Fremont Peak Observatory

Look toward Lyra as the constellation rises in the northeast after 11pm. Peak is tonight through the 26th. Some spectacular historical shows of up to 100 per hour. #lyrids

spring spring spring

When the jet contrails are short, we have dry air and great observing conditions. We have the super Worm Moon coming up around 7:44 PST and it looks like a great night for some basic star gazing. The moon is very bright later, but try for the Orion Nebula to the south about 25 deg. alt. with field binoculars before the moon saturates the dark sky, pretty difficult, but maybe... Orion and Mars will be in the western sky until about 5 hours after sunset.

Event Horizon telescope images M87 black hole magnetic field in a polarized image.. https://www.cnn.com//black-hole-magnetic-field-/index.html

Research vessels in my bathtub experienced waves as high as 2, just kidding, but here are the tensor and focal plane solutions for the event. Strike-slip shearing force was about 1500 trillion ft-lbf NW-SE along the main trace of the San Andreas 5mi below Aromas, Ca. https://earthquake.usgs.gov//ev/nc73512355/focal-mechanism... https://earthquake.usgs.gov//even/nc73512355/moment-tensor

Help keep our county dark and our pollinators happy. Please adopt dark sky friendly lighting and replace that old mercury vapor light. ;o) - yellower light frequencies - light bulb up inside the shade... - low number of fixtures - shut off early See more

Jupiter-Saturn-Mercury triple conjunction Look from a clear view to the southwest at 5pm tomorrow evening to see the three planets trailing the sunset by an hour.

The Quadrantids meteor shower peaks during early January, visible throughout the pre-dawn sky, radiant is in the Bootes constellation. Here’s the NASA page and the CAMS model: https://solarsystem.nasa.gov//meteor/quadrantids/in-depth/... https://www.meteorshowers.org/view/Quadrantids

Happy New Year! The station orbits the Earth at 17,500 miles per hour (28,000 kilometers per hour) enabling the crew to see 16 sunrises and sunsets each day.

some conjunctivitis, let’s call the right photo impressionism, that’s it... Jupiter is 500 million miles from the Sun, Saturn is out at a billion miles. With about the same disk size if we include Saturn’s rings, we can feel the scale of the solar system from this difference in luminosity. If light falls off by 1/r2, then at 2r, we have 1/4r2, and Saturn should be 1/4 as bright as Jupiter. I’ll buy that.... With restrictions, our facility is closed and so these were taken offsite with our smaller telescope. Other group photos to come.

SpaceX Launch T-1:37 https://youtu.be/bnChQbxLkkI

Events this Week Get out the ski gear... The Northern Taurid Halloween fireballs peak this week on the 10th to the 12th between midnight and early hours. Big beautiful fireballs just before the next rains.... also Mercury is almost at greatest western elongation (when a line drawn from Earth westward toward Mercury is 90 deg to the sun at Mercury) and visible from our central coast location trailing Venus just before sunrise at 6:45a. In the image below, we can see how Venus and Mercury rise before the Sun as Earth rotates to the east.

Note the two distinct populations of stars, yellow and blue, the blue stars are known as blue stragglers, possibly resulting from interactions between two or more stars in close proximity, but there are several explanations. See the Wikipedia article for more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_straggler -

Beyond Jupiter at Saturn and Uranus. I’ve seen Neptune’s moon Triton through our 30 telescope, but that’s our limit for the Planets on an average viewing night. Again, in this series I’m just holding my little point and shoot camera up the the 2 32mm (Saturn) and 16mm (Uranus) eyepieces at full camera telephoto, and focusing the telescope.

The Orionids are peaking! This is a great meteor shower because it's visible from anywhere on Earth. While the meteors are extremely fast and on the faint side, many of them leave persistent trains that last for a few seconds after the meteor is gone. Let us know if you catch any!

Our next virtual event is Tuesday Oct 20th at 4pm. Other Worlds: How we will study them - What we hope to find. Planets around other stars are not just the do...main of science fiction anymore. Over the past quarter century astronomers have gone from no knowledge of planets around other stars to being able to say how common or rare they are (spoiler: they’re common). Are any of these planets habitable? To learn this we need to develop improved telescopes and instrumentation. I will describe how a specialized technique called adaptive optics will enable us to study planets and speculate what we might find. Zoom link: https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/98932317498 See more

Why don’t I get a professional setup? Because I like to demonstrate successes and frustrations of using basic equipment for our average visitor. The 30 telescope has tremendous light gathering power, so if you bring a camera or mobile phone up, the brightness saturates the CCD. Here is Jupiter through a 2 polarizer shut down about half way. Hard to see the bands, but the moons are visible. It’s hard to capture both, need HDR setting on, will play with that more later.

The new south sill installed and finished, new room paint

Not a Hubble event, but just to demonstrate a good try with a point and shoot camera through our 30 telescope, here’s Mars in the sky unaided at full telephoto and through the 16mm eyepiece. (a couple weeks ago) Nice deserts, better than last year.

blue sky sunset after the first work day in awhile

West coast smoke drawn into Pacific system, comes back as Godzilla, attacks Portland, San Francisco, and LA https://twitter.com/afreedma/status/1304465761625350146?s=21

My favorite binary star Alberio, the head of the constellation Cygnus ‘the Swan’, a yellow-blue pair photographed through the 30 telescope newtonian focus with my point and shoot camera. In focus, and de-focused to enhance the spectral contrast.

Many colourful stars are packed close together in this Picture of the Week featuring the globular cluster NGC 1805, taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope.... This tight grouping of thousands of stars is located near the edge of the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of our own Milky Way. The stars orbit closely to one another, like bees swarming around a hive. In the dense centre of one of these clusters, stars are 100 to 1000 times closer together than the nearest stars are to our Sun, making planetary systems around them unlikely. Image credit: ESA - European Space Agency / Hubble Space Telescope / NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration , J. Kalirai http://orlo.uk/vgLJA

Jupiter transiting this time, again thanks to Ryan Clark for his pretty good footage just before this week of storms and fires.

Transit of Saturn across the eyepiece of one member’s fixed 16 reflector. The planet moves along with the Earth’s rotation. (frame rate sped up, video from Monterey courtesy of Ryan Clark)

Rich in bright meteors and fireballs, the Perseids meteor shower is one of the best of the year and it peaks on Aug. 11-12. Here are tips on how to watch it: https://go.nasa.gov/2XEcuSC : NASA/Bill Ingalls

under the fog hat

the shutter rolls in, taming local city lights.. hope for our long term viability as an observatory holds

A last look at NEOWISE fading behind our recent fire smoke with a 14 mpx point and shoot