A quick reminder that the Lyrids meteor shower is set to peak on the evening of the 21st-22nd, even though it’s technically going on right now – this is apparently a shower with a long period but a very distinct and sharp peak, so your best bet is early morning on the 22nd. The thin crescent moon will have set by roughly midnight while the peak is somewhere around 4 AM EDT, so give it a shot. What do you have to lose but sleep? And perhaps your patience. Your lack of a stiff neck. And your lens cap in the dark.
[We now have folding lounge chairs that will allow us to lean back with a better sky view, so perhaps we can avoid the neck thing, though I imagine I’ll be pursuing these on my own.]
Don’t stay up all night, because you’ll need to be well-rested for all of the elaborate celebrations of Earth Day on the 22nd. Still, keep it mum, because we’re aiming for it to be a surprise. Did you really think Artemis II went around the back side of the moon for no good reason?
And on the 24th, the Hubble Space Telescope turns 36 years old, still going strong despite the various advanced ‘scopes that followed. That’s a Friday, so no worries about partying too hard. Let’s see, what was I doing at 36? Come to think of it, let’s not go there…
[I did, idly, wonder how my photographic output compared to Hubble’s, realizing that a) I didn’t even have a serious camera until well after it launched, and b) it’s been in near-constant operation from the start, with high demands on its time. So while I can lay claim to something near 110,000 digital images, 5,800 slides, and dog knows how many negative images, this probably doesn’t hold a candle to Hubble’s output. Except, a pretty good number of its images are extremely long exposures, like hours or days at a time. And do stacked images count? How about the fact that nearly every image it produces is a combination of several, since the sensors are not RGB or color in any way, and rely on the filters used in front of the sensor and post-processing? This is a rabbit hole I’m already regretting…]
But anyway, do something for April.
