Catching the Sky

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...

Tonight the Moon appeared next to a naked-eye star that showed up in the camera without any binoculars or telescopes. The star was Alnath, the tip of the upper horn in Taurus the Bull. I saw Alnath with my own eyes 47 minutes after sunset and began taking some photographs. This first photo is a crop, the camera in zoom mode. Alnath, a 1.6-magnitude star, can be seen by double-clicking on the photo, just above the moon. With the camera's digital zoom:

I often wonder if there's a better way, with the basic equipment I own, to produce a photo that communicates a sense of what it's like to look through a telescope at the moon. I cannot reproduce the clarity without getting a telescope that will automatically track objects as they rise and set. When I watch the moon, it moves. I thought that the photo below, taken this past Sunday (April 9th), got across something of what it's like to watch the moon taking up room in a circular field of view: I take photos with an Olympus digital, and my constant challenge is to minimize the exposure time. Longer exposures produce blurry pictures of a moving object, and they also make the moon, which is so bright, into a large white blob. The shortest exposure I have available is the flash setting, which is fine, since it adds nothing to the brightness of the moon and only occasionally gets reflected back by the lens of the eyepiece. Often I'll use the zoom function on the camera, which ...

Ben, who reported his experience with the Pleiades occultations in the comments section of this blog, has his own blog and a detailed report here: NYC Nova Hunter: Pleiades Occultation: Celaeno Graze 1-Apr See in particular the comments section of that post for a computerized profile of a single mountain on the moon.

Spaceweather.com has gathered a gallery of very nice photos of this star/moon conjunction on this page .

Through a cloudy sky, I got a few brief glimpses tonight of the Moon passing over the stars of the Pleiades (the Seven Sisters). This is a snapshot at 7:27 pm New York time, with Alcyone, the brightest of the cluster, only 27 minutes before the moon's dark limb caught up to it and covered it. Very close to the moon, near the lower left of the lunar disk and much dimmer than Alcyone, is a star called Maia. This shot at 8:34 p.m. captures, going counterclockwise from the star closest to the Moon's limb, Merope, Electra, Taygeta and Maia. Alcyone was then behind the Moon. Finally, this shot at 8:56 captures Alcyone hanging above the Moon's bright limb like a rocket taking off from the lunar surface, just two minutes after the star reappeared on that side. Before tonight I had never seen a star at the instant that it "winked" out and got eclipsed, or watched one while it winked back into view. Tonight I did get to see one such event, through murky clouds almost dark e...