After watching for a while, I finally found that I captured some images of one of Mt. Redoubt's eruptions from my
basement station. Yesterday
, (Saturday 4/4/09 5:55 ADT) the volcano blew off a nice big ash cloud to 50,000 feet. The NOAA-17 satellite made a pass (
click right photo) over the area about 4 hours later where you can see that the mountain was still busy spewing. The next image (
left photo) was about 7 hours later NOAA-18 passed, Redoubt had calmed down, but the big ash cloud can be still seen extending to the south.
Homer, Alaska was right in the
path of the plume and for a while it totally blocked out daylight while the ash fell on the snow. Probably familiar if you remember
ber St. Helens and Eastern Washington back in 1980.
The skies were sunny over Seattle for a change, with high hazy stuff, but we'll take it over the snow we have had this week! Also, look closely at the ocean near San Francisco, airplane contrails can be seen over the water.
The NOAA satellites that are active are NOAA 15,16,17,18, and 19. I don't get anything from NOAA-16 since it's APT transmitter screwed up shortly after the satellite went active, and NOAA-19 was just launched a few months ago and will be the last of this series of spacecraft. The satellites are in a polar orbit where they orbit over the poles and cover the whole Earth. If the satellite is above the horizon, I can pick it up and it will send down images of what it is directly flying over at the time at about 500 miles above the Earth. The signals can easily be heard on a Radio Shack police scanner (or similar) around 137 Mhz.
end a few hours trying to tweak the scope mount for better polar alignment. I found some software that makes drift alignment almost painless to do - once you figure out how the software works. Drift alignment is what you do with a polar aligned scope to align it when you don't have a clear shot of Polaris. It's a pain (although people say it's easy) since you have to watch a star in the east and south to see if it drifts up or down in the view. That will tell you if you need to twist the RA left/right and move the DEC up/down. It's confusing to do - at least for me!
26mm eyepiece. HUGE improvment! Also, did some testing of the autguiding and my errors are now much smaller. I've been putting up with a mis-aligned mess for about 4 years now?
Diagram showing the event, notice Seattle is smack in the middle of the moon!
...and what we'll see on Wednesday.
I was going nuts at work today, and had to get outside for some air. I did one of my favorite "get some air" walks and went over to Barnes & Noble to look around a bit. I came across a book called "Star Vistas" that looked great. The book is by Noel Carboni and Greg Parker. I'm familiar with Noel since I bought is Photoshop Astro Tools plugin a while back and use it all the time for processing my images.
When I was a kid, I used to pull out my huge box of Lego (I still have it, and it's about 50 lbs now) and spend a rainy afternoon on the floor of my room building an airport. I was pretty sloppy with colors and just put together buildings, planes, and terminals so they looked like a failed Rubik's cube attempt. This was real Lego too, not that stuff with all the special parts that they have nowadays, we had to use our imaginations. Not a single Jar Jar Binks in my box - and still none. Lego purist all the way!
I'm on an RSS feed from NASA's Earth Observatory Site which has new images of the Earth from space every day. There is always some volcano blowing up someplace leaving a mess around it.
tly toward Homer.
, (Saturday 4/4/09 5:55 ADT) the volcano blew off a nice big ash cloud to 50,000 feet. The NOAA-17 satellite made a pass (click right photo) over the area about 4 hours later where you can see that the mountain was still busy spewing. The next image (left photo) was about 7 hours later NOAA-18 passed, Redoubt had calmed down, but the big ash cloud can be still seen extending to the south.
ber St. Helens and Eastern Washington back in 1980.
