Vesta Revisited

I thought it had been a long time since my last post but it has only been since August - not that bad. My ETX handboxes still don't work and I still don't have a new scope and it is still way too light to do much around the house. That said, it's a new year, we have a new president as of noon today (ugh), and I read that my old friend Vesta is in the sky again. I haven't seen it in awhile. It was still low in Gemini at 8:00 pm when I first went out so I waited until 10:00 when it was a bit higher. Unfortunately I think the seeing got worse but it was still clear and I could make out Castor and Pollux unaided. Using my trusty 10x50s I was able to pick out stars down to about mag 6. I used Pollux and Phi Geminorum (mag 5) as pointers to hop over to Omega 1 and 2 in Cancer, a mag 6.3 wide double.  From there I looked about a third of the binoc field to the south and there it was, glowing dimly - Vesta! I could even occasionally make out the little string of three mag 7 stars just east of Vesta.It looks like I first saw this little planetoid back in 2008, a bit over 8 years ago, near the beginning of the Obama administration. I hope my observing is as good during the coming administration as it has been during the last two, but I'm not holding my breath.

Planet Crash!

It's been almost a year since my last post here.  Too long. Last year was not a good year for observing. My ETX has all but died as the handbox keys just don't want to work. Furthermore my neighbors are getting more and more paranoid every year and I'm now surrounded by motion detector lights: one to the N and one to the S in back, one to the S in front, and a light that seems to be a car headlight mounted on the neighbor's porch across the street and pointed at my house! If the light pollution wasn't bad enough, the end of January through me into the hospital for a few days with a subdural hematoma. That pretty much laid me low for 4-6 weeks. After that we got a call from a neighbor who wanted to buy our property in MO so we ended up selling out and moving to TX full time. We now own a lovely house in a neighborhood where the streets are named after objects de astro. Our street is named Aquarius so I guess that makes this the dawning of the age of Aquarius where Jupiter aligns with Mars etc etc (a good show!). Except this week Jupiter is definitely NOT aligning with Mars, it's Saturn! Jupiter is aligning with Venus and boy are they putting on a show. Venus is fairly racing through the sky and tonight shot right past Jupiter slowly slogging along. Clouds in the west threatened to ruin the show last night and tonight both but they pretty much dissipated and both planet pairs were gorgeous. I wasn't able to make out Mercury yet, it's just too low in the haze from my place.
I also decided to participate in Loss of Night's latest citizen science project and did a couple of 8 star observations with their app. At 9:15 or so the limiting magnitude reported by the app was about 2.5. Not bad for a place that is in perpetual twilight. I whined and fretted enough that the neighbors all turned off their outside lights on my side of their house so it's not too bad. I took all of mine down and actually got a thank you from two of the neighbors! Now if I could just turn off a few street lights. Maybe those second amendment folks can help out??
I had to use binocs since my ETX's new 497 handbox also bit the dust. This time the display is bad. One with bad keys, the other with a bad display. I think it's time to get a new scope.
We also found time to run over to Harlingen today and picked up a couple of mystery caches for the latest geocache mission project. We found 8nut's square root day cache and the Heritage Museum's cache. That one was fun as we got to take a quick look at their cigar box banjo exhibit and the  historical buildings on site.   Definitely worth a return trip.

Neptune at the Bonebrake Center

Tonight there was an astronomy outreach program at the Bonebrake center in Salem.  Since I'm friends with two of the ringleaders and one is an avid geocacher we decided to go early, have dinner at Angies Cafe and do some geocaching in the area.  We snagged a few, had a great pork steak bbq dinner, and met the crew at dusk.  I helped Joe Schuster and Jason Stotler set up their scopes and helped a bit as the night progressed.  They had a nice small crowd of mixed adults and kids. We were treated to clear skies, a quarter moon, and views of Saturn including Titan. Jason and I managed to get a glimpse of M31 in my 10x50 binocs but I was unable to catch Neptune.  It was just too low and the sky not quite dark enough.  Later at home around 11:00 I was finally able to verify Neptune. I thought it was a little brighter than the 7.8 given by Sky Safari and was able to see it easily in my 10x50s. There were not enough stars of Aquarius visible unaided due to the quarter moon glare so star hopping with my binocs from Fomalhaut was a bit tedious but I got 'er done! Uranus would have been a bit brighter but it was still too low to be easy to catch.  Maybe later in the valley although seeing anything in the East is difficult down there.

A Night to Remember

Actually all of yesterday was a Day to Remember: a perfectly beautiful early spring day in Missouri. We went back to Bray Conservation Area outside Rolla and hiked the Full Moon trail, about 2 miles I think. Of course we were geocaching and we found Rick and Joy's Golden Ammo Can at about the half way mark near the sinkhole feature. Yesterday evening I took advantage of the crystal clear moonless skies to observe Venus next to the Pleiades. I've been observing several Venus conjunctions this year as part of my BRGVSP outreach sessions but this one was different, and very pretty in binoculars. Leo looks like it is trying to catch Jupiter now and Jupiter makes a nice pairing with the Beehive cluster nearby. Early this morning I got up at 5:00 am to see if Nova Sagittarii 2015 No 2 was still visible.  It is and is still about magnitude 6 by my estimate. S&T claims it varies in brightness between 4.5 and 6 so I'll need to try again if we get any more clear mornings.  It's overcast again today (haze was coming in at 5:00) so one never knows.  This IS Missouri after all!

Nova Sagittarii 2015 No. 2

Nova Sagittarii 2015 No. 2

Nova Sagittarii 2015 No. 2

Nova Sagittarii 2015 No. 2

Nova Sagittarii 2015 No. 2

A Nova in Sagitarius

I've been trying to remember to get up early on a clear morning to see if I could see the new nova in the south. Today was the day.  Judy couldn't sleep so she went outside, noticed it was clear, and woke me up about 6:30. I grabbed my 10x50s and headed south to the fence where I just might get some relief from the depressingly large number of streetlights in our neighborhood, not to mention the added bonus of a yardlight every couple of yards, LED accent lights, rope lights, and every other form of light polution known to mankind! I was able to see Scorpius high in the south, much higher than it is up north at this time, and I knew that Sagitarius was following along close behind.  I couldn't see much unaided though so I pulled out my trusty 10x50s.  There it was, a pattern that was familiar: the teapot.  I looked for the lid and THERE IT WAS! There was a new fourth 'star' where there has always been only three before. I wasn't able to do a very good comparison but there was definitely a bright star not shown on my star chart. When I got home I estimated that it was about the same brightness as HD166023 a bit further west and out of my field of view. That would put the nova at about magnitude 5 or 6. If it is still clear in the morning, and if I'm able to get up again, I'll try a bit earlier from a darker location and see if I can't get a better estimate of brightness, but for now this will have to do.  I believe this is my first viewing of a nova! The image is a screen shot of the field around the nova as seen through my 10x50s assuming a seven degree FOV. The white arrow points to the location of the nova which I penciled in on the screenshot.

Venus and the Moon (and Mars, and the Sun finally)

Moon/Venus Conjunction

As bad as the seeing was last night (non-existent) it was superb tonight.  The sun finally broke through the cloud bank about noon and it got steadily better the rest of the day. Tonight was perfect except for a horde of pesky mosquitoes that have been taking advantage of all the rain and warm weather we've had lately. I missed the Mars/Moon conjunction last night because of the clouds but the Moon/Venus duet really put on a show tonight. I was able to capture a nice image of the pair framed by the neighbor's palm tree across the street. Mars was also in view, barely. I was able to make it out in my 10x50s after it got a bit darker.  I also used my new Nexus 7 tablet and Google Sky Map to help find Mars.  I've come to really like the new tool.  I've not use the 'point and shoot' feature of Sky Safari Pro, preferring to use manual mode instead, but I've been using Sky Map auto mode quite a bit ever since discovering that the compass and magnets don't go well together! I discovered that while geocaching a few days ago with it. The compass feature of c:geo was leading me all over the place until I realized that the cover had a magnet to turn the Nexus on and off by opening the cover. After removing the case, all was well, and the operation of Sky Map also improved! I also noticed that Jupiter is now high overhead, leading Leo to the west. I had originally intended setting up the scope for an evening of viewing but decided against it after providing dinner to some hungry mosquitoes.

March's Star Party - in the rain!

Who would be silly enough to show up for a star party in the pouring rain?  Those thoughts went through my head today as a fairly steady rain poured down all day long. A small clearing in the clouds appeared late this afternoon but quickly closed up toward sundown. The answer to my question came in the form of Judy and me and about ten others! I anticipated a stellar no-show and added about twice as much material including slides on the signs of the zodiac and why the sun's not in Leo in August anymore, Dawn at Ceres, CME's on the sun, and finding your way around in the sky. A crash of OpenOffice that occured before the show even started resulted in several slides 'disappearing' but otherwise it all went without a hitch, except no stars. There were several good questions and everyone seemed to enjoy going outside to see if we could catch at least a glimpse of something. There were no 9 year olds at this event so I basically skipped 'birthday stars' but will include them later. It was a kind of blah way to end the season's star parties as we will be heading back north soon, to darker skies hopefully, but it was fun anyway.