Jupiter

Just a quick note that last Saturday evening I showed Slim what Jupiter looks like when viewed through Dobby.
It was a pretty nice evening, very clear and with good transparency, so got a good view - Slim was moderately impressed.
Unfortunately Saturn was still too low to see.

Jupiter nearly at opposition

It was a beautiful clear night on Friday night (technically Saturday morning) the 28th of April and it was time to drag Dobby out to the front step.

The moon was a bright gibbous, so a quick look for some globular clusters in Scorpius was fruitless. Not that I spent much time, it was cool and I was a bit tired.

Jupiter was well worth the time though, and provided an amazing view of clear bands and a positive sighting of the GRS almost exactly at the middle of its transit across the face of the planet.

I snapped a couple of quick shots with my mobile, which as usual over-expose the planet, but show the disc and moons nicely.



Also attached is an image from the Juno Moons app showing the simulation of what I was looking at.

Commercial spaceflight, exoplanet and live streaming

About this time of the morning, back in 1985, I would be on the bus to another day in Year 7.
If we were lucky we might get to use a computer today, but that rarely happened in year 7. I may have been aware of another space shuttle mission happening/about to happen and I always enjoyed seeing any footage available of those that the news showed in the evening.*

This morning, as I caught the bus into work, I watched a live stream of SpaceX launching the NASA TESS mission on my phone.

Still a diesel smelling, bumpy ride (although a nicer bus than the old Volvo's that would take me to school) but today I could spend some of it holding a small, wireless device and watch live as a cheap, reusable (mostly) rocket took a NASA mission into orbit and then successfully landed the reusable stage. That was the 24th successful landing, so I'd say they've got that pretty much worked out.

The TESS mission is cool as well. Despite the Star Wars inspired certainty that year 7 me would have told you that there are planets around other stars, none had been confirmed at that time. There are now over 3800+ exoplanets confirmed, and the TESS mission is going to survey about 90% of the sky (although not as deep as other surveys) and will definitely add many more to that number. Awesome.

*I checked, and on this day 35 years ago the shuttle was just finishing a mission to deploy a communication satellite and do some other work and would land on the 20th April Australian time.

Screen snaps!

Nova in Carina

I've read over at AstroBlog that there is/was a new Nova in Carina.
I'd have liked to try to check it out, but the evenings have either been consistently overcast, or I've been busy.
I'll track down some other info on the web.

Haven't pulled Dobby out for a while. It's well overdue.

Starman update

Apart from loosing the central booster when it didn't fire enough engines to decelerate and hit the water next to the drone ship at about 500kph, everything else seems to have gone perfectly!
Starman is now on his way to the asteroid belt, and I'm not sure if that is because the burn went longer by design or accident. Coolness remains undiminished.

Showed the kids the videos of the animation and then the launch that was streamed. Then left on the live stream of the Tesla drifting away from Earth for a while, it was mesmerising.


It sounds like the battery has run out now, so there will not be any more images sent. I'll need to track down some of the last footage, as the receding Earth is just beautiful in those shots.

In the 2nd decade of the 21st Century...

I sit on a train, riding to work in Melbourne, watching the live broadcast on my mobile phone of the successful launch of Space X's Falcon Heavy.
I saw the successful twin landing of the outside boosters, I saw the video black out as the core booster started it's landing (there still is no news on what has happened to it)
I have seen live streaming video from the test payload as the faring was ejected and it settled into orbit waiting to start it's journey to Mars.
Not to land on Mars, it's not clean enough. But out to the orbit of Mars, and maybe a flyby within a few hundred thousand km of the red planet.
Space X is proving that commercial space flight is going to happen, much cheaper than government programs and with reusable components.

Lunar Eclipse

The rare triple event. A second full moon in the month, at perigee, and eclipsed... or as the media insisted on calling it, the "Blue Super Blood Moon".
With that name it really should have exploded at the end, but it didn't.
I started observing just as totality started, catching the last sliver of brightness slip away, then enjoyed the dusky goodness of the moon in shadow. Took plenty of photos on the DSLR on the tripod at 200mm, and set up Dobby and used the 30mm and 25mm eps.
Had an interesting chat with a passer by (I

was set up at the front gate) about full moons, lunar eclipse, movies and werewolves. It was late...
But, he enjoyed looking through the scope and got a quick photo through the ep on his mobile.
Woke up L twice to see totality and then near the end.
Took a run of photos as the last quarter of the shadow slipped away. I'll give a go at making an animation of that.
It was a beautiful night as well, cool but better seeing conditions than I thought it would be. Swung the scope around for a brief look at M43, since it was right there anyway.
Photos!