Catching the Sky

Very exciting news tonight. I caught sight of the new moon this evening when it was only 19 hours and 19 minutes old. This is beyond what I had ever expected to see from New York, and it completely shattered my old personal record of 26 hours and 41 minutes, from June 7, 2005 . But what I'm particularly happy about is getting a shot of this one, not just in the 9x63 binoculars, but in the telescope (thanks to our friend Kate's roof!) I watched from Brooklyn as always. The sun set at 8:17 p.m., and after waiting a little while I started sweeping the skies near the point where the sun had gone down. At 8:45 I actually saw Mercury first, and holding my binoculars at that height, I moved just slightly to the right, and saw the moon instantly. Four minutes later I took this shot through the telescope, at a magnification of about 30 (the orientation is adjusted here to a right-side-up view): SkyView Cafe has Mercury at an altitude of 4 degrees, 25 minutes at 8:45, and the moon sligh...

Because of my new night job, I rarely get on the roof anymore to do morning astronomy. So it was a delight to make the effort and get up this morning for the Moon-Venus conjunction. Click on the photos for the best views of the two bodies. I plan to go back to taking down precise notes of what I see in the sky, as I used to do before I started this blog. My astronomy journals ended when this blog began, and that can't be good. So I will have to change this blog to become more detail-oriented, or else retire it. But I do have one conjunction project to publish here -- and it's almost finished. For those still reading, I hope you'll stay tuned.

These are some pictures I took of a large fire that broke out in an abandoned 3-story warehouse along the East River at 5:30 this morning. The warehouse is the site of the old Greenpoint Terminal Market, and it collapsed around 9:30. It's one of three buildings that have caught fire. The local television news called it New York's largest fire in 10 years, including 9-11, in terms of manpower. I don't know how that can be true, but 350 firefighers were reported to be at this fire . It's 1:30 now and, although the fire is under control, I am still hearing fire engines rushing past our apartment, which is about 3/4 of a mile from the fire. I saw some EMS on the scene, but it's not known whether there were any squatters living in the warehouse. A shot from our roof, followed by photos that are self-explanatory: This is how the main warehouse looked immediately after its collapse, which I saw from about 500 feet away, corner of Franklin and Oak: In this last shot you can...

I saw A Flock of Dodos earlier today as part of the Tribeca Film Festival, and I stayed for a very brief Q&A with the filmmaker, Randy Olsen. A Harvard-trained marine ecologist, Olsen fully supports the theory of evolution, but with a twist. He endorses evolution directly, but the heart of his support seems to be expressed in criticism. He likens scientists to a flock of dodos and warns that science could go the way of the dodo if it's not communicated with greater concision, personability, and humility. It occurs to me that all three of these traits are often found in humor, or at least in varieties of humor that are not meant to ridicule. Olsen's movie is in fact concise, personable, and humble in its sense of humor. The movie gave me my first chance ever to laugh at the subject, and it's apparent that Olsen likes people and likes to laugh with them -- not at them. He asks himself in the movie whether he would want to sit down for a game of poker with some of the dr...