The Astronomical Society of Kansas City will be onsite at Union Station’s Science City with telescopes and volunteers. The planetarium will air the NASA event live just after midnight.
Hope to see you there!
Tag: amateur astronomy
A Triple Line-up in Triple Digit Heat
Despite a withering 103 degree temperature during the seven o’clock hour yesterday evening, I drug out my telescope and camera gear to the backyard in anticipation of an early evening planetary and lunar line-up. Terry grilled some chicken while I setup the scope, attached it to the portable battery and got the Autostar configured with the current date and time (almost straight up 8:00 pm). With forty minutes to go until sunset, I could clearly see the waxing crescent moon (see photo above), but the telephoto on my camera just couldn’t get me close enough to my lunar observing goal for the evening.
As I continue pursuing the Astro Quest observing award, created in 1995 by the ASKC Education Committee, I wanted to focus on the lunar section this month. The first item visible after a new moon happened to be the crater Hercules. Over the weekend, I researched all the lunar objects listed on the Astro Quest observing challenge, seeking images of the items first. I then determined I needed to find a lunar atlas. I have one for stars and deep sky objects (my handy Sky & Telescope Pocket Sky Atlas), but not a lunar one. Thanks to Google, I found the open source software called Virtual Moon Atlas, downloaded and installed it. I like it. The software makes it very easy to find features on the face of the moon and shows the current moon phase for my date/time and location.
I knew where to find the Hercules crater. Using my red dot finder scope, I honed the telescope in on the upper quadrant of the lit portion of the waxing crescent moon. Remembering to flip the image of the moon left to right in my head, I found the Hercules, and Atlas, craters easily. I spent several minutes using various eyepieces and barlows to zoom in for a closer look. I forgot to take a small portable table out with me to the backyard, so I didn’t have anything handy to take notes of my observations. I must get in the habit of doing this, if I plan to pursue other more stringent observing awards sanctioned by the Astronomical League.
I opted to mount my DSLR on the back of my telescope. I took a half dozen photos, none of which, upon downloading, were focused very well (grrrr). I selected the best of the bunch, cropped, labelled and uploaded it:
By this time, Terry had finished grilling supper, so I retired to the cool, air conditioned dining room to consume honey garlic grilled chicken and grilled Italian garlic bread with rice and Asian-style vegetables. He thoughtfully brewed some sun tea earlier in the day so I enjoyed two or three glasses of iced tea as well, knowing that I planned to return outside to the heat for more observing.
After dinner, I returned to the backyard, where I could now see Saturn, Spica and Mars, as predicted by various astronomy alerts I’d received earlier in the day. I captured the southwestern horizon at 9:30 pm in Lansing, Kansas from Astronomy magazine‘s StarDome Plus Java applet to share here. I could see another star, besides Spica, above Mars, but I’m not exactly sure which one in the constellation Virgo it might have been.
Before shutting down the telescope and returning the camera to it’s tripod, and a normal lens with a wider field of view, I turned the ETX90 towards Saturn for a quick look. I did take one photo of the ringed gas giant, which turned out better than I thought it would:
I also tried again to see the polar ice cap on Mars, but the ETX90 just couldn’t provide enough light or magnification (through the eyepieces and barlows I own) to get much bigger than the head of a pin. I could clearly tell I was not looking at a star and that the color reflected back to my eye was a ruddy orangy pink, but I could not discern any other features of the Red Planet.
The moon shone just a tad too bright to easily capture the fainter Saturn and Mars in a single photograph. Of the dozen or so shots I took with various aperture settings, shutter and film speeds, I only found one that appeared adequate:
By ten o’clock, I had all the equipment back in the air conditioned house. I had voluntarily sweated outside during triple digit heat for nearly three hours to make a few astronomical observations. I spent a few blessedly cool moments sitting in front of the fan before downloading, reviewing, editing and uploading the photos I’d taken. Soon after, I fell into bed (near eleven o’clock and two hours past my bedtime), but tossed and turned all night long. When the alarm sounded at five o’clock, I slapped snooze three times until it forced me awake at half past the hour.
Another day, a Tuesday this time, and another triple digit heat index predicted for the Heart of America. Autumn can not arrive too soon.
Teapot Steam
My dad contacted me Thursday to coordinate conveyances for our weekend astronomical adventure, thinking we would be attending the monthly ASKC club meeting, but he was a week early. Since I had mentioned earlier in the week a desire to see the glorious summer spread of our own Milky Way Galaxy, he had called me several times the past few days to see about driving to northern Atchison county to escape the Kansas City area light pollution. Both Wednesday and Thursday evenings turned out to be hazy and cloudy, so we nixed the road trip north.
Instead, I suggested we attend the monthly star party at Powell Observatory. I received two confirmation e-mails from David Hudgins, the club’s star party coordinator extraordinaire. I decided to leave my scope at home because you don’t really need a scope to take in the Milky Way Galaxy. If the skies grew dark enough, it would stretch from the southern horizon, up over the top, clear to the northern one.
I thought perhaps I was reliving last Friday (that would be the 13th) because when I got home early (by ten minutes) I walked into some surreal drama. I won’t go into the stressful week at work (we’ve all had weeks like that), but I looked forward to forgetting work and ignoring the excessive heat by reading books and watching movies in a quiet, air conditioned home with my hubby and two Rotties. I came home to find our satellite on the fritz and Terry needing me to pickup a prescription before the pharmacy closed at seven. While he cooked dinner, I did some preliminary troubleshooting of the satellite system with little success and decided to call DirecTV customer service, knowing I’d probably be on hold for several minutes. The technician wanted us to disconnect, check and reconnect all of our cables, which seemed a ridiculous request since the cable runs are static and have not been touched, moved or manipulated in years. After almost ruining supper in an effort to jump through DirecTV tech support hoops, we hung up on them and sat down to eat.
By now, I had less than an hour to pickup the prescription, so I grabbed my purse and drove to the store. I got as far as the pharmacy counter, where the assistant recognized me and had the prescription ready for me, but when I opened my purse, my billfold was missing. I had left it in the van because I stopped at Starbucks after work for a mocha frappacino treat for the drive home. Now I had to return home for my billfold and repeat the trip back to the pharmacy, a wasted trip, time and gas. When I returned home the third time, Terry had solved the satellite system glich. With our excessive heat and drought conditions, the ground supporting our satellite dish pole has dried up so far down into the ground, that the pole can now be easily moved back and forth and twisted on it’s concrete base. One of our dogs could have bumped into it and messed up the alignment. Terry used the signal strength meter diagnostics channel on the satellite receiver to dial the dish back in.
Hoping that would be the final challenge of the week solved for the moment, I called Dad just after seven o’clock and told him to head my way. I gathered up my camera equipment, my pocket star atlas, a large hardcover edition of Backyard Astronomy (to review Milky Way info), my purse (with billfold) and a lidded glass of cool water. I asked Dad to drive this weekend, volunteering to drive next weekend for the July club meeting. The hour jaunt to Louisburg passed quickly and we arrived at Powell just moments after sunset. The evening cooled off nicely, but remained calm, clear and surprisingly dry. In fact, we experienced no dew (the bane of telescope optics) until after midnight.
Several club members were already present and setting up their scopes in the East Observing Field (click photo above for photos taken upon our arrival). One member, Mike Sterling, introduced himself to me (asking if I was ‘the’ Jon Moss … apparently my name is known, if not my face or gender, from my blogging). He was in the process of collimating his 20-inch Dobsonian. My dad provided an extra pair of eyes to help finish. Mike also gave us a color brochure published by Astronomy magazine of the illustrated Messier catalog. This will come in handy in the future when I really get serious about an observing award.
The theme for this month’s star party centered around star charts and atlases. David Hudgins setup a table displaying several popular and easy-to-use books, visual aids and posters. I indicated to David I already owned the Sky & Telescope Pocket Sky Atlas and a smaller version of the wheel night sky star guide (the circular atlas resting on top of the poster in the upper left hand corner of the table shown in the photo above).
Dad and I wondered among the scopes, waiting for twilight to fade and the stars to emerge. Saturn and Mars, along with Spica and Arcturus appeared very early and most of the scopes honed in on our ringed neighbor. By 10:30 pm, the skies had darkened enough to begin hunting for some of the brighter Messier objects. Mike graciously asked me (several times over the course of the evening) what I wanted to observe next. I drew a blank every time because my goal had been to see the Milky Way, not any specific object viewable in a scope. He obligingly filled in the blank by touring through clusters, nebulae and a galaxy found in the constellation Sagittarius, Scorpius, Hercules and Ursa Major. I tweeted the objects as we found them so I would have a record of what we saw and when.
- 10:30 pm – M57 (the Ring Nebula), M20 (the Trifid Neblua), M8 (the Lagoon Nebula), M7 (the Ptolemy Cluster)
- 10:50 pm – M51 (the Whirlpool Galaxy)
- What happened during the 11 o’clock hour? *see update below
- 12:00 am – M4 (globular cluster in Scorpius)
- 12:08 am – M13 (the Great Globular Cluster in Hercules)
- 12:24 am – M10 (globular cluster in Ophicuhus)
My dad and I also used his binoculars just to see what we could see with them (as opposed to a scope). The highlight of that side project included finding Brocchi’s Cluster (more commonly known by the asterism ‘the Coathanger’). One of the other club members used the Summer Triangle as an aid to locating the Coathanger. As stated in the Wikipedia article: “It is best found by slowly sweeping across the Milky Way along an imaginary line from the bright star Altair toward the even brighter star Vega. About one third of the way toward Vega, the Coathanger should be spotted easily against a darker region of the Milky Way. The asterism is best seen in July-August and north of 20° north latitude it is displayed upside down (as in the picture above) when it is at its highest point.”
* Update * (added after original publication):
I completely spaced out tweeting during the eleven o’clock hour. During this time, Mike disconnected the Goto electronics on his telescope and set me to star hopping for objects near Sagittarius. The first one he tested me with was finding two small globular clusters a small hop away from the gamma star in Sagittarius (the star the delineates the spout of the teapot). If I could find these two clusters, Mike told me I should be able to see both of them at the same time in the eyepiece’s field of view. After about five minutes, I spied a couple of small fuzzy balls, not as distinct as the surrounding background stars, but I thought they might be the clusters. Mike confirmed I had found them by doing a ‘happy dance’ and sing-songing ‘she found them, she found them’ for all to hear. The designations for these clusters are NGC 6522 and 6528.
Mike next set me to finding either M69 or M70 (also hanging out in Sagittarius, but in the bottom of the Teapot). I glanced at his star chart and used his excellent Telrad finderscope (which had a nice large field of view and an easy-to-use red bullseye) to quickly locate one of the Messier objects (probably M69). Again Mike did a happy dance and song.
Mike went looking for another globular cluster, this time between Sagittarius and Scorpius, designated as NGC 6380. I found this one especially interesting because of it’s apparent close proximity to a star.
The third test proved my undoing. Mike moved his scope to Antares in Scorpius and set me to finding M4. I didn’t review his star chart and spent several minutes attempting to find it. Eventually, I gave up and Mike located it.
Despite all the mesmerizing Messier distractions, I did succeed in observing the vast sweep of our Milky Way Galaxy. I learned a couple of cool memory aids and bits of trivia about finding the ‘heart’ of the galaxy and the path it takes. Cygnus, the swan constellation, also sometimes known as the ‘Northern Cross,’ flies along the Milky Way, pointing directly to the heart of the galaxy. To find the Milky Way’s heart, locate the Teapot (an asterism for the constellation Sagittarius), visible along the southern horizon during July and August, and imagine steam rising from the spout.
I even attempted to photograph the Milky Way using my simple tripod and DSLR camera, but without an equitorial mount of some kind with a tracking system and the digital photo editing software (to stack multiple repetitive exposures), the best I could accomplish was a three or four second exposure (using ISO 800) and fiddling with the brightness/contrast after downloading:
appears centered/parallel to the frame of the photo).
I also took photos of Cygnus swimming in the Milky Way, the Summer Triangle, the Big Dipper over the dome of the observatory and several of the southern horizon. To see the entire album, click on the photo at the top of this blog.
Soon after 12:30 a.m., Dad and I thanked Mike Sterling for the guided tour of the summer sky. We packed up our gear and drove the hour home, where I finally drifted off to sleep after two o’clock with visions of Messier objects dancing in my head.
Dad and I had a blast and my husband is now having second thoughts about staying home last night. Many thanks to David Hudgins, Mike Sterling and the other members of the Astronomical Society of Kansas City for throwing a fun mid-summer star party.
Cool Early Morning Trio
Cool, because at 72 degrees, that was as cool as it was going to get on Friday, but also because I could clearly see bright Venus (lower left of triangle), slighter dimmer Jupiter (top of triangle) and even dimmer Aldebaran (middle right of triangle). I like the cloud arrangement this morning a bit more than yesterday, but either one provides refreshing relief from the heat. Here’s a close-up of the trio:
I heard on the radio this morning our forecasted high was set for 105 degrees (our third or fourth day of excessive heat) with an extension of our heat advisory until next Wednesday. Ugh. My daughter in Texas is enjoying cooler weather than I am in Kansas. That just seems wrong.
Nothin’ But Haze
And not much of it even purple.
I could easily see Venus, Jupiter and Aldebaran throughout the twenty minutes I vanely searched for the rising moon.
But I finally gave up looking for the last vestige of the waning moon with ten minutes left before sunrise.
And just before I took the camera off the tripod, I turned it north to capture some pink and purple tinged clouds.
But alas, I spied no moon amid the sea of haze washing up along the eastern horizon. Not surprising since the Kansas City area is under a heat advisory until Saturday evening (four days from now).
When I checked the star chart for the eastern horizon at moonrise later, I realized the moon wouldn’t even reach the five degree mark above the horizon before the sun rose. From the photos I took yesterday morning, I could discern the haze exceeded that height easily, which made an even thinner, dimmer crescent moon that much more difficult to find. I may have set myself an impossible task considering the amount of humidity in the atmosphere during the summer months in Kansas.
Perhaps I’ll have better luck next month capturing the elusive barest glimmer of the waning crescent moon.
Sliver of a Dying Moon
I tossed and turned most of last night, dreaming about missing the opportunity to observe nearly the last shred of the dying crescent moon. I remember waking up at two o’clock, three o’clock and again at four o’clock, and struggling to return to sleep. Getting up that early would not have helped me observe the moon, since it wouldn’t rise above the horizon until 4:46 a.m. Central.
My cell phone buzzed me with my alert at ten minutes to five o’clock. I’d been staring up at the dark ceiling of my bedroom waiting for it to officially wake me up. I grumbled my way down the stairs, with Apollo in tow, and greeted my husband and our new Rottweiler, Lexy. I only took a moment to slip on my flip-flops, grab the camera gear, my purse and the van key. I drove a block and a half up the hill to the dead end in front of City Hall and just like I did two days ago, setup my tripod in the middle of the street.
I could clearly see the sliver of the waning crescent moon, just a few degrees (less than five degrees actually) above the eastern horizon. The sky appeared to be only minimally hazed. I began taking photos at 5:04 a.m. and tried various automatic settings and then revert to manually manipulating the shutter, aperture and finally the ISO, setting it to 800 (something I don’t like doing because it sacrifices pixels and detail for more light). Here is the unaltered series of photos I took, stopping at 5:13 a.m. this morning (click the image to view rest of album):
I may try again tomorrow morning, but I fear the twilight will wash out any chance of seeing the extremely thin crescent of a moon less than eighteen hours away from being reborn as a new moon. Moon rise tomorrow morning occurs at 5:43 a.m. Central, but twilight begins at 4:15 a.m. Sun rise will occur at 6:08 a.m. so I would have less than a half hour to spy an even thinner crescent moon amid the growing glare of the rising sun.
I also plan to attempt to capture the first sliver of the new moon on Thursday evening, but I don’t think I will be successful. The sun sets at 8:42 p.m. and the moon sets at 8:50 p.m., just eight minutes later. The new moon occurs near midnight (about a half hour before straight up midnight) during night the 18th (tomorrow).
Crescent Moon Sails Between Jupiter and Venus on the Ides of July
I need my head examined. Why else would I suddenly sit up in bed and immediately head to a window in the darkest hour of the night, just to see if an astronomical conjunction was visible yet? And that’s exactly what I did this morning, without the aid of an alarm clock. Some internal portion of my brain must be tapped into some universal system (let’s hope it’s not that Dark Energy that’s making the cosmological headlines lately), because I woke up at 3:55 a.m. earlier today, just so I could photograph two planets, a star and a crescent moon.
A quick peak out my second story east facing window showed something bright glittering through my large oak tree’s leaves. For a better look, I went out the front door and walked halfway down the driveway. Yep, I could clearly see the crescent moon, Jupiter above, and Venus below, as well as the star Aldebaran in the constellation Taurus (although that was the only star I could see in that constellation with my blurry bleary sleepy eyes).
I went back inside and grabbed my camera gear and the keys to the van. I remembered my purse, since I planned to setup the tripod in the cul-de-sac in front of Lansing City Hall and the Police Department. I’ve been questioned more than once by the local ‘protect and serve’ brigade while attempting astrophotography on their front lawn.
I took a couple of shots with the normal lens, but quickly determined I really needed the telephoto. Once I switched the lenses, I could zoom in and capture just the four primary objects in one frame. I took a half dozen photos before returning the gear to the van. At least one police car did cruise by, but he probably didn’t see me ensconced in the dark dead end to his right as he turned left down the hill.
Once I got back home, I went back to bed. Five hours later, I woke up and thought to look at the photos I’d taken while half asleep. I settled on the second to last one I took. Here is that photo (twice … once without labels and once with):
Good Morning Stars
I let Apollo out this morning and looked up (like I always do) and realized the sky was unusually clear, free of haze or clouds. I vaguely remembered reading an astronomy alert on Monday about Jupiter or Venus being less than ten degrees from a bright star (which one I couldn’t remember off the top fo my head). So, I left Apollo in the back yard and traversed the house to the front door on the east side. I stepped outside and had to walk down the steps to get out from under my large black oak tree, which blocks all of the eastern horizon when you look out the front door or windows of my house. Up and to the southeast I easily found the waning moon (see photo above). Turning back to the east, I found a very bright Venus and a somewhat less bright (but not by much) Jupiter directly above it. And just to the lower right of Venus, I could barely see a star twinkling.
I went back in the house and grabbed my camera. The tripod stayed locked in the trunk of the car. I just hoped I could keep steady enough to capture the ‘morning stars’ from the driveway. I took half a dozen shots of Jupiter and Venus and three or four of the waning moon. Then I went inside to review the results.
All but the last photo of Jupiter and Venus were blurry from not using a tripod. Only one photo of the moon, done with some manual fiddling with the shutter and aperture proved to be passably viewable.
I hopped on the Astronomy.com website to access their Star Dome Plus subscriber only star atlas Java application. I needed to determine the name of the star faintly sparkling next to bright Venus. I set the app to look at 45 degrees of the eastern horizon at the time I took the photo (5:35 a.m. Central) and discovered Aldebaran of the constellation Taurus to be the star near our sister planet. Here’s a screenshot of the eastern horizon courtesy of Star Dome Plus:
I quickly edited my one good photo of the ‘morning stars’, rotating the orentation from landscape to portrait and adding some text labels to identify the objects observed. Here are both the unlabelled and labelled versions of that photo:
I did remember to let Apollo back in from his morning soujourn through the backyard. He turned his nose up at his breakfast and climbed up on the couch for his morning nap.
Heat Bubble Bursts Just in Time for Summer Stargazing
Saturday evening I headed south to Louisburg to volunteer for my second scheduled night of the 2012 Powell Observatory public season. My dad decided to tag along, to enjoy the show and help keep me awake for the long drive home. We left Lansing about twenty minutes after five and my car’s external thermometer reported 106 to 107 degrees, which has been our afternoon average for about a week now, give or take two or three degrees either way. We stopped in Bonner Springs to grab a quick, cool sandwich from Subway and returned to the highway just shortly after six o’clock. I needed to be at Powell Observatory by seven o’clock to help prepare the facility for the weekly public program and observing night.
As we approached Louisburg from the north, I noticed a definite increase in the wind, so much so that my car was jostled several times. At the same time, I noticed a significant drop in the external temperature. By the time I exited US-69, the thermometer read 92 degrees, and was still falling. Except for early mornings the past couple of weeks, I had not seen or felt such low temperatures while the sun still shone. I pulled into the west observing field parking area and realized I was again the first person to arrive. Since the temperature had dropped, I turned off the car and opened all the windows. The breeze felt incredibly refreshing.
My team leader arrived within a few minutes and I received my Powell Observatory ‘Staff’ T-shirt, which I changed into as soon as the building was unlocked. I helped setup the class room for the program, ‘Sounds of Space.’ Another ASKC member arrived and setup his ten-inch Dobsonian for solar observing and I caught a glimpse of some great sunspots before our public guests began arriving. The clouds provided some dramatic solar observing situations.
I repeated my role as gatekeeper and accepted donations from the public and queried them for their ZIP codes to record for future grant petitions. The first group of twenty-five guests began the ‘Sounds of Space’ program at 8:30 p.m., but I soon had at least that many waiting for the second showing. At one point as I sat waiting for more guests to arrive, what I thought was a stray dog wandered into the observing field, soon followed by three horses, two with riders and a third colt between them. They trotted across the field to the west, with the dog trailing after, riding off into the sunset … literally.
As the sky continued to darken, despite a few wispy clouds, we opened the dome so those waiting for the next program could observe Saturn and a globular cluster found in the constellation Scorpius. I didn’t get a chance to look at the cluster through the 30-inch scope, but I believe they looked at M4, which is near the bright star Antares.
We ended up having nearly ninety public guests Saturday evening and ran a third showing of our program. After the last two guests had left the dome a bit after eleven o’clock, I quickly snuck a peak at the Ring Nebula in the constellation Lyra, one of the 
Messier Objects I’ve been trying go get a glimpse of for quite some time. Lyra is also home to the very bright star Vega, one of the three stars that form the Summer Triangle.
As the final guests drove away, my team members and I began cleaning the building and storing chairs, tables and other items for the next Saturday. I signed myself out of the Observatory at 11:35 and gathered up my dad for the long drive home. He related information he’d gleaned from another team members about various types of Dobsonian telescopes and helped keep me alert as we sped north towards Leavenworth County.
Next week, we present a program on ‘Our Amazing Moon’ and the following week we’ll pose the question ‘Is There Life Out There?’ We look forward to showing you the astronomical sights (and sounds).
Until then, Keep Looking Up!
My Midsummer Night’s Dream
Every year I look forward to the summer solstice in June, not because I’m in love with the heat and humidity that pervades Kansas, but rather because it signals the beginning of the shorter days and longer nights. Until recently, my amateur astronomy goals didn’t include solar observing, but twice in the last month I’ve been drawn into observing a solar eclipse and the transit of Venus. I can safely say I’ve had my fill of the sun for the foreseeable future.
This evening at 6:09 p.m. CDT, less than an hour after I return home from work, the sun will reach the highest position in the sky, as seen from the Northern Hemisphere. Tomorrow, and each succeeding day thereafter, the sun will ‘fall’ ever so slowly back towards the south (most notable at dawn or dusk). Someday I hope to visit the far north, perhaps Canada or Alaska and experience the midnight sun, or rather a full day of sun, sans sunrise or sunset.
But for the next six months, I will take advantage of the lengthening nights to achieve some of my other astronomical observing goals, provided the clouds, humidity and winds cooperate.
In the short term, though, my yard and trees could really use some rain. You won’t catch me lighting a midsummer bonfire in my backyard tonight! Too much chance of everything, including the house, going up in flames.
Welcome to Summer!
