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By Ben, on August 24th, 2010
The moon goes by many different names. Here are the moon names for August according to MoonPhase, one of my favorite lunar apps for my iPod (and iPad, but I’m consulting the iPod version because Someone Who Shall Remain Nameless drained the battery last night and didn’t plug it in so it’s recharging from the wall charger):
August (Calendar Month)
Dog Days (in Colonial American parlance)
Sturgeon (Algonquin, which was the basis for the Farmers’ Almanac moon names)
Grain (English)
Dispute (Celtic)
Wyrt (Medieval wiccan)
Lightning (Neo pagan).
Whatever you call it, it happens today at 1:05 p.m. EDT. And as you may recall from previous full moon [...]
By Ben, on August 6th, 2010
As you can see from today’s Astronomy Photo of the Day, the sun is becoming quite a bit active these days. I ran outside this afternoon and tried to figure out how to get my point and shoot camera to take decent pictures of the sun through the spotting scope, but, as you can see, I failed:
Sunspot, August 6. 2010. 4 p.m. EDT.
Another sunspot. August 6, 2010, 4 p.m. EDT.
Both of these spots were taken from the same image:
Sun in white-light Baader filter. August 6, 2010. 4 p.m. EDT
It’s challenging focusing on the sun through a point [...]
By Ben, on July 26th, 2010
Since I work from home again, my observatory is right outside my office door, and I can run out between emails and phone calls and see what the sun is doing. Today, there is a sunspot grouping called AR11089 (AR=active region; this numbering scheme was started by NOAA in 1972) that is visible enough for me to focus on with my P&S camera through the spotting scope:
The image itself isn’t all that spectacular, is it? Even when I blow up the region itself, it leaves a little to be desired:
White-light imaging through a homemade Baader filter without even a parasol [...]
By Ben, on July 25th, 2010
It’s been said so often, and not just by those who dabble in astronomy, but perhaps especially often among those who do: patience is a virtue. After waiting up two hours past my normal bedtime for the summer moon to come out from behind the clouds, she finally did:
Last night’s insurance photo, all warm and fuzzy as it is, really isn’t in the same league. Part of the issue, I’m convinced, is that if I’ve already been asleep, I have a much harder time coaxing focus into my eyes. And on a difficult subject like the full moon through a [...]
By Ben, on July 25th, 2010
This morning at 2 a.m. it was still over 80 degrees outside, and, it being 2 a.m. and all, I found it hard to focus. Not just mentally. Literally. See the picture below if you doubt me.
Summer Moon, 25 July, 2010, 2:10 a.m. EDT.
What we have here is a fuzzy shot of the Summer Moon, taken on a warm and sleepless night here in south Florida. I only took the shot because I couldn’t get back to sleep after giving Eric his middle-night bottle (he’s sick. again. and needs his comfort food), for fear that tonight’s Summer Moon (9:35 [...]
By Ben, on July 4th, 2010
Tonight at approximately 11 p.m. EDT, the Earth reaches aphelion, that point in its orbit when it is furthest from the Sun. Being July, one might wonder why it’s so dang hot (at least in the Northern Hemisphere, where the majority of Earth’s population resides on the majority of Earth’s land mass) if we’re farther from the sun than we are at any other time of the year.
The answer, as many of you know, is that Earth’s seasons are not caused by its distance from the Sun. Instead, they are caused by the tilt of its axis. It’s easiest to [...]
By Ben, on June 28th, 2010
Friday night/Saturday morning, I decided to put my 2 a.m. wakeup call* to good use and get a shot of the moon at close to full. Backyard astronomy at its best!
The house is nice and cool these days, thanks to the a/c man and my suddenly light bank account, and the contrast between the cool and dry indoors and the hot and muggy out of doors was intense, even at 2:25 a.m. I thought I’d entered a sauna just by opening the door to the Florida room! There was a deep mist in the air, but not too dense; a [...]
By Ben, on June 27th, 2010
Here at long last is last month’s shot of the near full moon. Time, weather, and energy permitting, I’m still committed to posting at least one shot of each month’s full moon in 2010.
Depending on your browser, you can either click on the image, or mouse over the area to the right of the image, in order to see the caption/description. (In my browser, Safari for Mac, clicking on the image brings up a new window with a “full size” version. Full size in quotes, because I reduced it to 1200 pixels wide just to make it easy to upload.) [...]
By Ben, on May 2nd, 2010
Here is the best shot of a brief series I took before one of my many business trips last month (in case you were wondering why I haven’t been updating the blog very frequently):
[Show as slideshow]
By Ben, on April 6th, 2010
Jet lag from a recent trip to India combined with a cloudy night to make the blurry shot below the best one I could get of the full moon closest to the March equinox. Oh, well. Here, for the record, is the full moon from March 30, 2010, at 2:52 a.m.:
now, to compare it to December, January and February’s full moons, so we can see any libration effects:
Ignoring my poor alignment skills, you can see that Mare Crisium in March is much farther from the visible limb of the moon than it was in December. This means that it’s a [...]
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