Catching the Sky

Check out this episode of "The Simpsons," which I just saw last week. I love this show.

Here are two pictures I took during my honeymoon last August. This is Meteor Crater, also known as Barringer Crater -- a very large hole in the ground in eastern Arizona. It's 4,150 feet wide and 570 feet deep. Dess and I stood near the rim with the evening summer winds blowing very hard at us -- but not quite hard enough to throw us in. The picture below was taken the next morning. The Crater shows up quite nicely on Google Earth, especially if you tilt the view; then you can actually make out a depression in the earth. The surrounding rim, which rises 150 feet, is noticeable. Look for it about 20 miles west of Winslow, AZ (the coordinates are 35 degrees, 1 minute, 37 seconds North, and 111 degrees, 1 minute, 22 seconds West). An image taken from the web: On the web there's an estimate that the meteor was 150 feet across (compared to the one that is proposed to have caused the extinction of the dinosaurs, at perhaps 10 miles across). It weighed roughly 300,000 tons, and was tr...

Here are my two photos from the post below, as nearly as I could reproduce them on Google Earth. I set the altitude in each case for nearly 30,000 feet, to match the plane's height, and then adjusted the tilt in order to view the ground at a slant. Is it just me, or does Google Earth seem to stretch the earth's surface vertically in their images, especially in this second photo? I can get a Google image that looks closer to the photo I took, but only by flying the plane at 40,000 feet and at other heights that cannot be right. How photo-realistic is Google's imagery?

Speaking of Google Earth, this is a very similar page at which you can zoom in on the surface of the Moon. The highest zoom reveals a surprise: http://moon.google.com/

I sometimes call this photo "Earth," and I keep it in my astronomy collection. I snapped it a year ago, on the last day of my honeymoon in the Southwest. Dess and I were on a plane headed back to New York, and flying over many places we had just visited, so it was possible to recognize a few things from that far up. The way I remember it, I recognized the Grand Canyon and got the camera out, a little late; by the time I took the photo above, I did not recognize the terrain I was seeing outside the window and I feared that we'd left the Canyon behind; but I still regarded my photo as showing the easternmost reaches of the Canyon. I just figured that such a winding river must be the Colorado. I was almost right about that. But the photo does not actually show any part of the Grand Canyon. I know because I found photos of the very same terrain on Google Earth this past week. Don't read any further if you're into the challenge and you want to try to find it yourself....

I took this photo earlier this evening: You can see Venus here, the white dot to the left of the Tribute in Light.

I was in touch with Phil Plait, aka The Bad Astronomer , about my photos of the Venus-Moon-Jupiter conjunction. His sky in California has been clouded over but he did say that there were some other nice photos of the conjunction at a blog in Australia called Two Cents, by Beche-La-Mer. Her photos include one bright body that did not appear in mine (the star Spica), and they show the Moon almost touching Venus: Australia turned toward the conjunction half a day after New York was facing it, so Beche saw a Moon that had had about 12 to 14 extra hours to move across the sky. Beche left a comment on my first post and noted how interesting it was to see the perspective from the other side of the planet. I agree, it's actually quite engrossing when you think about it. Beche's photos have Venus, Jupiter and the Moon in a nearly vertical line while my photos have them close to horizontal. I've been using the sky charts provided by SkyView Cafe and AstroViewer to learn a little m...

From left to right are the Moon, Venus, and Jupiter, at 8:06 pm tonight, forming as straight a line as one could hope for. However they were not so close as last night , when all three bodies fit into a circle only 5 degrees apart; tonight about 8 degrees separated the Moon and Venus, and about 6 degrees lay between Venus and Jupiter. Last night all three could be seen at once, though barely, in the 9x63 binoculars; tonight I could not see any two of them in the aperture. This shot at 8:27 is the only one I got which shows off the Tribute in Light, which began tonight -- look just to the right of Venus. Jupiter is nearly invisible and about to sink, as it did last night, behind the brilliantly lit spiral top of the Woolworth Building. It did so at 8:28, re-emerged at the other side of the spire two minutes later, and sank for good at 8:32. It hit the Woolworth three minutes earlier than last night, and in a slightly lower spot on the spire. At 8:33 Venus disappeared behind the Chase Ma...

Photos do not capture the sky, or the wonder that it can induce. This is a new blog, and that's the first thing I wanted to say. It may bear repeating later on. I took the photo above a few hours ago, from the roof of the three-story apartment building where I live with my wife Dess. Three bodies are setting over the Manhattan skyline as seen from Greenpoint, Brooklyn: Venus on the left, Jupiter on the right, and the moon in between. Venus is currently 102 million miles from the earth, and it's about the size of our own planet. The sun, which always sits around 93 million miles from earth, is to the lower right, having set below the horizon 48 minutes before I snapped the photo. Jupiter, a planet with a diameter a dozen times greater than that of Venus, is neverthless more faint due to its great distance from earth, currently 580 million miles. At this time it is sitting on the other side of the sun from us. Our moon, the smallest of all these objects but by far the brightest, ...