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
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 have a small number of images to post from an outing yesterday, but first, some images from a later outing (because they’re fewer and easier and I’m lazy.) We’ll start with a comparison.
That’s the moon on top, seen through many obscuring tree branches because I wasn’t out there after the moon, but I was using it for sharp focus, because what I was
That’s a line from ‘Catch A Star,’ an obscure track from Business As Usual, the first album by Men At Work, and it popped into my head as I was hiking down to my shooting locale this morning because I was heavily influenced by that album when it was released – we
This is far from the first place you’re likely to have seen this, but there’s also no way I can let this go past. You have almost certainly heard about the touchdown of the Perseverance rover on Mars a few days back now we have the videos of that touchdown, even taken
And here we are – the 52nd week of the series, and thus the last ‘On This Date’ post of the year! Except, no, we’re better than a week away from the end of the year, aren’t we? That’s what I get for starting this on the 1st. And seriously, what kind of creator makes a solar or sidereal year with such an odd number of hours in it? Sheesh…
Anyway, we’ve
While the sky was cloudy earlier in the evening of the 4th, it (mostly) cleared to allow a couple of moon shot experiments, and I thought I’d throw one up here… with the possibility of a follow-up later on. It’s quarter to three AM right now on the morning of the 5th, the moon riding very high, but it will set about 10:30 AM and rise again about 9 PM, allowing
On this date in 1976, the NASA Viking 1 lander touched down on the surface of Mars, becoming the first manmade object to contact that planet. The US space program, until that time dealing largely with the moon missions, satellites, and Skylab, had now extended its reach phenomenally.
Now, I’m going to put a damper on nationalism in the interests of accuracy, for a moment. The Soviet Union had