Catching the Sky

Above you can see the view that I had from my roof at 6 a.m. yesterday morning. Venus, when sitting alone in a clear sky, is just entrancing, no doubt about it. And I'm also sure that photographs don't get the magic across. Photos are just rectangles, really. There is no substitute for actually going out and standing, sitting, or lying down beneath an all-encompassing sky. I've been doing too little of that in recent months, which is why I'm making a big deal of going out yesterday. And it was unbelievably cold, because of the wind. The highs in New York these days are just below freezing, but it's the wind that gets you. I blocked the wind by getting behind a chimney on the roof. I sat down, closed my hood, put away my gloved hands and waited another half hour for sunrise. My hope was to see the crescent moon, just about a day and a half away from new -- and no luck. Too many clouds on the horizon. I noticed that Jupiter, in the binoculars, was making a triangle wi...

I don't usually repeat on my blog the posts I make elsewhere on the web. But earlier today I left the following comment at Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy site, responding to an analogy he was making -- and the comment I left there just seems to touch on everything that I tend to write about, so I'm pasting it here. _________________ I just want to point out some problems I see with Phil's analogy. "Those organisms that can handle the input from their environment survive, while those that cannot deal with it fail. Those that can adapt, even marginally, to outside influence are able to better cope with whatever comes next..... "A scientist who is too stiff, too resistant to change, will find themselves extinct if the evidence from observation becomes overwhelmingly against them. "Evolution is a fact, both in nature and in science. If more people realized this simple truth, and the beauty inherent in it, then a lot of nonsense would become extinct as well....

Time to laugh a little. The googolplex is a famous number so large that it cannot be written out in a conventional manner. The number of digits in a googolplex exceeds the space available to put them in, even if you printed each digit at the size of an atom and used all the space in the known universe. A googolplex is unimaginably larger than a googol, which can be written out as a 1 followed by a hundred zeroes, or 10 to the power of 100. Let me write that out (with some help from cutting and pasting): 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. Another way to write it out is as 10 to the power of 100, which is 10 multiplied by itself in a string that includes a hundred instances of "10". 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x ...

Our friend, Kate Magram, of Kirkos fame, took these shots of the moon last November 20, 2005, just as it was rising. This was her first time taking any astrophotos, and she used a unique camera -- her cell phone. The other instrument was my telescope, which I lugged over to her roof that night -- the same night that Mars and Venus appeared at the potluck. A memorable astronomy session.

Well, we broke the record. New York got nearly 27 inches of snow by the time the blizzard ended several hours ago. That's half an inch more than the previous record in 1947 -- and the greatest snowfall in this city since these kinds of measurements began. Ten years ago we got a storm that was called the Blizzard of the Century , and that was just above 20 inches. It's been a weekend of shoveling snow and reading books. I didn't travel far, but I got a few photos.

We're losing our sky here in this part of Brooklyn. Large buildings are going up everywhere in Greenpoint and in neighboring Williamsburg. Look at this picture of two buildings under construction right in front of our kitchen windows: That's directly west -- where I've taken lots of photos of sunsets, new moons, and conjunctions. I don't really know how much my astronomy will be effected by this. Much depends on how high these twins go. But it does stick in the craw. This makes me want to go back to the Southwest -- where Dess and I took our honeymoon -- more than ever. I remember a lot of flat horizons there. Already there's only so much I can do with the telescope here. I can climb up the fire escape to the roof with a camera, but not with anything heavy like a telescope. Except on occasional trips to friends' houses, the scope has to stay on our fire escape, where I sometimes get some nice photos -- but always photos of the same hemisphere of the sky,...

Got some fine shots of the moon at around 8 p.m. last night. The moon was 5 1/2 days old, and almost 37% illuminated. Below you can see a close-up near the middle of the terminator. The left-most prominent crater, with a very noticeable mountain in its center, is Theophilus. From Virtual Moon Atlas : Type: Crater Geological period: Eratosthenian (From -3.2 billions years to -1.1 billions years) Dimension: 104x104Km / 61x61Mi Height: 4400m / 13300ft Height/Wide ratio: 0.044 Description: Circular formation forming a remarkable trio with Cyrillus and Catharina. Tormented and steep slopes overhanging Sinus Asperitatis from 1200m and supporting Cyrillus to the South-East Theophilus F to the West and Mädler to the East. Very high walls with terraces overlapped by Theophilus B to the North-West. Flat floor. Imposing central mountain 1 400 m high with 4 summits. Line of crests hills and craterlets. Interest: Exceptional formation Observation period: 5 days after New Moon or 4 days after Full ...

Just plugging myself a little here. The March 2006 issue of Sky & Telescope , on newstands since February 1st, contains a photo from my opening blog post back in September. The author, Fred Schaaf, mentions my observations, including the flashing of Venus. The article is not available on the website, but the title is "Return of the Venus Green Flashes -- Part 2" (p. 72). Part 1 was in February's issue. My thanks to Fred and to the magazine.