I can talk the, um, mouth sounds, but can I stroll the amble? Well, kinda…
I did indeed get out early this morning in pursuit of Jupiter and the moon and all that, but I never had time to get the telescope up to speed, between two days of rain/overcast and being gone all day yesterday, too exhausted after that to start driving my frustration up with the ‘scope. So I simply went out at
Coming up on October 6th at roughly 08:15 UTC (which translates to 4:15 AM Eastern Daylight Time,) the crescent moon will occult Jupiter – for once, a nice target for an occultation, since it’s a planet and, at decent magnification, has both a shape and detail. Note that this is for North America and may not occur (or be hidden below the horizon) for many
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,
I went out yesterday morning when it was finally clear to take a shot at the Perseids meteors, as well as the aurora if it bothered to show. Same ol’ same ol’ – I saw a couple of small and brief meteors, and captured the barest streaks in images, but not at all worth the effort on either count. It did not help that the humidity was high and cutting down some of the ‘seeing’
I still routinely check out Astronomy Picture of the Day, even though I’ve come to personally call it the Photoshop of the Day because the number of edited images are now surpassing the unaltered ones – virtually all of those showing starfields over landscapes, certainly. But yesterday’s deserves
I don’t know why I did, because the results were as expected, but I made the attempt again early this morning to capture some meteors. It was, at least, quite clear.
Not a glimmer of shooting star in there anywhere, nor did I see any no matter where I looked. So I boosted ISO to 6400 and just did some night sky exposures of this nature – but this is the funny thing:
Well, it’s the Leonids meteor shower again, or at least the time for it, and since the skies looked pretty clear when I checked, I did a quick trip down to the lake to see what I could capture. However, once I got down there, the clouds rolling in were quite evident, especially well to the southwest as seen here. Still, the skies above were clear, and I re-aimed for a wider
Yeah yeah, I know, terribly unprofessional of me to neglect the blog, but I’ll tell you what: you can keep my honorarium this month. Deal?
That aside, I did indeed take a few photos yesterday, which means only an hour or two ago. It’s a clear night.
I’d seen the moon last night, uh, two nights ago, and knew it was too soon for… you know… so kept it in
I went out briefly very early this morning (like 3 AM) and noticed the crescent moon had a reasonably close companion, but wasn’t inclined to set up for a photo session at that hour. I forgot about it until reminded this afternoon, and took a look at Stellarium to see what the companion was, and what it would look like tonight/early
Widely mixed, even.
So Buggato and I had another outing yesterday, once again to Jordan Lake because, while plants are indeed budding out around here, full bloom is a ways off meanwhile, we’re keeping an eye on bird activity at the lake. And in some cases, it was active.
While seeing double-crested cormorants (Nannopterum auritum) is fairly easy down there, yesterday
