There's a webcam orbiting Mars!

The European Space Agency has a probe orbiting Mars called The Mars Express. It's job is to:

• image the entire surface at high resolution (10 metres/pixel) and selected areas at super resolution (2 metres/pixel);
• produce a map of the mineral composition of the surface at 100 metre resolution;
• map the composition of the atmosphere and determine its global circulation;
• determine the structure of the sub-surface to a depth of a few kilometres;
• determine the effect of the atmosphere on the surface;
• determine the interaction of the atmosphere with the solar wind.

Then there is this camera that was on board to watch the deployment of a lander. That was it's sole purpose. Thing is, it still works. The science team has little or no use for it. But it's still taking pictures and the ESA releases sets of these every few days. But they are raw pictures. Several amateurs, like myself, take these images and process them to bring out the detail. Like I did here.

Anyway, here's the link to my images on the ESA website.

Near Earth Asteroid 2010 AL30

On January 13, 2010 an 'object' whizzed past Earth just 1/3 the distance to the moon. It turned out to be a small asteroid about 10 meters across. Had it hit Earth, it would have likely burned up very brightly in the atmosphere.

The night before closest approach I was able to image it. I put together several dozen 5 second exposures to make this movie. It comes in from the left side of the field near the center moving right. Actual time it took to travel through the frame was about 4 minutes. It's hard to see, because it was the size of a house 80,000 miles away!

2012: The end of the world?

No. Please spread the word. http://www.2012hoax.org/

Cosmic Spherules

It's been a decent meteor season this year. The Persieds were actually pretty good on the night of the 12th rather than the 11th. The Leonids were disappointing after all the predictions of a minor storm. I even set up a radio observing post to record radio 'pings' from nearby meteors for the Leonids but recorded none. The next shower is the Geminids in mid December. I'll be setting up the radio again, but this time with a more sensitive receiver.
Meanwhile, I heard that you can collect micrometeorites from your roof. Just put some strong magnets in your rain gutter and after a good rain, clean the magnets and look at the dust under a microscope. Well it hadn't rained all summer and there was a good rain forecast, so I put some small neodymium magnets in the rain gutter. The next morning, I pulled them off the roof and dried them in a dish on a hot plate. I had bought a usb microscope at a yard sale a couple years ago that works quite well. I spread the dust from the magnets on a slide and placed it under the microscope and there they were! Micrometeorites or, as scientists call them, "Cosmic Spherules".

The picture above is from that dust that was washed off my roof magnified 200x. Click on it to make it bigger.

New Observatory Code!

I'm still at war with the mice/rats and I doubt I will ever have complete control. But thus is life on planet Earth.
But the good news is.......I got my observatory code from the Minor Planet Center!! I'm now G55. But it wasn't as easy as I'd thought it would be. They have very strict rules about formatting observation reports, but it was the actual astrometry that was the most difficult. I'm still trying to sort out why some of my measurememnts are still off. But this is exactly why I so love astronomy; there is always something to learn; a challenge to conquer. And I did.

New Observing Season Begins...

Well, it's been a long hot summer. In these parts, it's in the hundreds most days and stays light (and hot) until after 9pm, and I have to be at work early, so their is very litte astronomy for me. The obervatory is mostly closed for the summer.

With the cooler weather and longer nights, it was time to open up and dust off the equipment. Much to my dismay, I find just about every level surface in the observatory liberally sprinkled with mouse droppings. I keep no food in there and there doesn't seem like much for them to get into, but it somehow became thier playground. I had seen mice running along my backyard fences and even along the roof rails of my observatory, but I had no idea they were having parties every night.

I had a few mouse traps left from when I rid my pantry of mice. It worked well in just a few days. I took the traps and put peanut butter on them, as I did with the mice in the pantry, and put them around my observatory. The next day I would find the ones I'd set on the roof rails sprung and laying on the ground with the peanut butter cleaned off, but the ones I set inside my observatory were untouched. There were however more droppings.

So last night, I set all the traps on the roof rails and waited about 50 feet away in a lawn chair for twilight. Sure enough, just as it started getting dark, here comes a rather large mouse along one roof rail. He sniffed the trap a few times and then as I watched he sprung the trap, which flung him head over tail through the air at least 8 feet. This was no ordinary mouse. This was a rat. I reset the trap and with minutes another one was there. Again it sprung the trap and got away. I did this a few more times as it got darker. Then, to my amazement I saw one running upsidedown under a roof rail to avoid the traps! What is this, Mouse Hunt?

The war has begun and I will win.