an eyepieces of decent power but also their moons. So naturally I'm was going to set up and get a bunch of people to see it. And then I realized, it can't be done safely. You've not only got people with masks that aren't hyper-sealed breathing vapor out the top, It will be moist out at night giving that vapor a nice place to condense on the eyepiece and holder. In addition you have possible fluid transfer from eyes pressed up against the eyepiece. Even if everyone wore a good mask and gloves there is just too much possible exposure for people in my demographic to risk.
However it can certainly be see with family members and other possible isolated groups. To the naked eye the pair will definitely be noticed by anyone even casually looking that way at the right time--look to the southwest around 45 minutes after local sunset. Again very obvious. It will be very good in any pair of binoculars. And of course it's best for telescopes. What's interesting is this will be just even those junky telescopes you may have sitting in the closet from when you thought you'd get into astronomy. Due to their brightness in the sky they are extremely easy to find. So one way or another one should see this amazing event in the sky. Highly recommended.
Attachments
How close will these two planets be from each other in miles ?
@irwin posted:How close will these two planets be from each other in miles ?
Almost half a billion miles apart. As with double stars some of them are optically close and some of them are physically close. In this case Jupiter and Saturn are on the same side of the Sun but their orbits are still very far apart.
Half a billion miles. Whew! Almost hit each other!
Best I could do with my 80 mm Hanukkah trash refractor and cell phone. The top image is Jupiter with one moon, Io, above and two on the other side close to the sphere and Callisto almost a third of the way out towards Saturn. Saturn does appear with its ring in the telescope eyepiece but couldn't get my phone steady enough to capture it. Unless you're into amateur astronomy you have no idea how amazing it is to seem them both in one eyepiece. And if I could haul out my larger, and more stable, telescope, I could easily obtain this view at 4x higher power.
Attachments
The Old Man: That is one amazing photo. Your knowledge of astronomy and photographic ability is really admirable.
@irwin posted:The Old Man: That is one amazing photo. Your knowledge of astronomy and photographic ability is really admirable.
<<<< This is the closest I could find to a blushing emoticon. Actually you're going to see some amazing pictures from others in the upcoming week.
@The Old Man posted:
I know it is a bit unusual for the forums here for someone to actually compliment another forumite, instead of using profanity to dis someone. Sorry to shock you.
@irwin posted:I know it is a bit unusual for the forums here for someone to actually compliment another forumite, instead of using profanity to dis someone. Sorry to shock you.
You did throw me for a loop there.
Though the image this time is too shaky to show the moon's, you can see how the distance strunk between the two planets.
Attachments
Attachments
Images (3)
I went out to walk the dog this morning and saw the white glow in the north sky and wondered what it was. It was mostly like a bright light behind a cloud. Came back in, turned on the teley, and saw that there was a launch going on.
I was up at 430AM this morning to watch the live stream of the launch on the NASA Youtube channel. I always love a night launch. So cool.
Great living along the coast and see these. I set my alarm so I could see today. The shuttles were the best
@vinole posted:
I was able to see this morning's launch of the Falcon9/Dragon from about 150mi S of KSC. It was the most striking launch I've seen in person from a distance, and looked more like a super bright comet rather than an orange glow that you usually get. Was also cool to watch the booster stage come down (see the bright glow behind the Dragon capsule) as it appeared to fire blasts every 10-15 seconds that the atmosphere reacted to like the main spacecraft . My zoomed in cell phone photo sucks (bottom one), but attached some posted elsewhere to see it much better.
Holy shit!