Yes, the Red Sox really did win the World Series last night, I wasn't dreaming or otherwise visiting an alternate reality.
Did a little googling (love the flexibility of English) and found that in fact refraction of light through the Earth's atmosphere does cause the moon to turn red during an eclipse. Here's a lovely explanation that tells the tale pretty completely.
While a total lunar eclipse is definitely worthy of an evening of viewing, an eclipse occurs much more frequently than tonight's other historic event...
THE RED SOX won the World Series, sweeping the St. Louis Cardinals.
Winning their first world series since 1918.
Woo hoo! Go Boston! Go Sox!
I did slip out between innings and saw the eclipse at 1/3, 2/3, 3/4, 7/8 and totality before the clouds finally obscured it, which is par for the course. Astronomical events seem to generate cloud cover. The transit of Venus earlier this year was lost in fog -- fog in Maryland.
Ah well.
Did notice that the moon was not as red as it was during the last eclipse I watched. This has something to do with the earth's atmosphere and how opaque it is, I will need to look it up.
Actually finding something in a telescope and knowing what you are looking at take a surprising amount of preparation, even with computerized "Goto" scopes. The scope needs to be set up and leveled, then it needs to be aligned using a few known stars. Of course, if you think you are pointing the scope at Polaris and it turns out you're not -- the computer gets confused and finds bupkis. I found this out the hard way during our one clear night of actual observing.
Vince had set up his 5" Celestron scope and was getting ready to align it. I helpfully pointed out what I thought was Polaris. Ooops. Still not sure what star I had pointed at (likely Cepheus Alpha), but it was not Polaris. Larry, one of my fellow classmates who was aligning his 8" Meade at the same time, pointed this out before Vince had spent too much time.
I must confess I was a bit disappointed that we were going to be using the "Goto" scopes. I wanted to find the stars, galactic clusters, etc. the old-fashioned way, using right ascension and declination on a manually aligned scope, so I could begin to learn the sky. But, as Vince pointed out, while it is very cool to be able to find a celestial object on your own, it takes a while and the only person likely to be impressed is yourself. If you want to see a lot in a short time, the "Goto" scope is the only way to do it.
And once we had straightened the Polaris, not Polaris issue, well we did see a lot.
We observed all the following objects 10/6/2004 between 8-10:30 pm EDT. There were probably a couple more, but I could not remember them all. From now on I take notes!
Polaris (really)
Mizar (a double-double!)
Vega
Double Cluster
Andromeda (M31)
M32
Peliades (M45)
Albireo (a very colorful double)
M13
M57
Dumbell Nebula(M27)
Uranus
Neptune
Now, a star in a telescope is just a point of light, but the point can have color, and sometimes (quite often actually) the single point visible to the naked eye, resolves in two (or more) stars in the telescope. It is like finding a secret note.
The planets have dimension and appear as tiny disks -- and they don't twinkle. Uranus and Neptune both appeared bluish-green.
The Double Cluster is astounding! So many stars, I can only imagine what would be like to be on a planet around one of those stars, the night sky would be filled with bright stars.
All the M numbers refer to Messier objects. These were cataloged by Charles Messier when he was searching for comets. It is amazing how much early astronomers were able to find with such limited telescopes. Of course, the skies were darker then.
While the view through an amateur telescope isn't as breathtaking as a picture taken by Hubble or one of the huge groundbreaking, it becomes much more intimate to see the light through the eyepiece -- I can't wait to see more!
After years of reading about the stars, planets and other heavenly bodies, I finally set out to learn what the heck declination and right ascension mean and how they would help me find something recognizable in the night sky.
I signed up for an observational astronomy class at Montgomery College to get the basics. The class is part of the Life Long Learning program. Our intrepid and enthusiatic instructor, Vince Sempronio, showed us a very interesting PowerPoint presentation (and to think when a filmstrip was the height of classroom AV) on the history of astronomy. We were also provided with a planisphere (a circular sky guide that lets one figure out which stars are where in the sky at a given date and time).
The only bummer of the evening was that Vince informed us that there would be little or no math in the class, so no getting to play with Kepler's Laws of motion -- ah well -- maybe that will have to wait for a gradual degree program.
I think that is enough for my first ever blog post.
