Frustrated whining and complaining of Seattle Astronomers

I'm feeling more tempted now to research who the authority is that I must contact to find out why astronomy has been canceled in Seattle - no, make that most of Western Washington - over the last 2.5 years. What did we do wrong? Did we upset one of those "La Nina" weather creatures of the Pacific waters? Does someone keep buying fancy new optics and let the clouds out when they open the box only releasing the curse?
I'm writing this to vent some of my extreme frustration over yesterday. As we know, Comet Lulin is in the skies right now. At this time it's just past Regulus in the constellation of Leo, and well placed high in the southern sky in the evenings. Higher is better, since there is less atmosphere to distort the view. So, all day yesterday (this is the day after another frustrating 3 inches of snow - which vanished quickly) I look out of my 10th floor office window and see Mt. Rainier super clear to the south. You know the days, it's when it's so clear that every time you look over it seems to be closer? By around lunchtime it was just south of Boeing Field "it lifted it's skirt and took a few steps forward" to quote my sister Linda who was also pleased with how the day looked..
Anticipating that we'll FINALLY get a great clear night for comet imaging, I was getting excited about the evening. A couple friends were coming over to play out back in our backyard observatory also. The Clear Sky Chart was even showing perfect conditions until about 2am. PERFECT! Plus, as a bonus it was Friday and we could do a late night of viewing.
3:30pm, I look out and Rainier had put on it's hat and it's "skirt" trailed off to the south. Quick peek at NOAA satellite images showed clouds quickly coming up from the south. Olympia - already 5,500 broken. Arrgghh!
5pm - game over! Nothing. Comet hidden, sky gone, disappointment maxed out to highest level, evening worthless again.

This is basically the typical pattern here in Seattle we have had on clear days for about the last 2 years. Fine during the day, clouds return at night. It does clear up a few days a month - during the FULL MOON! That is useless for anyone into deep sky observing like myself. The two big summer star parties over the last two years have been a total bust. Table mountain - clouds wind, freezing temperatures in August. Deception Pass - Clouds rain.

I'm not done, there's more. Light pollution. When it does clear, for the most part, there is always some haze in the sky, but that falls under the "cloud whining" mentioned above. It used to be that the sky appeared kind of pink here, but now I'm noticing that the sky, at least toward the west, has a bluish tinge to it. I'm thinking that is from the new "The Landing" mall down the hill from me. I was assured by the city of Renton (yes I did contact them about this) that lighting would follow strict rules and not go upward. I think they kept the promise, but I'm sure it's bouncing off the ground and going up. There was bill in the works (HB 1069) to reduce light pollution in Washington state that was going to the legislative session coming up. I just found out that it was canceled or shelved for another year....money. Don't they realize that good lighting will save money plus a lot of other bonuses? Everyone would win with this. It would cost something like $72,000 and the state is already in very deep financial trouble. Thanks to the economic mess, I think saving money on lighting has been ignored now.
I've been pretty hard-core into Astronomy for almost the last 10 years now, but I'm getting so frustrated with it all. I want to buy some new filters for imaging, but wondering if I should just drop that idea? Is 2 or 3 marginal nights in a 4 month period even enough to justify a a few hundred dollars for new filters?

The familiar full rows of horizontal disappointment

Now where did I put that bottle of vitamin D3 to cover my sun deficiency....?

Sunset to Moonrise at Paranal, Chile.

Just a fun little one minute video of a night at the ESO observatory in Chile. I first thought it was the sun coming up, but then the stars were still out. It was just light from the moonrise.
Skies once were like this just a few short years ago. Ok, more than just a few years, but maybe 30 years? I used to sleep on the backyard lawn in the summers and - faintly - still see the Milky Way in the sky. That is all gone now....and so is the slug that I found on my pillow next to my left ear when I woke up in the morning.

| ESO Paranal Observatory |

Track wreckage with Google Earth.

More fun and somewhat disturbing (but very cool!) features keep coming out for Google Earth. This time the latest add-on file for it is a way to track the chunks of shattered US/Russian satellites that collided on Feb. 10.
This is realtime data of the orbiting chunks that are being tracked and the orbital data provided by Celestrak. So now you can probably find the ISS, Shuttle, all your favorite satellites, and now even a couple swarms of garbage. The problem with Google Earth that I have is that once I start playing with it, I'll look at my watch and I've lost an hour. But traveled to many places. In a way, it's similar to snacking on M&Ms, I dare you - eat just one!

| Orbiting Frog - to get the add-on |

Cassini mission summary in one chart.

I keep finding really cool stuff on Emily Lakdawalla's blog on The Planetary Society web page. She has all the good sources of space stuff. I'm working on getting more good sources all the time. Anyway, she just posted this really fancy chart showing the past, current (we are in the "Equinox" stage of the mission right now), and future extended mission of the Cassini orbiter. Looks like plenty of good moon passes coming up and then "Proximal Orbits" whatever that means.
Maybe that is where Cassni does some ring or cloud barnstorming before they crash it into Saturn? I'll have to look further into what that is. (As usual, click the image to see full size)

| Emily's blog on Planetary Society |

Just can't let go of Lulin, best thing in the sky right now.

I think I'll have to just take my images, stack them, do the best I can with the data, then post it on a share for others to fix. Here is my original image that I took and was disgusted with due to the 3D blobs.
Steve on the Yahoogroups turned it into this:


Then my friend Jeff over in Indonesia (yeah, astronomers make the world small) tweaked it even better:How's that for international cooperation! :-)

Why does Lulin have two tails?

Comet Lulin shows up in photos as having two tails, one in front and the other in back. Some earlier photos have it with a pointy horn sticking out the front. No, it's not a magic unicorn or space narwhal in search of NCC1701 to attack James T. Kirk and kill the nearest red-shirt, but it's just simply a dust tail that is seen from a different point of view. This comet is traveling toward us with the sun about 90 degrees off to the side. The solar wind blows the gas or hydrogen tail directly away from it, while the dust tail is just basically a skid mark left on the path of it's orbit.
This is a good diagram that should explain it well.

More on Comet Lulin

Tuesday morning comet Lulin will pass just 2 degrees from Saturn in the sky. I'm kind of excited to see what kind of images those lucky enough to have clear skies for that event will come up with.
I had a chance to view and image Lulin Friday night. We were out until about 2am despite the somewhat hazy skies and 28 degree temperatures. I took this image of the comet - with special thanks to Steve on the CCD-Newastro Yahoogroup for tweaking my image a bit. I had some really ugly dust blobs that didn't process out since I must have twisted the camera accidentally when I took the flat-field images. Didn't line up very well then. Steve used the Photoshop "heal' tool to fixe that. I'll give that a try myself and play with it some more and see if I can improve the colors some more in this shot.
There is hope for us in Seattle. Live comet images of the Saturn/Lulin conjunction will be availible on the Coca Cola Space Science Center web page. I thought Coca Cola was only good for keeping us late night guys up with a caffeine and sugar high? I guess the do sponsor some cool astronomy stuff too!
Also took this image of the Rosette Nebula while waiting for the comet to get higher in the sky. It's H-alpha with 10 exposures at 800 ISO at 7 minutes each.

| Spaceweather.com for latest comet stuff |

Comet Lulin seen from Renton

Finally got my first image of C/2009 N3 (or better known as "Lulin") last night. It was high enough to just clear the wall of the observatory when I found it. It wasn't much to see in the eyepiece, just a very faint blob that could only be seen with averted vision. I was almost wondering if I had a galaxy instead, but then saw it was moving fast. Yep, Lulin has been found!
I tracked it with the scope guiding on the nucleus of the comet so I could get a good image of he comet itself. The stars are trailing not from the Earth's rotation, but the comet's fast movement. This image was taken over about a 40 minute time period. The tail can be seen faintly off to the left of the comet.
Again, the best night to see this fuzzy guy will be on the 24th, but I'm not confident about the forecast (Scott Sistek, are you reading this?). ;-)
I should have possibly another good night tonight before the clouds come back this weekend, so I'll see what happens. (Click on the image to see it in full size)
Also tried another target that I have yet to get a really good image of (the Crab Nebula - or M1). I think our scope has some problem autoguiding this part of sky since the stars always end up slightly 'Twinkie' shaped due to the back and forth motion of the autoguider. Argh! Still working on that....

Harness a Horsey.

A quick peek at the very hard to photograph horsehead nebula in Orion. This beast is a tough one to image especially from my location in light polluted Renton. Again I cheated a little bit and sucked down the Hydrogen (red) wavelength with my expensive little H-alpha filter. Then tossed out the "R" of the RGB visible image and used the H-alpha for the red instead.
Skies were not good the Horsey was wandering over toward the west and squatting over the lights of the city making it a miserable place to image. By that time I switched over to Hydrogen and cut through the light pollution. That filter really does do magic!
Can't help a hazy sky though, so focus left something to be desired, and as always I never get as many frames as I would like, recycled some old flat/dark frames that I had and overall wasn't extremely pleased with the outcome. I guess it looks ok in the smaller size, but the full size image just looks pretty nasty. I might just be getting too critical of my work too....

Feb. 24 - good night to get out and look.

February 24 is a good night to get out and to some observing. Two interesting and kind of rare events are happening. First of all, we know that Comet Lulin will be at it's closest to Earth at .41 AU (or about 38 million miles) and it should be at it's brightest of about magnitude 5 or so. If the sky is dark enough, no telescope should be needed to see Lulin.
Wait! There more....swing your scope over to the right and look at the yellowish 'star' (shouldn't be twinkling since it's a planet) and zoom in on Saturn. Since the ring plane of the planet is lined up with Earth right now the rings look very thin, and also make the planet dimmer since we lose a lot of reflective stuff bouncing light off the rings. 2:54am PST Titan will work it's way across Saturn's face followed by it's shadow about 40 minutes later. Then about 2 hours later 4 more of the moons will appear and scoot across Saturn making for a 4 moon "eclipse".
Please let me know how this all looks. I don't expect to see anything since this is Seattle and we NEVER get to see anything cool in the sky like this.

| Saturn event |
| Comet Lulin |

February 9, 2009 lunar eclipse --- Seen from the other end.

Here is a video of the lunar eclipse from this month. The video was taken from the Kaguya spacecraft orbiting the moon. Earthrise and solar eclipse seen from the moon. (Lunar eclipse seen from Earth).

| See the video here |

| More info - English page |

Shooting the moon this summer. Sounds like a viewing party to me!

The next exciting mission to the moon will launch sometime this summer. First of all the LRO (Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter) is going up, and this is the spacecraft with the camera similar to the one around Mars on the MRO spacecraft that can see the rovers, Viking landers, Phoenix, the parachutes they rode down on, and hopefully find some wreckage of ESA's Beagle II someday. So, if they can be seen, we know that the Apollo landing sites will finally be seen. That will finally shut up "Swear on the Bible that you went to the moon Mr. Armstrong" - Bart Sibrel and all those others that think the Apollo missions were just a prequel to Capricorn One.
This spacecraft will also be riding along with the LCROSS spacecraft that is headed directly to the moon's surfae. No, not a soft landing, but more of a bullet like smacking. But first, the booster that takes them out of Earth's orbit is going to crash into a crater that is always in darkness, followed by LCROSS a few minutes later - after it flies through the plume and takes a quick sniff of the contents and radios it quickly back to Earth before it to meets it's doom from a very sudden stop. Why crash into the moon? Because we are searching for water. Not for hidden moon life, but for a source of H2O for future manned missions. The water can be used for many things including fuel if enough energy can be produced to separate it into Hydrogen and Oxygen for other uses.
It even gets better......here on the west coast of the US (sometime betwen May and August this summer - depending on the launch date) we will have a view of the moon and its predicted that the plume from the crashing spacecraft will be visible from here. Amateur telescopes should be able to see the plume rise out of the crater and extend about 6 km above the surface and out 40 km in all directions.
Since it's summer, our chances are a lot better for clear skies and a chance to see it. I think I'll plan a backyard moon bashing party like we did when Deep Impact hit comet Temple 1 back in 2005. Couldn't see the comet in the West, but we had food, friends, and set up a backyard big screen TV with the projector and watched live NASA TV coverage out back. Good fun!

| LCROSS page |
| Lunar Recon Orbiter |
| Summary of all lunar missions |