Sean’s Mental Walkabout

This is just incredible.  This moon of mars is basically just little asteroid, so to have pictures this clear is completely new science. 

Click through on the image for more info.  While it doesn’t look this awesome in a backyard scope, it still looks pretty amazing.

The Galaxy Zoo that is.  Granted, a bunch of what you’ll see are round fuzy blobs, but those classify out pretty quickly.  In the hour I’ve spent classifying I’ve actually come across 2 galaxy collisions already.

Spend an hour for science, it’s a much better hour spent than randomly trolling around on the internet.

So very awesome.

Just because it’s that awesome.  You should definitely look at signing up to the APOD RSS feed.

While I love the snow part of winter (which we don’t get nearly enough of down here in in Poughkeepsie), I used to hate the dark part of winter.  The Sun setting at 4:45 in December is sort of depressing.

I say I used to, because now I’m eager for sundown, as it means I can grab the binoculars or the telescope and wander outside.  Now, a 6 pm sunset in October is great.

Tonight we were at the library, as I needed to pick up an inter library loan book. As per usual they had a table of old books for sale, which I was flipping through.

One of those books was “Astronomy”, published some time in the early 1970s. Towards the center were some really fuzzy pictures of Mars and Saturn. And it occurred to me. This was prior to the Viking missions, and the Voyager missions. In 1970 our understanding of even our own solar system was incredible elementary.

As I now look at beautiful images taken by Hubble over the last decade, it’s hard to believe how recent all this knowledge really is, and how much more we are sure to discover.

2 months ago I bought a telescope.  I’ve wanted one for years, and finally broke down and did it while they were on sale at Orion.  It arrived about 6 weeks ago, and I’ve had about a dozen good observing days since.

Previously I spent some time finding Nebula, double stars, and galaxies.  Last night I decided to check out something different, stellar clusters.  It turns out there are 1/2 dozen different stellar clusters in and around the constellation of Cassiopeia, and I found most of them last night.  While the most famous is M103, as that’s in the messier catalog, the double cluster was the most spectacular.

There is something about a stellar cluster and it’s dense packing of starts that gives you the sense that the stars are just spilling out of a rift in space.  The pictures don’t do them justice, they are just breath taking in the scope.  The detail and depth of the clusters is amazing, even in slightly too bright sky last night (the moon was 1/2 full and setting at the time).  I can’t wait to check them out once the moon cycle passes and we get back to really dark skies.

M103 – open cluster in cassiopeia


NGC 869 & 884 – double cluster in perseus

Today’s comic is available as a poster.

Yesterday my new telescope showed up, after just over an hour of assembly it was ready to go. Unfortunately, darkness was still about 5 hours off.

Once we finally got the darkness, we had a clear night, and a few friends over to play. I learned a few important things:

• The 9x scope takes some getting used to finding things. I am used to binoculars, which you can flip back and forth to the night sky very quickly. I’m still not all the comfortable pointing it yet.
• The sighting scope needs alignment, which I found out how to do by accident. I can now cross hair something and it will be in the scope field of view.
• Jupiter is always a hit, and easy to find because it throws so much light. With the 120x optics (I have 48x and 120x optics included) you can see the cloud bands on the planet, which is very cool.
• Transit time at 120x is quicker than I imagined. Jupiter does it in about 45 seconds.
• I got used to the reverse / upsidedown controls pretty quick, quicker than I’d expect.
• I’m really glad I got the object finder. While I didn’t try using it last night (as calibrating that the first time is going to take some effort), the evening definitely showed me that there is a huge adjustment to finding things with the scope. Having the assistance to find things is going to be appreciated.

I managed to snag 2 satellites in the scope at 48x, which I found with the sighting scope by accident. I think we were at about 6 satellites last night. I also found that I ended up in the same structures a few times by accident, and was starting to be able to find familiar bits of the sky.

All in all a fun evening. It looks like our next clear night will be tuesday, so will need to spend that night figuring out the object finder.