biggest mars for next 8 years!

as this is my last weekend to host the public star parties at the old telescope on UT's campus, i'm thrilled that mars is putting on such a show! mars doesnt look terribly exciting thru average telescopes most of the time it is visible in our sky, because it's far away from us in its orbit, it doesnt have big bright moons and it has no rings. but this month, on december 18th, mars appears bigger to us than it will be for the next 8 years!

being close means that mars appears brighter in our night sky, making it easier to find, and hopefully obvious to see for the next month once you get yourself acquainted! mars rises early in the evening in the east and then moves overhead and across the entire sky as the night goes by. to find it, face east in the evening and try to find the familiar constellation, orion, with three bright stars lined up almost vertically. move your eyes to the left and you'll notice two bright stars also aligned vertically, castor and pollux, of gemini. in between orion and the pair, castor and pollux, you'll see a bright orange point of light... closer to castor and pollux... thats mars!!


mars is not only brighter due to its closeness, it also appears bigger. our eyes cannot detect the size difference as easily as we notice its enhanced brightness level.... but looking thru a telescope will be more exciting because mars is almost 16 arcseconds across!

if you have a telescope, use it. if you don't, the look for astronomical societies in your town or see if the local university has public viewing nights or star parties!

once you are looking thru the eyepiece of a telescope at the image of the red planet, try to locate the white clouds covering the north polar ice caps. depending on the type of telescope, the "north pole" could be at the top or the bottom of your image. the image below shows mars as seen by Jean-Luc Dauvergne and Francois Colas a couple weeks ago in france.


a martian day is 40 minutes longer than a day on earth, so each week that you look at mars you'll see slightly different dark spots ("maria"), bright spots ("terrae") and cloud cover. sky and telescope has a nice mars finder application that shows the features of mars visible to us at any time! enjoy!

carnival of space #32

read many interesting articles about our solar system and space at large at the 32nd installement of the carnival of space hosted by the robot guy.

and a little comic holiday cheer...

hotel mauna kea

here's a clever and hilarious little video created by astronomers who regularly visit mauna kea, hawaii to use NASA's infrared telescope facility (IRTF). they created this parody of the song "hotel california" ... most likely while they were stuck killing time during a night of bad weather. they successfully capture the joy and frustrations of observing anywhere!


observing can be incredibly fun, but it's also challenging when your brain cant concentrate or think properly due to the lack of oxygen at high altitude. when things go wrong, computers break down or your data looks funky, it can get a little chaotic trying to figure out what the problem is! an additional challenge is that absolutely nothing is "standard" about operating any telescope anywhere! they are all unique beasts that get tweaked and adjusted over time so that they work! when you use one many times you get used to its methods and particular quirks, but of course these things change over time.

remember that this all assumes the weather is good enough to open the dome and observe the sky! when the roads are so bad, you cant even drive to the 14,000ft summit of mauna kea, you relax at hale pohaku where the dorm rooms are, at 9000ft. in the video they show some footage of an available time killer... the dart board! there's also a ping pong table and a good-as-can-be-expected pool table! they also highlight some other familiar scenes that many astronomers visit during their brief time off the mountain!

most observatories have a collection of games or things to entertain astronomers during bouts of bad weather.... there is the option to work uninterrupted thru the night, which sometimes is very nice... but i find that my brain shuts off after 2 am and i can no longer concentrate. so i get to know the astronomers using the other telescopes, drink a beer, play cards, read a book... it can be dangerous to try to solve an old puzzle sitting around because inevitably pieces have been lost over the years! observing is much more fun when the skies are clear!

results are coming in...

as job application deadlines continue to come and go, i sit patiently waiting for responses while finishing papers and writing my dissertation.

yesterday i received my first job offer. yippee!
this morning i received my first rejection letter. dud.

i'm still sending out applications, but i think i found a great job for which i'm definitely qualified ;) .... or not.

new horizons on jupiter and io

NASA recently shared with us this beautiful image taken by the pluto-bound new horizons spacecraft. the spacecraft flew by jupiter on Feb. 28, 2007, in order to use the large gas giant's gravitational field as a cosmic slingshot to the outskirts of our solar system. taking advantage of the closeness, folks at NASA spent time taking several images of of jupiter and its moons with the cameras on-board new horizons. below is a composite image of jupiter and the active moon, io.


the image feels so calm, and quiet, yet jupiters surface is completely covered in raging storms! the larger sphere of jupiter shows the complex layering of the clouds that cover the planets surface in horizontal bands. the big blue circle shows the biggest single storm on jupiters surface, more commonly known as the "great red spot." the worst hurricanes on earth last a couple weeks as they travel across the surface.... imagine that jupiters great storm has lasted hundreds of years!! different filters collect light of different wavelengths, which are shaded different colors in the picture in order to distinguish the physical representations on the surface of the planets. in this image, the red represents the deeper clouds, while the blue shows the upper layers.

the smaller orb in the image is jupiter's moon, io. io orbits closer to jupiter than our moon is to us and as a result, its the most volcanically active object in the entire solar system. the image of io was taken on March 1st 2007 and was created to represent the "true colors" of the moon as we would see them with our eyes. at the top of the moon, where the dark night persists, you can see the sun illuminating the blue tip a huge plume of smoke curving up from the 200-mile-high eruption rising above the volcano Tvashtar!! the red dot just below shows the flowing lava glowing in the darkness! new horizons detected at least 36 actively flowing volcanoes on io, glowing in the infrared.

DIY eggstractor

heres a clever mechanism to cleanly extract a hard boiled egg from it's shell! very nice.



DIY: Eggstractor - video powered by Metacafe
based on this hands-on demonstration...



Peeling Eggs - video powered by Metacafe

link

ugly christmas sweater contest winner

happy holidays, from the girl with the biggest... amount of courage... bliss. amazingly creative and hilarious!



it took me a while to notice her cute santa hat! hahaha!

new couch? naw...

inspired by his own comic....


... Randall Munroe of xkcd created his own ball pit!

"I was thinking of getting a couch or something for my room, somewhere for guests to lounge around. Fuck new couches. I now have a ball pit in my room."




pure awesome fun!

read about the details and the best way to create your own ball pit playground: here.

shrinking again, comet holmes

comet holmes is no longer the biggest thing in our solar system. the diffuse halo has shrunk back down and now spans half a degree in the sky, or about the same size as the full moon. take advantage of the currently moonless early evening sky to try to spot comet holmes.


the use of binoculars will greatly aid your ability to see comet holmes. here's an old finding chart in order for you to see the whole sky view, followed by a detailed views of how the comet is moving around the sky inside the constellation, perseus, for the next several months.




gary kronk shares the history of comet holmes, here, including some great photos of the burst stages since the initial outburst in late october.