Mars is approaching opposition meaning it is in the opposite side of the sky from the sun and the closest it will be to Earth this year. It's not a very good opposition this time due to Mars being in an elliptical orbit.

This was my first attempt with my 8" telescope. I was hoping for more detail, but it turned out I was looking at a fairly 'blank' side of Mars. You can easily see the polar cap made up of mostly frozen carbon dioxide.


UPDATE:
We had another clear night (Feb 11, 2010)) and I was able to get a shot in before yet more high clouds rolled in. This time it was a little underexposed and if I'd had more time would have taken some spectacular images. But this was the best I could manage this time.





Compare it to the CalSky model of what it should have looked like.

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.