Starship Asterisk*

What did I see in the day? Jupiter and Venus passing at their closest, imaged around local noon under a bright blue sky!
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Cloudy early, then the stars and moon finally came out and it turned out to be a great eclipse! Then the clouds and moon came back.

Did anyone else see meteors last night? It was a good night for them!

owlice wrote: ↑Tue May 31, 2022 7:43 pm Did anyone else see meteors last night? It was a good night for them!

I looked out my front door shortly after 12:30 last night, and it was immediately clear that I wouldn’t see anything over the neighborhood streetlights. So I got dressed and drove to an unlit scenic lookout.

There was no meteor storm here; more like a failed meteor drizzle. You know, how you feel a lone raindrop, and you look up, and there’s not even a cloud above you? That’s what the meteors were like.

I started observing shortly before 1 a.m. AST (5 a.m. GMT), and stopped at 2 a.m. I saw a total of 5 meteors, all of which were short duration, and all of which traced back to Boötes:

• 1:25 in Pegasus, bright, orange, and slow. This first meteor showed just as I was about to give up for the night.
• Ca. 1:30 in central Boötes, a very brief orange flash, no perceptible proper motion.
• 1:37 in Lyra, faint, white, and fast.
• 1:38 in eastern Boötes, orange and slow, on a path that traced east of Arcturus.
• 1:51 between Cygnus and Pegasus, white and fast.

It occurred to me that I spent most of the time facing northeast, because there was a hill to my southwest, but also because the light pollution in St. Thomas is mostly on the south side of the island. The northeast bias seems to show in my observations, as few as they were.

As far as the sky conditions, the Milky Way was faintly visible, and I could barely make out M5 naked eye. I could not confirm M13 naked eye.

I seem to see less and less in the night sky as the years pass. I don’t know whether it is declining night vision or the increasing light pollution, though I suspect the latter. The sky from the dark lookout last night was as washed out as my suburban sky was 20 years ago.

owlice wrote: ↑Tue May 31, 2022 7:43 pm Did anyone else see meteors last night? It was a good night for them!

Well, a so-so night, anyway. Not as high of activity as we hoped (against the odds) for. I didn't see any visually (I didn't spend a lot of time looking, though). But I had three cameras on the sky, two allsky video cameras and a DSLR with a wide angle lens shooting continuous 30-second images towards the southwest. The more sensitive allsky camera caught 21 Tau Herculids between 21:30 and 02:26 MDT. The image below, a stack of seven images collected from 22:17 to 23:23 MDT contains 8 Tau Herculids.

The meteors are unusual. No matter where in the sky they were, they were yellow and had very short trails, suggesting they burned up very quickly (and were therefore made up of fragile material). But four of the meteors I caught on the DSLR left dust/ion trails that drifted away over two minutes or more. So the meteoroids may have been fairly large. Also below is an animated GIF of one of those (you might have to open it in a new tab to get the animation). The frames are each 30 seconds.
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The full Moon, colored by heavy smoke drifting up from a fire in Arizona, more than 400 miles away. The smoke was so thick I couldn't even see the Moon rise. It didn't show up until it was a good 15° above the horizon.
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Venus rising with the Pleades just above.

Kind of cool. My allsky camera (which is for meteors, but which I also let run in the day) caught a nice double rainbow yesterday.
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Longest meteor trail? We shall see.

Impressive display of anticrepuscular rays, framed by a rainbow. The rays continued overhead and behind me, becoming crepuscular rays, but didn't reach all the way back down to the western horizon.
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Chris Peterson wrote: ↑Mon Aug 08, 2022 1:37 am Impressive display of anticrepuscular rays, framed by a rainbow. The rays continued overhead and behind me, becoming crepuscular rays, but didn't reach all the way back down to the western horizon.
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Click to view full size image

Wow, Chris. Amazing!!

Ann

Nice ISS pass this morning, caught on my allsky camera. Came into sunlight near Jupiter in the lower right, crossed above Mars and Aldebaran and just below Capella, then faded out on the horizon near Venus. Orion is in the lower right (Betelgeuse and Rigel are most obvious). The bright spot near the bottom is probably a satellite flare, lasting less then a few seconds during the two-minute pass.
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A few nights ago; so it wasn't actually tonight, we here in San Luis Obispo were treated to another launch from Vandenburg AFB. This last one was a smaller rocket but they are all pretty cool to watch and most especially the large rockets. The base is about a two hour drive from here but once in awhile we will make the drive to watch them launch however its always risky business as one never knows if the launch will be scratched ( I hate when that happens) Nonetheless if anyone reading this comment has never watched one of those big boys take off you can't imagine how loud they are like even from many miles away heck your whole body vibrates as well. If you have never had the experience I highly recommend that you do sosometime.

At around 9:45 CDT, I saw a big red fiery tail headed by a red bulb, slowly descending, straight down, a few miles south, maybe, of Normandy, MO. I saw it and immediately told two friends standing next to me that it was a shooting star (Is that probably what it was; what else could it be?).

Very pretty lunar eclipse, good weather start to finish. Might try to stitch together a video since I took pictures every minute. This is near the middle of totality.
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A couple more eclipse shots. The entire thing, about every 10 minutes for 4 hours, spiraling out from the center. And one just seconds from the start of totality that nicely captures the blue ozone band.
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Had a nice lunar halo for most of the evening. One of my allsky cameras takes a picture every 5 seconds, and caught it nicely. You can see Jupiter inside the halo. At the time of the image, Jupiter was 26° from the Moon. The halo is considered to have a radius of 22°, but that's to its inside, and here we can see that Jupiter is towards the outside, which explains the difference.
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Lunar occultation of Mars.

Despite some thin clouds coming and going, I managed to get some nice shots. The clouds made the actual occultation invisible to my eyes... just not enough contrast. But the cameras had no problem seeing through that.

(The second image is an animation... might have to click on it to see that.)
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Another occultation image. This was with my Canon 7D on my 4" Stellarvue refractor. The beginning and end of the event, an hour apart. (In at about 7 o'clock, out at about 3 o'clock. Got to look closely!)
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Comet C/2022 E3 ZTF
Been wanting to get this for a couple of weeks, but we've had thin haze every morning, which combined with an interfering Moon made it problematic. Finally got clear skies this morning. Shot this with my QSI660 camera on my RC10 scope. Not a lot of exposure time, but it's bright so that's not a problem. 10x60s luminance, 1x60s red, 1x60s green, 1x60s blue. Just looked like a slightly oblong fuzzy spot in binoculars.
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Comet C/2022 E3 ZTF
UT 2023-01-22 11:55. Got another clear morning, but terrible seeing (5 arcsec). Shot again with the QSI660 camera on my RC10 scope. 23x30s lum, 21x60s red, 21x60s green, 20x60s blue. The ion tail doesn't show any visible structure at all.
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They'll be better images of the Moon/Jupiter conjunction tonight but not many as lucky.

It was a bit hazy last night but clear enough to witness a pretty rare conjunction that, I hope, we'll see better images submitted.

Is my picture better than the three you posted, Fred?

Absolutely not, but here goes anyway - the view of Venus and Jupiter from my balcony on March 2, 2023:


Ann