Venus Moon Gathering And Rovers / Phoenix Updates

I suck at titles what can I say. There has been some great picture opportunities for my "Find And Photograph The Daytime Crescent Moon Contest". Again email your image to me and I will post it on my site. First place wins 50 pairs of Hanna Montana/Miley Cyrus 3D glasses, second place a DVD of "In The Shadow Of The Moon". Closing date is today November 3rd, or before my next post, this Thursday.


Tonight the Moon and Jupiter come within 3 degrees of each other in the South part of the sky just after Sunset. What's 3 degrees you may ask, well the Moon is a half a degree wide, so they will be within 6 Moon widths, another great photo opportunity.


The image below shows what the Moon, Venus and Jupiter gathering looked like Saturday just after Sunset, tonight the Moon will be right beside Jupiter.


Good luck to all the contestants which at this time is one, and it's a nighttime crescent Moon, getting more lax with the rules to get people to submit their images, first it was , "Daytime Crescent Moon", then "Nighttime Crescent Moon", then "Moon", then "A Link To A Moon Picture I Found While Surfing The Net", to "I Think This Is A Moon Image I Found While Shopping For Furniture Online Contest".


Well the little rover guys are both doing well, surviving another winter. Opportunity is on her way to the huge crater Endeavour, about 7 miles away, doesn't sound that far away but when you only travel 110 yards a day it takes 2 years to get there, but Opportunity will be doing lots of science on the way there. Spirit is up and running and doing science and image taking, of course she has dust on her solar panels from the dust storms that have been happening in her area, poor Spirit again, the troubled child of the two with a broke wheel and all.


Phoenix on the other hand, not so much, with the coming of winter, - 140 degree c temperatures, and fewer and fewer hours of Sunlight reaching her solar panels has created a low power fault putting the Phoenix into safe mode. Anybody that has a computer knows what safe mode is, I call it suck mode, can't do anything. The Phoenix team have shut down all they can on the Phoenix in hopes of the lander building up enough energy to be able to squeeze out all the science they can before the lander freezes over for good.

I'll leave you now with an animated crescent Moon I took on my outing Saturday night.

The Many Faces Of The Hunter's Moon

October's Full Moon is called the Hunter's Moon because it provided light to the early Native Americans to hunt their prey in preparation for the coming winter months. Actually the September, October and November Moons hang high and long in the Northern Hemisphere's night sky for a couple of reasons.


One is because of our changing seasons the Earth's Northern Hemisphere is starting to point away from the Sun and towards the Moon during it's Full Moon Phase, the Moon is opposite the Sun in the sky at this time, and two, the Moon's orbit around the Earth during these months favors the Northern Hemisphere.


So I was able to image the Moon from daytime, to evening wispy clouds, to cloudy skies, to clear skies, all in one night.




Winter is fast approaching as well for the Phoenix Lander. The lander is now working on it's 145 Martian day and is slowly loosing the Sun's energy it needs to power it's instruments as the Sun is setting earlier every day behind the horizon. The lander's robotic arm delivered yet another sample to one of it's ovens for analysis , they are trying to get as much done before the lander finally shuts down. The Phoenix Lander has accomplished a lot, from it's rocket landing, to studying the climate of Mars and seeing falling snow for the first time on another celestial body to actually finding ice water, an extremely successful mission.

I'll leave you with a clip I put together of the October Full Moon Rise, comprised of 126 images over a real time frame of 10 minutes.

Perseid Meteoroid Hits Moon

The next meteor shower I attend, and that will be the Orionids, peaking October 20,21, I'm pointing my camera and telescope at the Moon. The above animation was taking by amateur astronomer Robert Spellman shows a Perseid Meteoriod blasting into the Moon to the equivalent of around 100 lbs of TNT, quite a site, sign me up for a piece of that.

Some updates on the Phoenix Mars Lander, the above animation was taken with the Lander's surface stereo imager, it is a clip of 10 frames over a time frame of 10 minutes and shows ice clouds moving over the landing site. This helps scientists track winds on Mars, the clouds are made of ice crystals similar to the cirrus clouds here on Earth. The Lander has also gathered another soil sample into one of it's ovens. This sample came from the Stone Soup 7 inch deep trench, the deepest todate, "We are anxious to find out what makes this deeper soil cloddier than the other samples" Doug Ming, Phoenix science team member.

The little rover guys are still going strong, the above image shows the tracks of Opportunity coming back out of the Victoria Crater, notice two sets of tracks, it came back out over the same tracks it went into the crater with. Spirit's batteries are charging up again and is still doing science, both have made it through another Martian winter, a couple robots that were only to last 30 days have now been working for around 4 years, geez they keep going and going, the Phoenix should be so lucky.

Get thee over to Google Chrome, download this browser, it's fast and it's clean, it's a clean machine. The only problem with it I've found so far is that when you do your posts it doesn't underline like Firefox your spelling mistakes, which for me is quite a big thing, my posts usually have a gazillion words underlined, right now nothing is underlined, which means I've either spelled everything right or I'm screwed, so I may end up surfing the net with Chrome and then doing my posts with Firefox.

I'll leave you now with a Sunset I took a few nights ago.

Martian Water Confirmed and Total Solar Eclipse

It's confirmed, ice water on Mars!! After a couple of failed attempts the Phoenix Lander's scoop finally got some of that ice water soil into one of it's ovens to analyse and confirm there is ice water on Mars. The soil came from a trench around 2 inches deep called Snow White, image above and below, top one being a cool 3D image.



Some more great news, NASA has increased the funds for Phoenix extending it's mission to September 30, 5 weeks past the original 90 days.


Having said all that you may want to look at investing in some of that now wet Martian real estate, I mean now we have confirmed water, the property levels are bound to jump. Those of you that are my regular readers know I have purchased Lunar Real Estate and being the forward thinker and wise investor that I am, have purchased some Prime View Martian Property, that's right not just any view, Prime View. For just $22.49 you can get in on the ground floor with the purchase of an acre of Prime View Martian real estate. After your purchase you will receive your Martian Deed, a Martian map with your location, so you know where to go and a copy of the Martian constitution and Bill Of Rights, and on top of all that you will have a great conversation starter at all the dinner parties you attend, example;

Informed Bob: So, uninformed friend I have purchased an acre of Prime View Martian real estate.

Uninformed Friend: ...............I thought you had lunar property?

Informed Bob: Yes that is true, I have purchased an acre on the Lunar Southern Hemisphere in the Crater Campanus, lot# 15/1247, 26-30 degrees south, 30-26 degrees west. and being the forward thinker and wise investor that I am have decided that after the confirmed ice water discovery on Mars it would be in my best interest to purchase Prime View Martian real estate before the prices become too prohivitive to purchase.

Uninformed Friend: ..................What?...................................you nuts?

see.



This morning there was a Total Solar Eclipse, it started around 6 am EST, the path of totality started in North East parts of Canada and ended up in China and Mongolia. if you missed it you can catch up over at NASA or watch the You Tube video below. A Total Eclipse occurs when the Sun, Moon and Earth are perfectly aligned so the Moon which is in between, blocks the Sun from the Earth.

Some interesting facts:

The Moon's shadow for the August 1 2008 eclipse was 6,235 miles long and 147 miles wide.

During the eclipse the Moons shadow covered .4% of the Earth's surface.

The entire Eclipse lasted 2 hours 3 minutes, totality lasted 2 minutes 27 seconds.

Below is a You Tube video of the eclipse posted by the Associated Press.

Here Comes The Sun

At one time I had really big plans for the Sun and this blog, gonna post a lot of images and such, but alas the Sun has not been co-operating, nothing going on, little or no Sunspots, flares or prominences. I took the image of Sunspot 0999 above over a month ago. The image below is what was on Spaceweather.com today, actually been the same blank Sun for going on 6 weeks now.



A little bit of solar background, the Sun's solar activity such as sunspots, flares and prominences goes through an 11 year cycle of highs and lows, we are currently on the extra long decaying end of cycle 23, in the next few months we will see more solar activity as the Sun builds to solar maximum around 2012. At solar maximum we can expect to see upwards of 120 sunspots and intense solar flares daily as well as auroras as far south as Florida.

The Phoenix lander has been drilling into the Martian surface with it's motorized rasp on the back of it's robotic arm, collecting the sample with it's scoop and then watching and documenting the whole procedure kind of like a dress rehearsal in preparation for an actual gathering and depositing in the lander's oven when they are hoping they will finally be able to get some of that ice water into an oven to scientifically conclude ice water on Mars.

Okay now for the exciting news, NASA just released some 3D stereo views of the Martian surface around the lander. You've heard me talk before about my cardboard 3D glasses, people mock me for wearing them, actually I'm wearing them right now as I type, and yes It isn't the easiest thing to do, type while your wearing 3D glasses, but boy is it ever cool, may not look cool, but the view of the images with these glasses is, well it's like you're there, get yourself some of these glasses, you'll never regret it. Before I got my professional ones I had made some up by buying blue and red gels and taping the cut out squares to my glass lenses, word of advice, you may want to do that in private, it's not like people will think anything less of you when they see you wearing them, it's just they probably won't think anything more of you.

I'll leave you now with an animated Lunar Pleiades Occultation.

Lightning and The Phoenix Lander

We had an awesome display of lightning the other night and was able to capture some cool shots.


Some interesting facts on lightning, did you know for example that lightning can increase the temperature of the air around it by up to 50,000 degrees F, and that it contains up to 100 million volts? Also the leading cause of injuries in the home during a lightning storm is talking on the phone, wow, I never knew there was such a category, what is going on in people's minds? "Wow, cool thunderstorm, think I'll make a phone call and then take a bath."





Having said that I thought I would post one of my wide angle shots of lightning, what was I thinking? Most lightning injuries occur in the spring/summer when a lot of people are out doing things like, swimming, golfing, biking, taking pictures of lightning in a wide open space under power lines, ect.

If you hear thunder you are within 10 miles of lightning and you could be struck, seek shelter! You should avoid situations in which you may be vulnerable, like being under power lines, at the end of my photo shoot there was rain, lots of thunder, lightning, hey I don't have just one guardian angel, I got a group of them tag teaming.



A quick update on the Phoenix Lander, apparently the lander had some ice water rich soil in it's latest scoop, it was to be delivered to it's optical microscope Thursday and if there was any left over the rest was to be delivered to one of it's ovens for analysis to be done next week.

Scientists and engineers are thinking this could be the last chance to use the lander's ovens due to the fact one has developed an intermittent short. Whenever they deliver a sample to the ovens they have to shake the ovens to get the sample into them, no shake no sample to analyse, if oven number 4 shorts out again and causes the other ovens to stop shaking before they get a sample into the target oven number 0, they are not going to be able to perform any tests on the soil, if they get a sample into the oven and then oven 4 shorts out, they can still do tests, apparently the short doesn't effect the oven's abilities to analyze the sample once it's made it into the oven.

I'll leave you now with some shots of lightning I took a few days ago.

Occultations, Conjunctions and Phoenix Lander

Took some images of the gathering of Saturn, Regulus and Mars, Mars will continue drawing closer to Saturn till July 10 when it will start to pull away. If you are interested there will be another very cool conjunction this coming June 30, mind you it will be at 3:00 am EDT, when the Moon rises in the east, it and the Pleiades will once again be in conjunction, in fact if you live out in Eastern Canada you will see the Crescent Moon complete with earthshine occulting, or covering some of the Pleiades stars, what a photo op. They are calling for clear skies here so even though in Western Canada the Moon rises after the occultation I will be getting pics of the conjunction for my next post.

For my Fathers Day present my youngest daughter took me to the latest Indiana Jones movie, a great movie and a great time, me and my youngest have very similar tastes, both like the same type of movies, video games, believe that aliens had something to do with the building of the pyramids, and like to make up words, my oldest daughter and Wife have basically disowned us.

Wife " The Smiths are coming over tonight, you can talk about your space stuff but keep anything to do with aliens out, understood?"

Me " nyup"

Wife "what"

Me "hmm"

Wife "Bob"

Anyways I said all that to bring up something cool, at the very beginning of the show, I forget if it is part of a logo for the production company or the first scene, a huge image of a Moon/ Pleiades conjunction appears, how awesome was that, so if you go see the movie you can point that out to who ever you are with, or if by yourself, the person sitting next to you, they will appreciate it.

More good news on the Phoenix Lander front, after analyzing a sample of the Martian soil in one of the lander's wet labs, (a wet lab is an area where they mix water brought from Earth with the Martian soil so as to be able to do chemistry and test the soil for salts, acidity and other goodies) have found it to be similar to the dry valleys in Antarctica and has all the necessary ingredients to support life, although they have yet to find any water in the samples they are still hopeful that in later digs they will be able to get some of that ice water into their labs.

I'll leave you now with an animated 85% of Full Moon taken June 13th through some clouds.

Phoenix Finds Ice Water

Well scientists are convinced they have found water on Mars, I remain cautiously optimistic, now if they were to come back with a picture of a green alien I'd be saying "I knew it, in your face all you mockers of me", why am I cautiously optimistic? I don't know, I kind of would like to get some of that white substance into one of the lander's ovens to confirm it more scientifically before I jump for joy, I mean that's what the ovens are for, right?



If you remember my last post I had mentioned that the Phoenix People over at NASA were keeping an eye on the white substance in one of their previous digs. If the substance either developed frost or evaporated through sublimation, which is just a fancy term for changing from a solid to a vapour without going through the water stage, it would be ice water. Well as you can see from the above animation, some of it has, the only other thing the white could have been was salt, and salt doesn't work like that.


If this is indeed ice water it has profound implications, besides a water source for future colonists, you now have the ability to manufacture oxygen and fuel. When you are talking space travel, weight is key, the lighter the payload the less the cost, if you have the ability to manufacture the return trip fuel on Mars, the weight along with the cost of the mission goes down and the doability factor up. On a deeper level, with the finding of water on Mars, the possibilities of finding life increases dramatically, think about it, to find even a microbial alien life form on Mars, in our own backyard so to speak, opens up the imagination and possibilities to other life forms in the billions and billions of galaxies in our known universe, to say the least , exciting times and a step towards answering the age old question, "are we alone?"

Strawberry Moon June 18, 2008

In case you missed the June Full Moon I took some images. Called the Strawberry Moon by the Algonquin tribe because they harvested Strawberries during the month of June. I love horizon Full Moons, they always look squashed. The squashness is caused by the Earth's atmosphere acting like a lens and refracting the bottom of the Moon upwards.




As the Moon rose higher in the sky I took some images of it through my telescope, notice on both these images you can see light mist and clouds , the top image notice the dark shadow on the top right of the Moon, the bottom Moon most of the right side is covered with a light shadow, also notice the gold color of the image below, it was lower on the horizon and it's moonlight had to travel through more of our atmosphere which scatters the blues and allows the reds through to be seen by us.




I'll leave you with a clip I put together of the Moon Rise consisting of 54 images over a 7 minute time frame.

The Solstice Moon Illusion

May Full Moon

As the Full Moon rises tomorrow you will see what is called a Solstice Moon Illusion. A huge Moon will be rising in the east. Normally a low Moon on the horizon means an unusually big looking one, but for some reason during the summer solstice it seems to look bigger. No one really knows for sure why this illusion takes place, technically the Moon is the same size no matter where the Moon is but our brain sees it larger on the horizon, whatever the reason, just look to the east at Moon rise tomorrow to get a spectacular view, weather permitting I'll be taking lots of images to post for the weekend if you miss it.

To find out when the Moon rises in your location just visit Sky View Cafe, click on the find tab, type in your city and it will come back with all kinds of goodies like the whereabouts of the various celestial bodies at times for your area, if you need any help with the Moon rise time for your location just leave a comment and I'll get it for you.

Sun filtered through clouds, June 15, 2008

I was out last Sunday to get a horizon Moon shot for this post but it never showed itself from behind the clouds, so I thought I'd post this one instead. As I was turning to leave I happened to notice a pastel like cloudscape around the Sun and was very lucky to be able to capture the above image just as a bank of clouds was dropping which filtered out the blinding light of the Sun to show it's shape.


Snow White Dig site

Still nothing in the water finding department at the Phoenix Mars Lander site. They started a new dig called "Snow White" just today. It is about .8 inches in depth. The previous dig where they found the mysterious white stuff was around 2 inches deep, which by the way they are still keeping an eye on, if the white substance is ice it will either develop frost or sublimate, which means turn from a solid to a gaseous state.

I'll leave you now with an animated Solar cloudscape image.

Moon, Spica and Plutoids

While on my holidays to Winfield/Kelowna I got a cool shot of the Moon as a jet contrail was falling into it, I like to call it "Saturn Moon with Spica off the top right" as it looks kind of like Saturn and Spica is off the top right of the Saturn Moon, and yes it is framed, I'm am having way too much fun with this new framing software. Spica is the brightest star in the constellation Virgo and 16th. brightest star in the night sky. Spica is a blue giant, you can see it's blueness in the image above and is around 2,300 times more luminous then our own Sun.




The International Astronomical Union has just decided what to call Pluto and Pluto like celestial bodies; a "Plutoid", the definition of a Plutoid is; "Plutoids are celestial bodies in orbit around the Sun at a distance greater than that of Neptune that have sufficient mass for their self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces to that they assume a near spherical shape, and that have not cleared the neighbourhood around their orbit." Well La De Da isn't that special. As far as I'm concerned Pluto is and should be given the title planet back, if they think that by naming a new classification of celestial bodies after it and then hoping us "Pluto for Planet People" or the PPP as I liked to be called, are going to roll over and die, they're wrong and the vast majority of people are like mind. Don't get me wrong I'm all for calling the next dwarf planet or rock or whatever they end up calling them a Plutoid but lets grandfather little Pluto, sometimes you have to put science on the back burner to keep a little bit of our history and humanity alive.

JJ , in her comment asked if there were any petitions around to try and save the planet status of Pluto, there are a couple and you can find them at, Pluto Petition and Please Save Pluto, very easy and quick to use. Right now it's 21,456 for Pluto to remain a planet, and 4,682 for Pluto not to keep it's planet status.



The Mars Phoenix Lander has samples of the Martian soil in it's microscope station as well as in one of the lander's ovens, and all the people say "Burn Baby Burn". Phoenix lead investigator Peter Smith said "There could be real discoveries to come as we analyze this soil with our various instruments. We have just the right instruments to do the job." I for one am looking forward to the upcoming days and weeks to see what new and exciting things we may learn about Mars from this marvel of human technology.



I'd like to leave you now with an animated earthshine image I took a week ago.

Moon, Saturn and Regulus Conjunction

Conjunctions are our friends. Got some cool shots of the Moon, Saturn and Regulus conjunction Sunday June 8th. about an hour after Sunset. The image above shows Saturn to the top left of the Moon and Regulus off the top right of the Moon. The image below is a shot of the gathering as well as a Lunar Corona, Lunar Coronas are caused by the bright Moonlight reflecting and refracting of ice crystals in high thin clouds.



The image below is a picture of the conjunction with Mars off to the far right


I also took a wide angle shot below to show you what you would have seen if you had been walking west down your street to give you an idea how it would look to the naked eye.


This coming June 30th. Mars will be joining Saturn and Regulus, Mars will retrograde to settle just off the top right of Regulus for the too cool trio conjunction of Saturn, Regulus and Mars just in time for July 1st and 4th fireworks celebrations, so when you are out enjoying the fireworks and your significant other says " Wow aren't these fireworks great" you having the knowledge gained by reading this blog can reply " Yes they are, but I am also enjoying the celestial conjunction of Saturn, Mars and Regulus over here in the western quadrant of the celestial sphere" to which your significant other will reply ".......Kiss me you fool!" see, I got your back. Also this coming 5 and 6th. of July the Moon will join the gathering. July 5th. the Moon will be just below Regulus and Mars will have moved to almost the center of Saturn and Regulus, July 6th. the Moon will be just off the left of Saturn.

Saw the above animated gif at the Mars Phoenix Lander's web site and just had to have it on my blog. It shows the new sprinkling method they have developed to deliver the Martian soil samples to the various labs for analysis. The previous method of scoop and drop wasn't working, for some reason the soil is clumping and not going through the lab's protective screen, they've found by shaking the scoop a little they can sprinkle smaller samples onto the screen and through to the lab. The animated gif above shows the scoop delivering a sample to the Microscopy, Electrochemistry and Conductivity Analyzer or MECA for short. Seems to be working better. As of today Scientists do not know the reason why the soil is clumping, could be ice or static electricity holding it together, once they get a good sample into the labs we should get some answers, very exciting stuff, by the way the above gif is comprised of 4 images over a 20 minute time frame.

I'll leave you now with an animated gif of a cool 4 percent crescent Moon in clouds.