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.

Celestial Gatherings and Climate Change

Moon and Antares, June 16, 2008


First off I'm pretty pumped about the fact that redOrbit selected Black holes as a Red Hot Blog of the Day , very cool when a large reputable science site's editors choose your site as something worthwhile and recommend it to it's readers.

Got a couple images of some celestial gatherings that have happened in the past week. The above image taken June 16 of the Moon and Antares, Antares is a Red Super giant star in the constellation Scorpius, because of it's red color it is sometimes mistaken for Mars, it's diameter is 700 times that of our Sun and 600 light years distant. The image below is a conjunction of the Moon and Jupiter taken June 19 at 11:00 pm.


Moon and Jupiter June 19, 2008

If you are concerned at all with climate change you'll want to head over to Global Climate Change a brand new website just started by NASA's Jet Proplusion Laboratory. This site deals with educating the public on Earth's everchanging climate. They do an excellent job of explaining various things such as the condition of Earth's ice sheets, Global Averge Temperature, sea level change and concentrations of key greenhouse gases.

There's lots of interactive stuff like a Climate Time Machine, it takes you back to 1979 through to 2007 and shows how various things like ice melt, sea levels, CO2 emissions and the Average Global Temperature have changed through the years, wow, very scary, and I don't scare easy, well maybe I do , but that's beside the point, and the music is very scary cool, I was humming it all day at work today, very catchy in a scary sort of way, awesome site, NASA does such super work on their sites.

I'll leave you now with another Moon Rise , it consists of 42 images over 3.5 minutes real time.

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.