So I did indeed get out to view the occultation of Mars by the mean ol’ moon (ours, I mean, not any of the other planets’,) and even snagged a couple of video clips. The nice thing was, Mars was bright enough to be seen near the moon with only a slight overexposure of the moon itself, so that worked out acceptably well.
You can see it easily down there at the bottom,
Tomorrow night, a little after 9 PM EST (so 2 AM Jan 14 UTC – adjust as necessary,) the moon will occult Mars, pretty directly for most of the US. This will last for a little over an hour before Mars reappears again out the other side, so this is an easy thing to spot by naked eye, and a good target for telephoto lenses, small and large telescopes.
I keep making noises to this
The main reasons that I have so few blog posts recently have been the projects, of which there are several – some of which you may see here, but most probably not, because they’re house-related schtuff. And I should be working on some of them right now, except I’m not, because I’m dicking around.
The moon is bright out there right now, and I went out briefly to shoot a few
And so begins a new weekly topic, which will consist entirely of images shot right here at Walkabout Estates Plus, since it should be able to provide a decent array of subjects without too many repeats – that’s the goal, anyway.
Now, after deciding on this topic late Wednesday night, I went after a couple of subjects on Thursday but wasn’t successful in capturing anything compelling,
So let’s see, what have I got to cover today?
There’s the Quadrantids meteor shower peaking in a couple days (well, tomorrow night/Friday morning,) that should be visible for a few days on either side, so if the skies are clear, go for it. If it remains as clear
It’s the third anniversary of the launching of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST, or “Juiced” – well, probably not that last one,) and in that scant amount of time, the telescope has been making hay with the amount of useful data that it’s been downloading to us, even after being
We’re once more into the nonsense blog trivia that would interest, oh, perhaps 1.29% of the population, but you did catch the ‘blog’ part, right? Good.
Today marks the 57th anniversary of the first flight of the Northrop HL-10 lifting body, and I’d intended to have a project done by now, but failed in that regard. So consider this a prelude for when it is done.
The HL-10 was
My attempts to finagle a clear sky and/or some nice Geminids meteors failed, but the haze did produce a nice, wide lunar halo, which nonetheless took a much longer exposure to bring out than the moon required, so the moon got blown out in the middle. This is at 18mm and just barely got the halo in the frame – I could have gone wider with another lens, but didn’t deem
Hmmm, Friday the 13th. The Geminids meteor shower peaks tonight. Now, my luck with meteor showers is uniformly bad, so much so that it’s a standing joke among, well, me, so I now consider this a regular state of affairs.
So, will the bad luck actually result in changing this? If I count on not seeing a damn thing, will the mystical daemons that assault people with trivial annoyances
This one popped up several weeks ago, when I was too busy to do it justice, so I set it aside for when I had plenty of time to write it up properly, which appears to be now. There are a decent number of details and thus it will take some explaining, so get comfy as we set off on this journey.
There used to be a massive radio telescope at Ohio State University, dubbed the Big Ear, that monitored a