Big Picture does the ISS.

The Big Picture does the ISS. I just watched the ISS and Shuttle pass by to the north last evening and fade into darkness. There are still some times to see it pass in Chicago.



via Bad Astronomy

See the International Space Station and Space Shuttle in Chicago

The next several evenings offer great possibilities to view the ISS and Shuttle docked from Chicago. See this link for viewing times.

3/18/2009 UPDATE: Take a look for current Shuttle passes.

Andromeda Galaxy

The Andromeda Galaxy, imaged on October 31st, 2007. 11 minutes exposure.

Click to enlarge

Scanner Camera color

If you could synchronize a tri-color set of filters with the RGB set of LEDs in the Canon Canoscan scanner, you could produce color images with a single scan of the diy scanner cameras out there.

National Geographic on Light Pollution

The End of Night: Why we need Darkness

National Geographic Magazine brings the issue of light pollution (or expressed for concerns outside astronomy, Light At Night) to the cover of the November issue.

Inbound bolide: 2008 TC3

Astronomers have discovered a small inbound object a few meters across that appears to be on an impact course with the Earth. The object may enter the Earth's atmosphere somewhere over Europe or North Africa just after 2:30AM UT Tuesday (9:30PM CDT tonight). The orbit is uncertain enough to have a number of possible interactions with the Earth, including missing entirely. It is small enough, based on its brightness, to cause no concern, but should be a nice bright fireball and might drop some meteorites. The self-assigned ID is 8TA9D69, and it was discovered on Mt. Lemmon near Tucson, Arizona by the Mt. Lemmon Sky Survey.
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/mpml/message/21070

Update: It's now designated 2008 TC3
http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/mpec/K08/K08T50.html

I showed some RAS folks how to use the CCD camera last night. We couldn't get the drivers installed on the new laptop, despite tweaking the INF files to identify the USB device (at least in Windows, when you first connect a USB device, the device sends an ID number down, and Windows looks in the INFs to locate the driver). Unfortunately the manufacturer of the Starlight Xpress SXV-H9 camera changed the camera and the driver without changing the name or offering the old driver for download--the result is old camera owners can't get it working at all. Having to ask for the driver when it could just be on a website someone is really dumb.

Anyways, we got the camera working on the ancient soon to die laptop (94MB of RAM!) and took this 3 minute (12x 15sec) exposure of the Dumbbell Nebula. Enjoy.

Article in Sun-Times about Light Pollution

Yes, Light pollution does affect the ecology of the region.

http://www.suntimes.com/lifestyles/1199598,CST-NWS-night03.article.

Do I believe "A spokeswoman for the Chicago Bureau of Electricity said the city "has been actively pursing different methods to address the issue of light pollution."? Not in a second.

The University of Chicago just added over $7000 in electrical costs a year in extra, non-effective lights on campus. Is that sustainable?

Raft part 2

They finally got underway again, after a stop at the Riverdale Marina. They ended up replacing their outboard with a newer and slightly more powerful model. This then tripped them up as it tried to tear away from the raft. Suitability reinforced, they left this morning down the Cal-Sag to parts south.

This image is really the best, caught by Dave D., a boater who had seen them earlier while at the Riverdale Marina, he just happened to see them while crossing the 127th St. bridge, and he then headed further west to the Ridgeland Ave. bridge and caught some great shots.



Update: I just got a call from Igor; they've docked for the night near the last SEPA station right at the junction of the Cal-Sag and the Chicago Ship and Sanitary Canal, just a touch past the Illinois and Michigan Canal remnants and will be walking a mile up and across the river to the nearest gas station to pick up some gas.

Ah, panic

Nonrational behavior cleans out the gasoline supply in Nashville. No reasonable reason, of course, but panic takes out the gas supply of an American city. A minor problem with the US gasoline supply is that it is unable to handle panic buying or hoarding of gasoline. We've relied on the fact that most Americans haven't freaked out at any particular moment.

Raft

My time has been taken up with four friends of mine who are building a raft. Building a raft to travel from Chicago to New Orleans. I've been helping out as my schedule allows, although I took a few days off recently to help out on moving the preassembled parts from the backyard of a Hyde Park apartment to the Croissant Marina on the Little Calumet River. (This marina is a great spot--amazing for the friendliness, the methane purgers on the other side of the river, and the barges passing silently by). The weather gods have not been kind though. The majority of the water on the Little Calumet is effluent, and this weekend Chicago received the highest one-day precipitation event ever, AND the remnants of Hurricane Ike, in two separate rain events. In the scheme of things, it was so bad they opened all the normally closed locks that keep the Chicago river and canals from flowing into Lake Michigan. So, our previous spot at the marina is now covered in combined sewage and storm output by ten feet. It put a damper on the weekend for a lot of people; a lot of people are flooded out of their basements and apartments. Ryerson Observatory reports almost 11 inches of rain in the past seven days.

While we now have a 16ftx32ft raft, we still need to mount the 35hp motor and construct the cabins and hammock supports for the travelers. Try this link for construction photos. You might be able to see it without a facebook account--I'm just dumping stuff without much editing.

Volcanic sunsets part 2

Jennifer points out the local Chicago view from 8/31. Last night the colors were all there without any crepscular rays. Another image at WGN Weather. Spaceweather says the cloud is moving off from North America, but I still thought last night's was great.

volcanic sunset

Me, earlier this week walking to the supermarket: "Boy, it's funny. The western sky has odd colors. They vaguely remind me of the Mount Pinatubo colors from so many years ago. But there hasn't been any eruption lately."

Me, just now, reading Space Weather: Facepalm. Aleutian volcanic eruption a couple of weeks ago.


Also see WGN weather blog for a number of identical "Boy, what a sunset" posts.

EDIT: And thinking about it made me remember catching some news on Highly Allochthonous about how three of the Aleutian volcanoes were erupting and whether the volcanism was related.

Deep Time for Dummies

Snark!

"DEEP TIME FOR DUMMIES

History's Shortest Geological Column


The decade-long failure of The Congressional Record to note the 6,000th anniversary of the Earth's Creation (4004 BC-AD 1997) shows the dire need for a Geological Column that junior Senators, Congressional pages and Washington Times editors can easily master in a single session of Sunday School."

Link

SDSS conference news

Sloan Digital Sky Survey summary conference this weekend.

The likely press highlight of the Solar System session on the morning of Monday, August 18 will be announcement of the discovery (by SDSS astronomer Andrew Becker) of a remarkable object that is currently about the same distance from Earth as the planet Uranus but whose 27,000-year orbit carries it to more than 70 times that distance. This object is akin to the famous dwarf planet Sedna, but its orbital properties are considerably more extreme, with a much more elongated path that takes it nearly twice as far from the Sun.

Press release