What did you see in the sky tonight?

[Chris Peterson]

What did I see in the day? Jupiter and Venus passing at their closest, imaged around local noon under a bright blue sky!
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[Fred the Cat]

Cloudy early, then the stars and moon finally came out

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and it turned out to be a great eclipse!

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Then the clouds and moon came back.

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[Orca]

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[owlice]

Did anyone else see meteors last night? It was a good night for them!

[Cousin Ricky]

Did anyone else see meteors last night? It was a good night for them!

I looked out my front door shortly after 12:30 last night, and it was immediately clear that I wouldn’t see anything over the neighborhood streetlights. So I got dressed and drove to an unlit scenic lookout.

There was no meteor storm here; more like a failed meteor drizzle. You know, how you feel a lone raindrop, and you look up, and there’s not even a cloud above you? That’s what the meteors were like.

I started observing shortly before 1 a.m. AST (5 a.m. GMT), and stopped at 2 a.m. I saw a total of 5 meteors, all of which were short duration, and all of which traced back to Boötes:

• 1:25 in Pegasus, bright, orange, and slow. This first meteor showed just as I was about to give up for the night.
• Ca. 1:30 in central Boötes, a very brief orange flash, no perceptible proper motion.
• 1:37 in Lyra, faint, white, and fast.
• 1:38 in eastern Boötes, orange and slow, on a path that traced east of Arcturus.
• 1:51 between Cygnus and Pegasus, white and fast.

It occurred to me that I spent most of the time facing northeast, because there was a hill to my southwest, but also because the light pollution in St. Thomas is mostly on the south side of the island. The northeast bias seems to show in my observations, as few as they were.

As far as the sky conditions, the Milky Way was faintly visible, and I could barely make out M5 naked eye. I could not confirm M13 naked eye.

I seem to see less and less in the night sky as the years pass. I don’t know whether it is declining night vision or the increasing light pollution, though I suspect the latter. The sky from the dark lookout last night was as washed out as my suburban sky was 20 years ago.

[Chris Peterson]

Did anyone else see meteors last night? It was a good night for them!

Well, a so-so night, anyway. Not as high of activity as we hoped (against the odds) for. I didn't see any visually (I didn't spend a lot of time looking, though). But I had three cameras on the sky, two allsky video cameras and a DSLR with a wide angle lens shooting continuous 30-second images towards the southwest. The more sensitive allsky camera caught 21 Tau Herculids between 21:30 and 02:26 MDT. The image below, a stack of seven images collected from 22:17 to 23:23 MDT contains 8 Tau Herculids.

The meteors are unusual. No matter where in the sky they were, they were yellow and had very short trails, suggesting they burned up very quickly (and were therefore made up of fragile material). But four of the meteors I caught on the DSLR left dust/ion trails that drifted away over two minutes or more. So the meteoroids may have been fairly large. Also below is an animated GIF of one of those (you might have to open it in a new tab to get the animation). The frames are each 30 seconds.
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[Chris Peterson]

The full Moon, colored by heavy smoke drifting up from a fire in Arizona, more than 400 miles away. The smoke was so thick I couldn't even see the Moon rise. It didn't show up until it was a good 15° above the horizon.
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[Fred the Cat]

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Venus rising with the Pleades just above.