Rocket, man

London is totally into rockets and space right now. Like, he knows more about the US manned space program than I did two months ago. For Halloween he wanted to be a rocket. And not just any rocket, but specifically the Mercury Redstone. And he was _adamant_. I admit to trying to deflect him onto a path that would be simpler (for me), but he stuck to his guns.

Thank goodness for posterboard and black duct tape.

The ratite clearing house post

Darren's post on my emu dissection pictures inspired me to bring all of my ratite blogging together in one place, for the convenience and edification of all.


There's the original emu dissection post and and the immediately subsequent rhea dissection posts (two links). Note the striking difference between the comparatively large, normally-folding wings of the smaller rhea (below) and the silly twig-wings of the much larger emu (above).


Emus use their inflatable throat pouches to make booming calls. I was fortunate enough to witness this and engage in a bout of reciprocal burping with an emu at the Merced zoo, which I covered here.


Later on I posted briefly about kiwis. Also, people loved the gross photos enough that I felt compelled to share pix from dissecting a hyena, which is not a ratite but also flightless and still pretty cool.


Finally, I bought together my biological and then-nascent astronomical obsessions and turned some of the emu gore into a planet.

If you find anything dead, or get to cut something up, or have some other cool interaction with the natural world, post it and tell the world!

Starscaping

Hoo boy, you are ska-ROOOOD! Because it's either the morning, and you need to get to work, or you're at work, or it's the evening and you need to do chores/spend time with your family/stalk people online, and here I am pointing you toward the Star Formation game, which in its addictiveness makes the infamous Falling Sand game look like eating your boogers in public (i.e., pathetically easy to kick...not that that's an actual habit anyone would ever need to break...no sirree, just trying to turn a humble phrase here...).

They could have called this Herding Hydrogen. Theoretically, you set off supernovae to compress clouds of interstellar gas so that they become gravitationally bound and collapse into massive short-lived stars which themselves go supernova. Basically though, you Nuke Stuff until it glows, and then it goes BOOM and Nukes other Stuff and the eternal cycle of Blowing Stuff Up rolls on. I submit that this is scientific evidence that the Creator exists and that He is a dude.


In not-completely-unrelated news, last night I got curious about what would happen if I held my camcorder--literally the cheapest commercially available model--up to the eyepiece of my thermos-sized telescope. The answer is that I got something that is pretty crap on any objective scale, but at least recognizable and therefore a smashing success personally. I'm posting this not to brag--oh hay-ull no--but as a reminder that the night sky is accessible even to those of modest means.

Clear skies!

Sunset on the Sea of Rains

All of these pictures were taken by afocal projection with an Orion XT6 Dobsonian telescope and Nikon Coolpix 4500 digital camera. The first two shots were made through an Orion Sirius 25mm Plossl eyepiece and Orion Shorty 2x Barlow lens. The bottom shot was made through an Orion Sirius 32mm Plossl.

Happy holidays from Hubble

If you've never had one, an advent calendar has 25 little boxes to open, one for every day of December through Christmas. Boston.com has a virtual advent calendar of Hubble's greatest hits. This is a ring galaxy, from Dec. 6.

Hat tip to Jarrod, and Merry Christmas to all!

The moon by Earthlight

There's about a metric buttload of stuff I want to blog about, including the highlights of the Lick Observatory trip (now on my Flickr page) and some awesome predator/prey photos that one of my students took and the Western Pond Turtle that my wife caught crawling across our driveway last week, but it's the time of year when I've got finals to write and grade so all that stuff will have to wait.

In the meantime, this is what the moon looked like tonight. This fetching display is called "the old moon in the new moon's arms"; from the moon the Earth is nearly full and it bounces back enough light to dimly illuminate the shadowed regions of the moon. If you'd like to see it for yourself, you don't have to wait a month--the show should be almost as good for the next couple of nights.

For those who care, this was a two-second exposure with my Nikon Coolpix 4500, shooting through an Orion XT6 Dobsonian reflector with a 32mm Plossl eyepiece.

Speak of the devil

I was back at the Lick Observatory this evening, with another UCM field trip group.


Like last time, we all got to look through the 36 in Lick refractor (that's the Shane reflector above).


Unlike last time, Saturn was up. Can you guess what that means?

My moon map

UPDATE, March 23: As is so often the case, an initial effort that I thought was cool at the time now looks like crap. The base image I used above was the first picture of a full moon I ever took, and I didn't realize how lousy it was until I took a better one. Also, the Apollo landing sites are all off by about 50 miles because I was just sort of eyeballing them instead of really checking their precise locations. So now, thanks to a better photo and this awesome site, I present my updated moon map (below). Obviously there are a zillion things that could be labeled here but aren't; everything shown here can be seen by the sharp-eyed on a clear night with no optical equipment other than the Mark 1 eyeball. If you want more details, I strongly recommend Cherrington's Exploring the Moon Through Binoculars and Small Telescopes ($20) and Sky & Telescope's Field Map of the Moon ($10).

The end of the eclipse

I wanted to take a series of photos like this for the entire eclipse, but two things stood in my way. The first was crappy seeing. If you look at the photos in the last post, they're not fuzzy because the scope was out of focus or the camera wasn't doing it's job. The atmosphere was just yucky. The Central Valley of California has about the worst air pollution of any non-metro area in the US, and the rising moon was swimming up through a roiling stew of hot air and groady particulates. By the time the moon was coming out of totality, it was high enough in the sky to be out of the real murk, but there was still quite a bit of turbulence.

The other limitation is the fact that I was just holding the camera up to the eyepiece. I could have gotten out the tripod and mounted the camera at the eyepiece, but I was lazy. As the moon got dimmer, exposure times got longer and pictures got fuzzier. I threw away literally hundreds. Still, I got a few keepers and I had a good time, and that's about all you can ask of a transient celestial event.

Live blogging the eclipse

I'm coming to you live from mid-totality. I'm in here showing off instead of out there taking more pictures because I needed to recharge my battery. But don't worry, my sojourn here is very temporary.


Looking east from my back porch.


This is pushing the limit of how long I can hold the camera to the eyepiece without losing all resolution.

Hope you're not missing it, but if you are, I'll have more pictures soon.

Clear skies!

Total eclipse of the moon next week

There is going to be a total eclipse of the moon next week, on the evening of Wednesday, Feb. 20 for North American observers and early in the morning of Feb. 21st for Europeans. If you're in Hawaii, Asia, or Australia, I'm sorry, no eclipse for you (this time). Don't feel bad, you've been getting the good solar eclipses lately, and with them lots of astronomy tourism dollars (or rubles, or whatever). Don't believe me? Check this out.

It's the only total lunar eclipse this year and the last one until 2010. For North American observers is it conveniently timed, too, with totality lasting from 10-11 on the East Coast and 7-8 out here in Cali. Get the full details here.

If you've never seen a lunar eclipse, you owe it to yourself to pull out some lawn chairs and watch. You don't need any observing equipment at all, but you'll be amazed at how cool the moon looks through binoculars, even cheap ones. If you have a telescope, it won't hurt; you can pick your favorite lunar getaway spot and watch it slowly drown in darkness and then be reborn in light.

The picture at top was taken by me earlier tonight. It's not very good compared to some others I've taken, but I'm pretty happy with it given the circumstances of its birth. I took it through this thing, which I built myself:


More details at my Flickr site: scope and photo. And I gotta credit David Gilbank for the design, which I shamelessly ripped off.

Dr. Vector visits the other Tethys

Usually when paleontologists talk about Tethys, they mean the ocean. Which is gone, or at least busted up pretty good. But tonight I explored the other Tethys for the first time, if "explored" is not too grand a word for sighting a wee dot of light at the edge of visibility at 125x in my telescope. Tethys is the fifth-largest of Saturn's 60-odd moons. It's about a thousand kilometers in diameter, slightly less than the distance between Berkeley and Salt Lake City on I-80 (a drive that figures prominently in John McPhee's Basin and Range and Assembling California, and in my own personal history).

I also saw Titan--biggest moon in the solar system, larger than the planet Mercury--and Iapetus. Dione and Rhea were too dim and too close to the planet to make out. (I don't know which moons those are in the photo above, I just liked it and didn't feel bad about ripping it from the horoscope site where Google Image Search found it.)

Actually I had no idea which moons I was seeing at the time; I sketched Saturn and the three I could see and did the IDing later, using Stellarium (still free, still awesome). Here's a screencap:


Seriously: if you haven't seen the rings of Saturn, or the moons of Jupiter, or the Orion Nebula, or the Double Cluster, with your own eyes, you owe it yourself to start figuring out how to make that happen. If you don't have a telescope, find a friend who does. Or buy one; Orion has some good 'uns for less than you think (my six-inch Dob*, which looks like a freakin' cannon, was under $300 nicely equipped). Or if you're not too far, invite yourself over and look through mine. The views don't suck.

* One of the ironies of amateur astronomy is that, thanks the success of even larger Dobs, a telescope four feet long, seven inches in diameter, and weighing 35 lbs is considered small.

Yes, it's true, you can Google up some Hubble images that will smoke anything you can see through a backyard telescope. Nothing wrong with that--I've got a big fat book on the shelf next to me with unreasonably gorgeous views of everything from the moon on out to the galaxy swarm in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. But I promise you this: your first eyeball view of Saturn or Jupiter or whatever gem the scope is pointed at will sock you in the brainpan in a whole different way. Try it and see.

Quick, grab your brain--before it explodes!

NGC 6543

I am a big fan of big explosions. And I'm not ashamed about it.

I also like to stare into the abyss, and I like having my mind blown by things that are unimaginably old and inconceivably immense. So maybe it was my destiny to work on sauropods. But if I wasn't so attached to dinosaurs, I'd be an astronomer for sure.

Supernovas are good. It's hard to beat a big ole whammy-kablammy. But lately I've been drawn to planetary nebulas. Despite the name, planetary nebulas have nothing to do with planets, they just look a bit like planets through small telescopes, like mine, or the ones around a hundred years ago when they were named. In fact, planetary nebulas are shells of gas blown off over hundreds of thousands or millions of years by the death throes of dying stars. Some of these stars later go whammy-kablammy, which is probably the ultimate cosmic twofer for any observers with a few million years to spend watching. A good candidate for that is Eta Carinae, which has already blown off a sweet planetary nebula that looks like twin mushroom clouds, and which will probably go supernova or hypernova in the next million or so years.

Eta Carinae

One of the best planetary nebulas is NGC 6543, the Cat's Eye Nebula,shown at the top of this post. I've had it as my desktop background since last June. Completely by coincidence, it is one of the things I got to see through the awe-inspiring and hellanormous Lick refractor last September.

Centaurus A

Supergiant stars blowing off immense glowing clouds of gas over millennia are pretty good, but even better are giant jets of crap blasted out by galaxies. That's right, folks. Galaxies. Active galaxies, like Centaurus A here (awesome composite stolen from APOD), emit huge jets of energy from their cores. These jets have their origins in the accretion discs around the central black holes, which eat stars for breakfast.

Just think about that for a while.

And look at the pretty pictures, which are of real things that really exist in our universe.

And try not to let your brain explode.

I dare you.

The long-promised, oft-delayed Lick refractor post

...is not here. I ended up saying everything I wanted to say when I put the photos up on my Flickr page. If you have no idea what the heck I'm talking about, see here and here and here. The upshot is that on Sept. 15 last fall I got to put my eyeball on the end of this 57-foot-long telescope, and saw some stuff that is still blowing my mind four months later.

The observatory is open to the public. If you get a chance, go.

The vastly overdue Shane reflector post

Back around the dawn of time I blogged about my visit to the Lick Observatory, and concluded by saying that a post on the 3-meter Shane reflector was "up next". Here it is. In my defence, I am following in the footsteps of a master here.

There's more, by the way, but it's not done, and if I wait for it this will never get blogged. You've heard the saying, "The perfect is the enemy of the good"? In my world, the adequate is the enemy of the incomplete and horribly delayed.

On to the scope.

The Mirror

For a while, this telescope was the second-largest in the world, behind the 200-inch (5-meter) Hale reflector at Mt. Palomar. And in fact this telescope came into existence as a by-product of the Hale telescope. No one had ever made a 200 inch mirror before, so they practiced with a series of test blanks to make sure they could cast that much Pyrex at once. The largest test blank was 3 meters in diameter, and it turned out fine, so they proceeded with the 5-m beast. The 3 meter blank went into a warehouse. It had never been intended to become a working mirror, it was just a prototype. But some UC astronomers got in touch with the folks at Cal Tech, who sold it to UC for something like $50,000, which was basically giving it away.

Like the 5 meter Hale mirror, the 3 meter test blank has a honeycombed back surface to reduce the mass of the mirror. From the reverse it looks like a waffle, with big spaces going deep into the glass. So deep, in fact, that when the blank was ground into a mirror, it could not be figured into a sharp curve or the center of the mirror would have been too thin. Most big observatory telescopes are fatties with short focal ratios (at least at the Newtonian focus; more on this in a later post). The Shane reflector has such long lines because the curvature of the mirror is so shallow; light rays coming off the primary mirror do not converge as sharply as they would if the mirror formed a deeper bowl. And a long telescope needs a big dome, so the Shane dome is huge. In contrast, the Automated Planet Finder will be a 2.4 meter telescope and it is going in a dome with less than half the diameter of the Shane dome.



Celestial Motion and Telescope Mounts

There is another reason why the Shane dome is huge. It's because of the telescope's mount. The rotation of the Earth means that from a fixed observing spot, everything in the sky appears to rotate. The only exceptions are the celestial poles; the north celestial pole is marked by Polaris, the North Star. It is the point of light around which all the stars are seen to whirl in long-exposure photographs like the one shown here (image swiped from here).


This constant motion of celestial objects is a real pain in the butt if you want to look at something at high magnification for more than a few seconds. You need some way to keep the telescope pointed at the same spot in the sky even though the Earth is rotating underneath it.

The simplest kind of telescope mount is the alt-azimuth mount. Think of how cannons are mounted in turrets. You have to be able to slew the barrel from side to side and raise it up and down. That's an alt-az mount. The problem is that celestial objects describe complex paths through the sky. Think about the southernmost stars you can see. They rise in the south-southeast, describe a very shallow arc across the sky, and set in the south-southwest. To track one requires constant adjustments in both altitude and azimuth; in fact, not just constant adjustments, but constantly varying adjustments. A clock drive won't cut it.

Now we have computers that can calculate these constantly varying adjustments and control the motors needed to track celestial objects using an alt-az mount. So a short, fat telescope like the APF can have a simple alt-az mount and sit in a very small dome (comparatively). But this level of computer control is a comparatively recent development in the history of astronomy; it was not available when the Shane reflector was built.

The other type of common telescope mount is the equatorial mount. Like an alt-az mount, an equatorial mount has two axles. The first axle is aligned with the Earth's axis of rotation (for backyard astronomers, it points toward Polaris). Slewing the telescope around this axis moves it in the equivalent of longitude (called right ascension in astronomy). The second axis is at right angles to the first, and moves the telescope in the equivalent of latitude (called declination).

Any sufficiently distant object in the sky has fixed coordinates for right ascension and declination. These are the fixed stars, and it is not hard to see why the ancients thought they were attached to the inside of a giant hollow sphere. Once a telescope on an equatorial mount is lined up on its target, it needs no further adjustment in declination (or latitude), and it can be adjusted in right ascension (or longitude) at a fixed rate--the rate at which the Earth rotates.

Compare this to the alt-az system, in which even the fixed stars have constantly varying coordinates in both axes, and keeping a 'scope on target requires adjusting its movement around both axes at constantly varying rates. The alt-az system does have one major advantage over the equatorial system, which is that it can be mechanically much simpler (assuming you have the computer power to keep it tracking); basically the telescope is on a simple turret or cannon-style mount.

If you need a better way to visualize this, most planetarium programs will project alt-az and equatorial grids on the sky (including Stellarium, which is free and a cinch to use). Speed up the time lapse and see what happens. The alt-az grid stays fixed and the stars move across it. The equatorial grid moves with the stars; the gridlines themselves rise and set as the whole grid rotates around Polaris (from our fixed viewpoint).

The Mount

The Shane reflector was one of the last big observatory telescopes to be completed before computer-controlled alt-az mounts became practical. Consequently, it is on one huge-ass equatorial mount. A giant metal fork holds the telescope; the whole assembly weighs 145 tons. The handle of the fork is the polar axis, aligned on the north celestial pole. The tines of the fork hold the telescope in the declination axis bearings. The whole thing is so well balanced that the right ascension drive motor, which turns the whole 145-ton rig, is a 1/25 horsepower electric motor that can sit in the palm of your hand.


A Word on Aperture

There is a saying in astronomy: Aperture Rules. Department store telescopes are often sold on (wildly inflated) claims about magnification, and when people see a telescope often the first thing they want to know is what magnification it yields. The answer for any telescope is, "Whatever you want, depending on what eyepiece (or optical instrument) is fitted." You can point a little department store scope at Jupiter and crank the magnification up to 1000x if you like, but beyond about 30-50 power the image will be too dim, too shaky, or just impossible to bring into focus because of poor optics.

Fact is, you can see a LOT at very low magnification. A pair of 7x35 binoculars only magnifies at 7x, but it will show you the Galilean moons of Jupiter, the Andromeda galaxy, the Orion Nebula, the Double Cluster in Perseus, and literally hundreds or thousands of other celestial objects. Binoculars often beat very small telescopes because they don't try to overmagnify; instead, they are built to optimize another variable: aperture.

When your eyes are fully dark-adapted, your pupils are about 7mm (+-1mm) in diameter. Now, I'm sure you've seen a zillion cut-away views of what eyes look like inside, so you know that your lens is bigger than your pupil and your retina is larger still. When you are looking at stuff up close, converging light rays can fit through your pupil and diverge on the other side to strike your much larger retina. But when you look at something far off, the light rays coming from it are parallel with each other and perpendicular to your pupil, so the size of the pupil aperture puts a very firm limit on how much light your eye can gather. The amount of light gathered is proportional to the area of the aperture; for a pupil with a diameter of 7mm, the aperture area is (pi)(r)^2 or just over 38 square mm.

The optical train of a binocular or telescope is effectively a funnel for light, gathering it over a large area and condensing it to pass through your relatively small pupils. Back to the 7x35 binoculars. Each primary lens is 35mm in diameter--five times the size of your pupil in linear dimensions, and 25 times larger in area (961.5 square mm). So you can gather 25 times as much light with binoculars as you can with the naked eye. A pair of 7x50s will be even better, with the aperture of each lens being just over seven times that of your eye in linear dimensions, and 49 times larger in area (1962.5 square mm). So although they are only 43% larger than the 7x35s in linear terms, the 7x50s actually gather just over twice as much light.

A good beginner's telescope (i.e., not a department store cheapie) will offer three to six inches (76-152 mm) of aperture. A three inch scope gathers 118 times as much light as one of your eyes. A six inch scope gathers 471 times as much as your eye, and four times as much as the three inch scope. Objects that are nearly invisible to the naked eye and dim blurs through binoculars can look awful purty when viewed through a six inch scope.


Now it is easy to see why the history of observatory telescopes has been one long quest for more aperture. At 3 meters in diameter, the Shane reflector has a mirror area of just over 7 million square mm, or 186,000 times the area of one of your dark-adapted pupils. The twin Keck telescopes on Mauna Kea (shown above) have mirrors 10.2 meters in diameter. Each telescope has a mirror area of 326 square meters, or 326 million square mm--almost 50 times more light-gathering area than the Shane reflector, and almost ten million times the light gathering power of the naked human eye.

---------------------------

What's "up next"? There is an unfinished section on the different foci of the Shane reflector, and all of this is just buildup to blogging about the Lick refractor, the one I put my eyeball next to back in September. All of this is subject to whatever delays come in because of teaching, doing enough writing to mollify my coauthors, feeding the monkey over at SV-POW, unanticipated manias, my general unreliability, and the erratic changes in topic and post rate that I deliberately cultivate here at ADV. Still...

Stay tuned, true believers.

Bored? Go see a comet!

Using this handy-dandy guide, prepared by yours truly. Printable at 8.5x11", or whatever suits your fancy. Feel free to disseminate it widely, too.

More WTA moon photos

Tired of looking at the moon? I hope not. I'm in the grip of an astronomy mania, and as long as you're in this corner of the blogosphere you're along for the ride. Took these last night, as well as an extremely dirty and blurry picture of Comet 17/P Holmes, which was so bad I will not show it. Still, my first comet pic and all. In fact, my first comet, period. Also saw Mars and the Great Nebula in Orion, once the clouds had blown away.

One of these days I will start labeling features but right now I am just grooving on the awesome desolation in all its unadorned majesty. My inner 10-year-old is in his LEGO Cosmic Cruiser, zooming over those craters on the lookout for the secret Zangblarffian base.


The moon is waning, so as it rises in the East the shadowed side is up. Images in my Newtonian reflector are rotated 180 degrees, as is usual for telescopes without image erectors. If I wanted right-side-up images I could just hold the camera upside down, but that's kinda pointless since you can achieve the same result by flipping the images after you download them. No, the problem is that the shadowed-on-the-bottom moon, as seen through the telescope and as shown here, just looks better and more optimistic than the shadowed-on-the-top moon. Some would say that makes me a rank and hopeless slave to aesthetics, but those people are themselves slaves to the arbitrary conventions that make North equal Up and the view from some random point on Earth equal Right. As an enlightened being I am able to escape from all that.

For at least an hour or two, on clear nights, anyway.

P.S. Just spent five minutes staring at the photos instead of posting. I want to go there. So freakin' bad. Burt Rutan, NASA, I don't care who, but somebody better get the lead out!

...and these

White trash astrophotography: hold your digital camera up to the eyepiece of your telescope, take a hundred or so exposures, hope that one or two come out. Here are the two best from my first time out, about half an hour ago (7:30 PM PST).


The big crater with the prominent rays coming out of it is Tycho, named for Danish studmuffin Tycho Brahe. The rays are ejecta blown out of the crater during impact. You can achieve a similar effect by setting a bowl of flour on your kitchen floor and dropping a golf ball in from head height. Have fun cleaning up!

For those who care about such stuff, the camera is a Nikon Coolpix 4500 in Flower Mode, and the telescope is an Orion SkyQuest XT6 with a 150 mm aperture and a 1200 mm focal length.

Dr Vector discovers the universe

I've mentioned here before Abrell & Thompson's wonderful little book, Moses May Have Been an Apache, a collection of bogus and no-so-bogus "Actual Facts" based on their newspaper cartoon of the same name. One of the entries has a surprisingly evocative doodle of an American Indian GI, and reads, "Charlie Medicine Horn discovered Germany in April, 1945."

Ha ha.

But there's something to that. It does not matter to me that I was not the first to stand in front of the Wall at Dinosaur National Monument, or wander through Beijing's Forbidden City, or hike the beaches on the Isle of Wight. The fact that thousands or millions of people have done those things before did not decrease the thrill of personal discovery for me.

Tonight I found the Galilean moons of Jupiter for the first time by myself. Now, people have been looking at them for 397 years, and our robots have sent back enough data on those worlds to keep a generation of planetary scientists very busy. I had even seen them before with my own eyes, through my astronomy professor's telescope in high school. But tonight was the first time that I found them for myself. And I didn't even need a telescope to see them. Some crappy Tasco 7x35 binoculars that I bought back in high school, steadied against a lamp pole, did the job.

It helps if you know where to look, of course. From our viewpoint Jupiter travels along the same track as the sun and the moon (the ecliptic), and it trails the sun by a couple of hours. Go outside right after sunset and look to the south-southwest, about 25 degrees above the horizon (spread the pinky and thumb of one hand as far as you can at arm's length; that's about 25 degrees). Jupiter will be the first 'star' you see, and it will be a lot brighter than any other stars in that part of the sky once they come out. With the naked eye it looks just like a bright star, but even at 7x magnification you can see a tiny crescent. If your eyes are moderately dark-adapted and you steady the binoculars against something, you will see tiny pinpricks of light near the crescent. Those are the Galilean moons. It may help to focus your vision on some other part of the field of view at first, a technique called averted vision, which helps you detect faint objects.


I had a little help from Stellarium, an open-source planetarium program that you can download for free. You can view the sky from any point on Earth (Wikipedia will give you your latitude and longitude if you don't already know them), and the program is a cinch to navigate. Here's a screenshot from Merced at 7:17 Pacific Time this evening, which I punched up earlier today to figure out where to look. You can turn everything on and off: the grids (alt-az and equatorial), atmosphere, constellation names and lines, and in fact the Earth itself if you want to look straight down and see what folks at the antipodes are seeing. Here I have the alt-az grid and the atmosphere on to show what the sky actually looked like at 7:17 tonight, and where Jupiter was located relative to the cardinal directions and the horizon.

In fact, I did not see all four Galilean moons, just two off the left flank of Jupiter. The chart in this month's Sky & Telescope says those two are Callisto (next to Jupiter) and Io (next one over). Ganymede should be farther off to the left but I didn't see it, and Europa is behind Jupiter tonight. Here's what it looked like through the binoculars:


Now, this is not an awesome spectacle of Nature's grandeur. It's a tiny crescent and two pinpricks almost at the limit of vision. What is awesome is not the size or detail of the view, it's that I got it all, standing under a (blessedly dim and yellow) streetlight with a pair of low-end department store binoculars.

I'll bet most of you have at least some lousy binoculars laying around; many of you probably have a nice pair gathering dust in the closet. Why don't you go outside tomorrow night and discover Jupiter's moons for yourself?

UPDATE: Erp. I couldn't actually have seen a crescent Jupiter. No one has, not with their own eyes. Jupiter is so far out that we are practically right next to the Sun compared to it; therefore we only ever see the lighted face. Anything less can only be seen by space probes. So what did I see? Some kind of aberration that my brain interpreted as a crescent. Three possible causes include lens flare in the binoculars, some other kind of visual aberration in the binos, and astigmatism in my eyes (I wasn't wearing glasses at the time). Percival Lowell ain't got nuthin' on me.

Still, after more than a week of almost nightly binocular viewing, the Gallilean moons are still pretty freakin' sweet.

Lick Observatory trip, Part 1

Life is weird. One year when I was a kid we went to Colorado Springs on our family vacation. We went up to the top of Pike's Peak one day and went to the Cheyenne Mountain zoo the next. That was back in the late '80s . . . I hope there weren't any particularly important breeding programs at Cheyenne Mountain back then, considering it was sitting on top of NORAD and was (and might still be) the Zoo Most Likely To Be Turned Into Fallout.

Anyway, then we stayed a few days with some friends who lived in Colorado Springs. They'd lived there for years. Turned out that in all that time, they had never been up to the top of Pike's Peak. And the guy was a park ranger and his wife was a school teacher!

Which is worse, having something cool right on your doorstep and never checking it out, or having something cool on your doorstep and not even knowing it exists? I can't be too hard on those folks, because I've been in the UC system for six years and I never knew that the Lick Observatory (the first and AFAIK only entirely* UC-run observatory) even existed until a few weeks ago.

* UC is a managing partner on the Keck telescopes (schwing!) and has its fingers in a bunch of other astronomical badassery, including the upcoming Thirty-Meter Telescope, whose appellation rivals the Big Bang for sheer unironic literalness.


Lick Observatory is up on Mount Hamilton above San Jose. The photo below shows the view from the summit looking off to the northwest. The light-colored expanse in the upper left is the south end of San Francisco Bay. Lick was the first mountaintop observatory in the world. Up until it opened, all of the world's observatories were located in the same cities as the universities that ran them, or, if they were privately operated, at the operator's place in the countryside (like Herschel's 1.26-meter monster).


Last Saturday we took two dozen students from UCM up to Lick. It was fully awesome. They have seven domes up there, and six telescopes. The oldest dome was built in 1881; the newest was just completed and is currently waiting for the Automated Planet Finder, a robotic 2.4-meter reflector, to be installed.


The open dome in the photo above was completed in 1886 and houses the 36-inch refractor, which you saw a bit of in the teaser and about which you will see much more in an upcoming post. The dome on the right is at the other end of the building. That's the dome that was completed in 1881. For it's first century of operation it held a 12-inch refractor, but since 1979 it has held the Anna L. Nickel 1-meter reflector.


The view looking east. The shadow of Mount Hamilton is thrown onto the next range over by the setting sun. Which also brings and end to this post. Next up: the 3-m Shane reflector.