The Sky is Waiting.
Our second telescope: a 60mm refractor.
(note the 8-track player in the background!)
It’s true: we destroyed our first telescope before its first night out.
Flashback to the summer 1977, and our ninth birthday. Returning home from church, I was greeted by a shiny new Newtonian reflecting telescope, lovingly assembled by my Mom in my bedroom. [Read more...]
Our current travel gear: ready for an upgrade?
The circle is nearly complete. Late last year, we took on a book project presented to us by Fraser Cain over at Universe Today. Numerous edits, rewrites and deadlines later, the book out from Page Street Publishing this October is nearly now on autopilot.
I do want to write one day about lessons learned during the first-time book writing process. But what I want to present this week is our stick and carrot reward project we’re about to initiate.
For years, our go to telescope has been a Celestron 8-inch, Schmidt-Cassegrain reflector. It’s a great scope, to be sure; it’s versatile enough for planetary or deep sky observing, plus I can still sling it into the hatchback of our Fiat 500 for mobility.
The trouble is, I have to leave it home when we fly abroad, and simply carry our DSLR and our Canon image-stabilized binoculars. I’ve always wanted a simple rig that’s down-sized to meet international flight carry-on restrictions, and I’m now ready to pull the trigger.
An article in Sky and Telescope last year also hatched a seed in my mind. In it, a pair of astronomers roughed it traveling through South America, and carried two small telescopes with them to use for public star parties. This got me thinking to all of our wayward journeys through places like Morocco, Nepal, and Cambodia… wouldn’t it be great to offer views of the Universe to people who have never looked through a telescope?
Thus a plan was born. I’m looking to donate the bulky 8-inch SCT scope to a good home (say, a deserving local school or astronomy club, where it will actually get used) and downsize to the largest Maksutov-Cassegrain scope I can get away with (hopefully) an Orion 127mm (5-inch). For solar observing, I’m hoping to do the team from the article one better, and trade in the Coronado PST solar scope for a white-light glass filter plus an offset hydrogen alpha filter for the aperture. One telescope to rule them all, in one kit.
I’m also hoping that the rig is light enough to fit on my collapsible Dolica travel tripod, and it won’t necessitate buying yet another beefier tripod. I may also add in a Skywatcher/IOptron tracking mount, though I always like to maintain the option of being able to simply hand slew the telescope towards targets, and not worry about dead batteries or slow drive motors (I can find the Moon myself, thank you very much).
A fully airline portable travel astronomy rig is a noble goal, and a worthy reward to ourselves for finishing our first book. We also have another criterion for the project: to keep the entire budget down under $1,000… book advances for most first-time authors aren’t as massive a s most people think!
Anyhow, that’s part one. We hope to bring you part two, in which we compare the results of the downsizing project about a month from now, in time for our fiftieth birthday… wow. Has it really been 50 orbits around ole Sol?
Living on the flight path – an aircraft approaches
the Full April Pink Moon. Photo by Author.
Quick: where’s your very own personal observatory?
In an ideal world, most amateur astronomers would simply live in an iconic dome observatory, perched on a windswept mountain under perpetually clear dark skies. [Read more...]
Avast: a great daytime comet.
Photo by author; from the Greenwich Observatory collection.
Turns out, finding fuzzballs isn’t easy. If you’re like us, you’ve been spending many a morning hunting for two faint periodic comets: 45P/Honda-Markov-Padušáková and 41P/Tuttle-Giacobini-Kresŕk. Yes, they’re both making close passes in 2017 as many a website have exclaimed, but they’re also both tiny and faint binocular objects from dark sky sites at the very best. Still, everyone from our repair guy to our landlord to random folks on social media have asked us how to see these intrinsically faint comets. [Read more...]
Under ceaseless skies…
Photo by author.
Astronomy forces us to think big. And not just big in terms of gazillions of miles of distance, but also in terms of time. The stars in the Milky Way galaxy, for example, are swirling around the galactic core to the tune of one orbit every quarter of a billion years – but the constellations you see from you backyard tonight looked pretty much the same on the day you were born, and won’t have changed much come the day that you die. [Read more...]
Catching the first sunrise of 2017.
We’re back!
The last week of 2016 saw us successfully make the jump back across the big pond that is the Atlantic Ocean back to the United States. It also saw us contract a flu that was sweeping the Spanish expat community of Jimena de la Frontera just days before departure, a flu which, despite our best efforts, progressed to mild pneumonia upon arrival back. Hey, we fully planned to get our yearly flu shot on return, honest. Anyways, we’re now (finally!) regaining strength, and thought we’d reflect on the trip last year and our return while impressions are still fresh in our mind’s eye.
It’s always a bit surreal, coming back to the U.S. Here, gas is cheap, and goods are plentiful. It’s hard not to grab random people and try to explain to them just how good they have it, and just what real poverty looks like. I know that it’s all relative to what people have experienced in their own lives, but travel opens you up to just how huge the disparity exists between the haves and have-nots is worldwide. And yet, we experienced such generosity from those who had the least to give us. Back in the States, it seems like we’re once again stuck in our own little bubble, with an indifference to others.
But its not all bad. Here, the WiFi screams along as fast as my fingers and brain can move, and I’m not clinching my teeth with every mouse click. In the States, we can really get business done. Whereas abroad, finding batteries or a place to get a haircut feels like a daily victory, here everything is a Walmart stop or an Amazon click away.
We also realize what a precious and expensive commodity personal space is on return to the U.S. Here, secondary roads are wider than main highways abroad, and garages are bigger than many European apartments.
Still, we miss the quiet solitude of writing amid the Andalusian foothills with the goats and cows, and the pleasant winding drive through the mountains home vs the endless redlight stop-start traffic of Florida’s US 19.
We did prove to ourselves that we can travel and work online indefinitely from the road in 2016, and keep the cash outflow equal to the very modest inflow our current lifestyle affords.
Of course, the return to the new ‘Occupied America‘ was a bitter sweet one, though the current political polarization isn’t as oblivious in day to day life even here in purple state Florida as our online life would suggest. We just do our best to break that bubble, and reach out to friends of all stripes. And speaking of which, PBS Newshour has an excellent quiz (and we almost NEVER take online quizzes) to help you see if you’re doing the same.
Well, that’s it for now. Time to rest up get healthy, and be ready to outrun the government’s fleet of flying killer robots if needed. Hey there’s and eclipse in 2017, so its already a good year.
Oh, and speaking of the eclipse, I wrote a book whilst traveling as well. be sure to check out our 101 Astronomical events to watch out for in 2017. Here’s to another exciting year!
A thing of the past?
What does the near future of human civilization have in store? If there’s one thing we’re terrible at as a species, it’s predicting change. Looking at predictions of the past is an instructive exercise in the folly of attempting to prognosticate. The biggest hazard appears to be the mere projection of current culture, and imagining that such a linear progression will go on forever. While everyone imagined we’d have flying cars and robotic servants by now, everybody completely missed the rise of Twitter, Ebay and Paypal. [Read more...]
Charming lane, or major thoroughfare?
And here, we thought we knew all there was of US vs UK culture. Sure, we knew a truck is a lorry, a boot was a trunk, and the whole fries-are-chips, chips-are-crisps thing. We’d accidentally avoided long stays in the UK in our 20+ plus years in the U.S. Air Force, as the Britain was usually a 24 hour stop off en route to Africa or the Middle East. Anyhow, as we near our final 72 hours in the United Kingdom, here are 12 differences large and small that we noticed in our two months in the British Isles: [Read more...]
Waiting on the train…
How do you get from point A to B? This past weekend, we turned in our rental car and made the transition from dangerous foreign driver in a strange land, to being a wandering, car-dodging tourist on foot in urban London. [Read more...]
Standing amid stones…
Well, we took the leap late last week, and jumped north into the (currently) United Kingdom. The post-Brexit jump for the U.S. dollar, and the accompanying fall of the price of rental cars and airline tickets fueled this decision, along with a desire to escape the August summer heat in Morocco. [Read more...]
What’s in your travelling medical kit?
It’s a reality we plan for, nearly every excursion.
Sickness, injuries, and health issues are a fact of life, and an extra stress while traveling. It can also be extra stressful when you’re traveling solo, and there’s no one to run out to the local pharmacy and pantomime for you. We once spent the day sick in a tiny, barren hotel room in Darwin, Australia, with only our guide book for entertainment. We were barely able to make it around the corner for bottled water. [Read more...]
Timeless wisdom…
Do you park your brain in neutral when you travel?
Indie travel really pulls you out of your element and plops you down wide-eyed in a new and strange place. More than ever, this is the time when you need to be alert to your new surroundings, not buried face-first in your smartphone… well, OK, in just about every country you visit these days, you’ll just look like about a 100 other people walking down the street starring at their phones. [Read more...]
The alleyways of Assilah, Morocco.
This week, we’d like to talk about the importance of not having a plan.
Sure, we’ve talked about the virtues of careful planning during any impeding trek in the past, and how it can make or break a trip. What we want to address this week might be better termed as built in flexibility. [Read more...]
Follow the arrow…
We’ve arrived.
As we mentioned in last week’s dispatch, our mission this past weekend was to exit Spain into Morocco, for a brand new 90 day reset on our visa… and of course, to explore brave new lands.
First off, everything went off with ‘nary a hitch. We ditched the rental in Gibraltar, pre-positioned ourselves in Algeciras, and caught the ferry across the straights of Gibraltar from Tarife to Tangier. Where invasion fleets and cannon balls used to fly, lies a now placid straight mainly plied by sun-seeking tourists. [Read more...]
How many pairs of footwear do YOU travel with?
How do you maintain an exercise regimen whilst traveling? And no, we’re not talking about skipping down to the hotel gym before buffet breakfast, although we’ve done that as well. We’re talking about staying true to a regimen while independently traveling. [Read more...]
Our humble station.
There’s another insidious danger that awaits unwary solar astronomers.
This coming Monday on May 9th, the planet Mercury transits the fair face of our host star as seen from our Earthly vantage point. Unlike, Venus, Mercury is tiny, meaning amateurs everywhere will be scrambling to make solar filters for their telescopes this weekend. [Read more...]
We can now see Gibraltar from our workspace…
Well, our time in Jimena de la Frontera is just about at an end. It has been a great stay in a tiny Andalusian white pueblo town, a foothill village topped with a stunning 9th century Moorish castle. We suspect you’ll be hearing more about Jimena soon, as recent archaeological finds date the roots of the town back even further, to Roman times. Stone Age art found along the river suggest that humans were here even earlier, plying the region for thousands of years. [Read more...]
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Pictured is a Delta IV rocket launch from Cape Canaveral on November 21st, 2010. The image is a 20 second exposure taken at dusk, shot from about 100 miles west of the launch site. The launch placed a classified payload in orbit for the United States Air Force.
Difficult but not impossible to catch against the dawn or dusk sky, spotting an extreme crescent moon can be a challenge. The slender crescent pictured was shot 30 minutes before sunrise when the Moon was less than 20 hours away from New. A true feat of visual athletics to catch, a good pair of binoculars or a well aimed wide field telescopic view can help with the hunt.
The Sun is our nearest star, and goes through an 11-year cycle of activity. This image was taken via a properly filtered telescope, and shows the Sun as it appeared during its last maximum peak in 2003. This was during solar cycle #23, a period during which the Sun hurled several large flares Earthward. The next solar cycle is due to peak around 2013-14.
Located in the belt of the constellation Orion, Messier 42, also known as the Orion Nebula is one of the finest deep sky objects in the northern hemisphere sky. Just visible as a faint smudge to the naked eye on a clear dark night, the Orion Nebula is a sure star party favorite, as it shows tendrils of gas contrasted with bright stars. M42 is a large stellar nursery, a star forming region about 1,000 light years distant.
Orbiting the planet in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) every 90 minutes, many people fail to realize that you can see the International Space Station (ISS) from most of the planet on a near-weekly basis. In fact, the ISS has been known to make up to four visible passes over the same location in one night. The image pictured is from the Fourth of July, 2011 and is a 20 second exposure of a bright ISS pass.
Next to the Sun, the two brightest objects in the sky are the Moon and the planet Venus. In fact, when Venus is favorably placed next to the Moon, it might just be possible to spot the two in the daytime. Another intriguing effect known as earthshine or ashen light is also seen in the image on the night side of the Moon; this is caused by sunlight reflected back off of the Earth towards our only satellite.
A mosaic of three images taken during the total lunar eclipse of December 21st, 2010. The eclipse occurred the same day as the winter solstice. The curve and size of the Earth’s shadow is apparent in the image.
Tracking Tales of Transits in Lewes, Delaware
Seen in Lewes, Delaware… photo by author.
I had to stop.
As we always love to say, astronomy and history is where you find it, even in a graveyard in Delaware beside the road.
The Delaware coast is an unlikely birthplace for modern American science. But back in the mid-18th century, it was the site of cutting edge astronomy. At the time, measuring the distance from the Earth to the Sun was the gold standard, a key to unlocking the scale and size of the solar system using Kepler’s laws. A transit of Venus across the the face of the Sun represented just such an opportunity to make a parallax measurement at the precise moments of ingress and egress as the black inky disk of the planet slips across the face of the Sun. This was one of the first truly international efforts in science, as several observations had to be made from multiple geographically separate locations. [Read more...]