brainwagon

I haven’t blogged too much about things having to do with astronomy as of late, but last Friday I took time out of my normal telescope making activities to actually stare through one: actually the 8″ Alvan Clark refractor (nicknamed Leah) that’s at the Chabot Space and Science Center. Mars is currently closing on its closest approach to the earth on October 29-30th, and is currently well placed for observation. The air conditions were slightly foggy but rather still, so I could see lots of good detail on Mars. If you need help identifying features on Mars, you can use the Java Marslet, a cool little applet that shows the features of Mars as they appear through a telescope. An example view (corresponding to what I saw on Friday) appears on the right. I could see just the hint of the polar cap appearing as a very bright white dot near the bottom of the disk, and could easily see Serpentis and Meridiani Margaritfer as horizontal features crossing the disc. Syrtis Major was just coming up over the limb, and could be seen when seeing becomes particularly still. Overall, one of the nicer views of Mars I’ve seen in recent years.

If you get a chance to see Mars through a telescope, take advantage. It’s pretty cool.

Courtesy of the Bad Astronomy Blog, some very nice images of our closest galactic neighbor M31, the Andromeda Galaxy taken with the Spitzer telescope in infrared. It shows a great deal of detail which is missing from visible light photographs. Very nice.

(Okay, okay, there are the Magellenic clouds, and other dwarf galaxies that are closer, but you get the idea.)

NASA has released a series of Earth images entitled Blue Marble Next Generation, which includes maps of the entire earth rendered without clouds in each f the 12 months of the year and resolutions of 2km per pixel. Very nice.

Heh.

Courtesy of Phil Plait’s Bad Astronomy Blog.

Today’s Gutenberg Gem is a neat little astronomy book, published in 1873 by Richard A. Proctor. It lists a number of half hour tours of the sky, each highlighting either a set of constellations or planets. It’s pretty brief, and certainly better modern guides exist, but it’s still a neat little thing to peruse through, for perspective if nothing else.

Half-hours with the Telescope by Richard A. Proctor - Project Gutenberg

Well, it’s hardly surprising, given that you can (with a little effort) stand them on end pretty much every day of the year. But today’s Astronomy Picture of the Day features Bad Astronomy’s Phil Plait demonstrating that egg stability seems to be unphased by changes in the seasons.

Still, today marks the beginning of fall. If I was in someplace that actually had seasons, I’d be watching the leaves turn. No such luck.

Addendum: Bad Astronomy has a blog too.

In a thread on Slashdot on calculating spacecraft trajectories to Mars some helpful individual pointed at Shane Ross’ Dynamics, Control & Computation page. Lots of good information on celestial mechanics.

This weekend marks the annual return of the Tears of Saint Lawrence: better known to those of us in the amateur astronomy community as the Perseid Meteor shower. If you haven’t trekked out somewhere dark recently to gaze at the annual shower, try reading Sky and Telescope magazine’s coverage.

The sky will be moonless, so the view should be pretty good. Rates often hit one a minute. I’ve seen some amazing fireballs in the predawn hours of this shower, so get out and have a peek at one of the cool sights available from our small terrestrial vantage point.

Check out this movie of the impactor as viewed from the flyby spacecraft. Cool.

Tonight the Deep Impact space probe impacted Comet Tempel 1. I’m watching the coverage life on NASA TV. We can expect to see a photo from the flyby space craft to be all over the front pages tomorrow. Congratulations to all those rocket scientists. Cool stuff.

By way of (gasp!) a useful Slashdot comment, here is a tutorial on deconvolution produced by the NRAO.

What can I say? I read stuff like this for fun.

A cool freebie: Free Mag 7 Star Charts distributed under a Creative Commons license. Can’t beat the cost!

Space.com reports that the Spirit rover caught these photos of Mars’ moon Deimos crossing the solar disk: in other words, a Martian solar eclipse. Very cool. You can get a version of the loop here as an mpeg or here as an animated gif. Compare these to my crude transit of Mercury that I recorded back in 1999.

Cool stuff.

Want to own a tiny bit of telescope making history? Check out the Porter Garden Telescope, which according to an email from the owner will be up for sale shortly. There is one currently on display at the Chabot Science Center as well, in case you don’t have the means to pick one up.

It is certainly possible to own a larger telescope, but it would be difficult to own one that’s cooler.

More information about the Garden Telescope.

Some of Porter’s drawings of the 200″ telescope

In itself, meteorites are not uncommon, but what’s pretty cool is that the Mars rover Opportunity managed to land close to a basketball sized one lying on the surface of Mars. You can read more in NASA’s press release.

CMU developed a project to find meteorites in Antartica using an autonomous robot that could search the frozen plains for these bits of stellar flotsam. Of course, there are other, more labor intensive ways to find Antarctic meteorites too.