I really really REALLY wish I had a camera I could clamp onto a good telephoto lens AND tripod, or else a camera that fit my ancient backyard scope.

Holding a point-and-shoot camera against the scope's eyepiece and trying not to breathe yielded these:

(Contrast boosted on most of them to try and make it more visible)


It seemed awfully dim after the first bright snap (top left).

Then I looked at the nearly full moon, and even it seemed awfully dim:



What was going on? Oh, right. Clouds. This is what I saw when I stopped trying to leave the shutter open long enough to collect a little light:



I'll have to try Saturn again on another night. Still can't expect much without the right equipment, but it's at a really good angle right now to catch the sun on the rings.

So I went out to the Great Park tonight to look for Comet PanStarrs, after failing last night because of fog on the ocean. I even got a new app, SkySafari, which lets you look up comets and everything else (Comet C/2011 L4 = Panstarrs)!, and then it draws a green arrow pointing to whatever the heck you're trying to find. IT'S OVER THERE, YOU TWIT!

Pannstars is tricky. It should be naked-eye by now, but it's hanging so close to the sun that there's only a very short window after the sun goes down and the sun-glare fades before Panstarrs, also, sets.

I had nearly given up when, suddenly, through the horizon haze, I spotted it (or so I thought) with binocs. YES! YES! THERE IT WAS! Fuzzy little ball with faintish wisp going up.

Except that after writing my "I saw Comet Panstarrs!" post, I found this photo taken five days ago, and now realize that I accidentally a different comet. What I saw looked more like "Lemmon" in this picture: the distinct snowball on the end.


By Juri Beletsky, Observatorio de Las Campanas, Chile [CC-BY-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons

Nevertheless, comet Panstarrs SHOULD be visible to the naked eye this week -- barely -- and quite visible with binoculars.

( How to find comet PANSTARRS (visible March 10-20 or so) )

I will be trying again all week. There's an astronomy club demo at the Great Park on Friday with big telescopes, but the lines are always looooong. So, we'll see.

I sure hope comet ISON survives its close encounter with the sun later this year and puts on a show for us in November. If it doesn't melt away completely during its swing around the sun, it should be easy to see with the naked eye. Unfortunately, it's cutting the turn really fine -- only 100,000 miles above the sun's surface! -- so it could get vaporized. But if it survives, it may be the brightest comet since the 1600s.

Houston, we do NOT have a problem with this... 



It's really too bad that NASA only recently acquired some social media savvy employees to do their PR. I suspect that we'd have had a lot more public awareness of past NASA missions, particularly the wonders of the shuttle program, if they'd been doing things like this and MarsCuriosity's "GALE CRATER, I AM IN YOU!" Twitter channel all along. 

...so slowly I was able to take 2 hour train and subway up to catch it.
https://mobile.twitter.com/Greekgeek/status/257538607127080961/photo/1

It'll come right next to me once it makes the last turn.

ETA:

I sat down and sketched it after it pulled up behind the hangar. Ipad doodle warning:

http://twitter.com/Greekgeek/status/257602909653569536/photo/1

 I've seen a launch live. Never saw a landing live, but I'm heading up to the top of the Disneyland parking structure tomorrow to watch piggyback shuttle fly by. I've always thought it looked very cute that way.
ETA: More thinky thoughts written at midnight after watching "NASA's When We Left Earth" Ep. 5 and 6 on Netflix...

I read that Neil Armstrong's family asked us to go out and "wink at the moon" and think of him, if we wanted to honor him.

So I lugged out my wee spotter scope and point-and-shoot camera for the first time, to see if I could photograph the moon. This was my best attempt (click for full-sized):




There's your rabbit doing the backflip, Inle.

I'd written a general-public article about a week ago explaining the Mars Curiosity mission: what it's there for, why it's cool, and why I was so excited about this one.
I started to update that page for tonight, er, last night's landing. Then I decided...what the heck, why not just LIVEBLOG THE LANDING!

And then I found out that JPL had this 3D visualizer, like a video game, streaming live data of where the spacecraft was, what she was doing, superimposed with computer graphics to let us "see" what was happening while it was happening, based on the telemetry Curiosity was sending back.

Here's a screencap from the visualizer that I grabbed on the way down. Click to read my notes and see the first photos of Curiosity on the surface of Mars:

August 5, 2012, 10:21PM PST. Six days. Curiosity Website here. 

Am I the only one on tenterhooks about this insane, utterly THIS... IS.... NASAAAAAAAA.... attempt to drop a car-sized rover onto the Martian surface?
 

 
Trying to land heavy things on Mars is HARD. Yes, even harder than the Moon. 

And to think I teased my Dad for the airbag bouncy-bouncy-bouncy-bouncy-bouncy deployment of the little Pathfinder rover (the size of a skateboard, so it didn't take so much effort to slow it down, just big airbags and a lot of bounces). He worked on the airbag portion of that project. It was silly, but at least it wasn't something that appears to have been designed by the Mythbusters on an all-night bender. 

ETA: Curiosity Rover has its own Twitter Channel. The robot is answering questions about itself. Good luck, big guy!

ETA: Curiosity hands out snark over NBC Olympic coverage: 

@UncleMurf @nbcolympics Only a 14 min delay from Mars! It can't be helped; it's the one-way light speed time for signal to reach Earth.

Wow. This story is several years old now and has been taken down from the Waco Tribune where it was posted, but thanks to the Wayback Machine...

Fundamentalists freak out and and leave the room in protest when Bill Nye says the moon receives its light from the sun.

It's getting mighty stupid out there, folks!