Shine on, Shine on Harvey Bloom, up in the sky

[austin_dern]

I've always loved astronomy and space. What I've never been is good at actually observing things in the sky. Maybe it's a lack of adequate attention on my part; the best observing is usually in the most miserably cold part of the year. Maybe it's just bad luck. Maybe it's just my inability to keep references on hand so I know where to look for what I want to see. I'm fairly sure I've seen Halley's Comet with my bare eye, but I'm not really sure and I'm not double-checking because I don't want to know that I'm wrong.

But this evening my mother rushed in the house, yelling for everyone to go out back, because the International Space Station and the Space Shuttle would be visible to the northwest until 7:02. She wasn't exactly sure which way was northwest; I had a good idea the rough idea of North but also know, it's a big sky, and you can miss ... uhm ... well, there was this quite bright thing in the northwest and trucking toward the zenith rather speedily. Maybe ... well ... perhaps it was. At the least we could watch and suppose we were right. It was moving nicely steadily, and though it was fast my mother was sure it'd be visible until past 7:02.

Well, I pointed out, when it falls into the Earth's shadow it'll turn nearly invisible quite rapidly. And I realized I shouldn't have said that since if the object got across the sky without dimming I'd have proven we missed the space station. When would it get into the shadow? It'd have to be right about when it reached the zenith, right? ... and as the object got lost in the branches of a tree, and my father got back from inside with his iPod to try taking pictures, my mother lost the suddenly dim object. It had to be something in the sky, moving into the shadow of the Earth. We could follow the dimmed object the rest of its way, to the point nearby houses obstructed it, but ...

Well, there's the important thing. Beyond any reasonable doubt I saw the International Space Station today, as it passed over my house.

Trivia: Joseph-Louis Lagrange, in Marseilles, observed the moon of Venus on the 10th, 11, and 12th of February 1761, in enough detail he announced the plane of its orbit was vertical to the ecliptic. Source: Watchers Of The Skies: An Informal History of Astronomy From Babylon To The Space Age, Willy Ley.

Currently Reading: Zoo City, Lauren Beukes. This is an interesting one. chefmongoose, one of the supporting cast has a mongoose familiar, though the familiar doesn't do very much beyond chuffling and demanding to be let out.

Comments

[notasquirrel.livejournal.com]

*jealouschitter* luckee.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

In this case, sure. But think of all the things in the sky I didn't see, or that I'm not really sure I saw.

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

Let out of what? (o_O)

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Oh, just the apartment. It wasn't anything sinister. It just wanted to be Out, and then a little later, In. There's sinister stuff in the book but not in this particular.

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

Well it has to patrol the garden for snakes of course. Makes sense.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Yeah; they may be magic and tied to their humans, but they're not incomprehensible.

[lexomatic.livejournal.com]

Spotting the ISS? Use something like NASA's SkyWatch applet (http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/realdata/sightings/), which can compute passes (may be during the day) and sightings from a given ZIP code for the next two weeks. With its full set of solar panels and radiators, it should be pretty dang bright now. Brighter than an "Iridium flare," though? I don't know.

::: I'm fairly sure I've seen Halley's Comet with my bare eye ...

This was last possible in 1986, y'know -- just checking. So it might be difficult at this late date (T+24 years) to verify the where/when/which-way of your position and attitude. There have been other naked-eye comets since.

What you should be watching for are auroras, now that Sol's entering solar maximum and is showing a propensity for X-class flares. Under those conditions, aurora excitation can extend as far south as NYC (although not necessarily in NYC). How dark is your local sky?

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

It was, indeed, in 1986 when I'm pretty sure I saw Halley's Comet. At least I was looking in roughly the direction the newspaper said at about the time it said and it looked like a non-typical star, but would it really have killed NASA to have paid for one of those horizon-to-zenith brilliant streaky comets that threaten to poison the world with its extraterrestrial cyanide and viruses? I've seen several others --- Hale-Bopp for sure --- but there really wasn't much cross-checking back then. I remember (well, I think I remember) what I saw, though.

I've got a bad record for seeing auroras too. Some of this is utter bad luck; some of it was spending half a decade on the equator when the northern hemisphere was enjoying a fruitful season. Although there was one freak storm in which the aurora was visible in Singapore, on a day when I happened to be back in the United States.

I'm in central New Jersey, so my night sky is of the darkness quality that amateur astronomers refer to as ``sadly weeping for the invisibility of all objects dimmer than the full moon''. Well, it's not quite that bad, but it's not upstate-New-York type `we're actually whole miles from a major light source or city' dark.

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

Dad took us to a dark place out in the country -- "Peach Mountain," where there is an observatory, though we weren't in the observatory, just on the grounds of it -- to try to look at Halley's Comet. Lots of other people were there. Dad kept trying to tell me where to look and finally I decided I'd seen it, or at least said I'd seen it so we could go home. The thing I finally decided was probably it was just a sort of fuzzy star. So maybe that was it, maybe not.

Looking at a list of Great Comets on Wikipedia, it looks like the only two I would have been able to observe were Hyakutake and Hale-Bopp. But I don't think I saw Hyakutake. I don't know why not, but it says it was only really visible for a few days, and in late March in Indiana, it's very probable that it was overcast the entire time. Hale-Bopp I remember well. It would have been difficult to avoid seeing it. I remember it being a familiar sight in the night sky for quite some time when I was in my first year of grad school.

My father has a story about a time when he was on a road trip and pulled over to relieve himself on the side of the road, looked up at the night sky, and saw a huge comet that he hadn't heard anything about. He seemed to have eventually come to remember it as having been Kohoutek, but given that I think the story takes place before he got married and the fact that Kahoutek became visible after he got married, he must be mistaken. Maybe he is confusing the later hoopla over Kahoutek with his sighting. Based on the list I'm looking at, the mysterious comet that took my father by surprise may have been Comet West.

I've seen the northern lights twice, once from the Leelanau peninsula (the "little finger" of Michigan) and once from Lansing. It looked quite different both times. The first time, up north, we were picnicking on some land that my parents used to own (they bought it from a farmer who sold off some of the land he wasn't using), on a hill from which Lake Michigan could be seen on the horizon. There were no colors, only white, although the sunset had been particularly vivid that night, in a strange way. After the twilight faded, white flickering shapes appeared in the sky, like a flickering fire. They seemed to blink on and off, and had discrete edges. It was very eerie. The time I saw them in Lansing, it looked more like sheets of light covering the sky.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

That sort of indistinct, fuzzy star is just what I remember from Halley's Comet, so at the least our views of it are compatible. I haven't gone looking too closely at pictures of what it was really like as there's no sense finding that my memory is utterly incompatible with what was possible to see then.

My parents never took me on expeditions to really dark places, partly because I'm really not all that fond of the remote places that get really dark (and from New Jersey you have to go really remote to get to that darkness, with Pennsylvania probably being about the nearest it is on-hand). Add to that my natural non-camper nature and we have the moderately amusing result that for all my astronomy interest I've really never seen a very good night sky.

Hyakutake and Hale-Bopp I know I've seen, but then there's no way we couldn't have seen those. They did very well as comets.

The Northern Lights, I'm sure, someday I'll see in person. They're probably pretty stunning when they're not bound by a small television set's frame and being spoken over by Michio Kaiku.

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

There is one of our differences. I love dark places, and I like camping if it's not too rough. I don't know if you can really have experienced the feeling of the sublime unless you have lain on your back looking up at a clear and truly dark night sky. My father once said that when you see a properly dark night sky "it looks three dimensional." I don't think that can be taken literally but rather as a poetic attempt to express how it is different from viewing the sky that one normally sees if one lives in a city.

(And I apologize to Kohoutek for spelling his name and his comet wrong twice up there, though at least I got it right once.)

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I haven't had that experience, no, but I have had several which I thought of as sublime. One of them I think I've talked about with you, actually, the strange feeling of the fall of night --- as in, seclusion even in public --- at the Night Safari in Singapore, after the shows had ended and most of the crowds had left. Between the city haze and the muggy atmosphere there wasn't anything faint to see in the sky, but the traces of light filled volume instead.