Starship Asterisk*

Great photo, Chris! You were really lucky.

For myself, I cycled home in drizzling rain at conjunction time.

As for driving and texting: Here in Sweden, we have successful mobile phone companies, and maybe because of that, Swedish law is incredibly generous when it comes to permitting us to use our phones at all times. Texting while driving? Hey, people here use their phones while driving all the time. Is it dangerous? Of course.

A Swedish reporter who had just moved to Germany reported home, horrified, that he had been stopped by the police and fined for speaking in his mobile while using his tramp bike. He couldn't believe it.

Ann

Yesterday, feb 21 at 18:30 local hour,
I saw a beautiful conjunction of
crescent Moon, Venus and a iridiscent
cloud between they.
Beautiful, Indeed.

To answer the question: the moon and Venus as we left the restaurant.

On the evening of March 23:

On March 29, Jupiter and the Moon passing about 6.5° from one another.

Nice image Chris. Jupiter has a new moon with one crazy orbit. I saw it last night too. Why are celestial objects so much more interesting when they get close together?

Ron-Astro Pharmacist wrote:Why are celestial objects so much more interesting when they get close together?

Not sure. But our eyes are certainly drawn to these events, and the historical record suggests that has been the case for at least as long as there have been historical records. And much longer than that, I suspect.

Record hysterical events too!! I think my wife thought I was going to blow a fuse during the conjunction last month when the clouds keep floating by to block the view with my camera and telescope set up.
Thanks to you and the rest of those lucky enough to have clear skies and the "right stuff" to be astrophotographers. I think my ears are still ringing.

1/1/15 at 10:45 pm. A very nice good sized green meteor, going due west from N/E Connecticut.

Last night, nearly at sunset, the rising Moon just 11 hours before it was full:
And then this morning, the fully eclipsed Moon when it was exactly full, setting in the west as dawn is lighting up the sky.

Saturday night's lunar eclipse -- the third in the tetrad, though not quite total, I think -- was (again) a complete non-event for me, despite (again) being perfectly placed to observe the whole thing. I heard a miserable report on the TV news that someone further south observed clouds showing a brief orange tinge, but it was probably just light pollution.

Yet the rain stopped on Sunday morning, at the end of a long, wet weekend, and revealed a few bits of the universe to me that night, through a hazy and very wobbly atmosphere. (It has been a long wet season, so I'll take what I can get right now.) Here are a few of my feeble efforts with my budget 5MP CMOS video camera, all at about 0.3 arcsec/pixel, which was as good as my atmosphere would allow.

At about 5:30 am this morning, i was looking at the slightly waning full moon through the fog, when two thick parallel black lines drifted across the face of it. It looked strange, but nice. Then shortly, i began to hear the plane. Then dark clouds covered the moon and i couldn't see it anymore. Fog seems to make everything seem just a little surreal.

The Moon. Venus. Jupiter.

I saw the moon earlier tonight yellow near the horizon and peeking between the clouds. I missed the two planets. Still, inspiring as ever... thanks for providing the cloudless view.

The conjunction continues. The Moon, Venus, Jupiter, Regulus (and bits of Leo, Cancer, Hydra). Setting over the flood-stage Arkansas River near Cañon City, Colorado. And an airplane (not a meteor).

Winter Solstice Sunrise over Brisbane:

I imagine some painter must have created that last photo. It seems idyllic.

A recent trip to Oregon gave me a chance to look at the sky from a different location. I wasn't impressed with the darkness levels since there were a lot of lights at the farm and the moon was also full, but it was a nice change of scenery.

I watched the conjunction from behind the calf barn. Not having a tripod, I set the camera on a formaldehyde tank. I don't know what one uses so much formaldehyde for at a dairy farm, but it was a useful stabilizer. The moon rising over an adjacent farm. Trees taken from the hill beyond left a brown patch. A photo from earlier at dusk. I just like the haze. A similar scene later on with stars visible; Spica at the top. I think I stabilized this atop a fence post after cleaning off some bird poo. I went inside before the sky had fully darkened.

There is a splendid show of noctilucent clouds going on outside my kitchen window.

I really ought to go to bed. Really really. I have plans for tomorrow, I have to get up early.

But the show is on tonight, now, for a few hours at best. There are long, long, wavy, silver-blue stripes, stretching diagonally up in the sky, as if the sky was billowing and contorting. Plus there are some doodles and jots and scribbles and little shadings made of light. Capella is sitting in the thick of it, twinkling away like mad, and dark and orange-colored little cumulus clouds are sailing past like Bok globules. I can see the beautiful clouds from my balcony, too, on the other side of the building. They stretch all the way from north west to north east.

What a light show I'm looking at!

Ann

Lucky you!

Yesterday evening, a firebow! This rainbow, caught just 5 minutes before sunset, showing almost nothing but the red band, since that's what was overwhelmingly present in the source light. An interesting optical phenomenon.

And beautiful. I bet the photo hardly does it justice. Rainbows are not so easily digitized.

geckzilla wrote:And beautiful. I bet the photo hardly does it justice. Rainbows are not so easily digitized.

It was very striking. We were out walking the dogs, and the rain you see in this image blew over us. We ducked under a tree for a few minute until it passed, and this is about 10 minutes later. First we saw the orange rain and virga, and the sunlight on Pikes Peak. Then we noticed the rainbow. Over the next 5-10 minutes it just kept getting brighter, and most of the color disappeared except for the red, which became more intense. Wish I'd had something other than just my phone to shoot it, but it didn't do badly.

I broke out the telescope a few weeks ago to show my daughter and nephews Jupiter, Saturn, Venus, and the moon. It worked out well as viewing could begin fairly early in the evening. It's fun to see people's reactions the first time they look through the eyepiece. It was also nice to be looking up again.

Hello again APOD folks!