Thoughts from Starlight Cascade

As if you have not been inundated enough with Earth Hour 2009 news, here is another attempt to encourage you to participate.

Saturday March 28th from 20:30-21:30 EDT is Earth Hour.
An attempt at bringing attention to various things, global climate change,
outrageous resource usage, waste, placating astronomers and more. From its
humble roots in 2007. I am amazed at the growth and reach of this initiative.
Its real affects are small, but getting the concepts of conservation, pollution
and waste into the attention span of the average citizen is a start.

So, Along with the City of Kingston
http://www.cityofkingston.ca/residents/environment/earth-hour.asp
and
Queen’s University
http://qnc.queensu.ca/campusnews_article_loader.php?id=47ea7028736aa

we encourage you to join in.

Here at work we will be shutting down non-essential systems, computers, air
handling units for the weekend starting Friday afternoon.

At home we plan on running this event for most of the day, powering down
non-essential electrical devices, turning off non-essential computer systems,
keeping all of the lights off from morning until evening, and if clear, be
outside enjoying the night skies during the actual event itself.

We also plan on taking Sky Quality Meter readings before during and after.
The only downside are the idiot politicians who moved daylight savings to early
March, blindly assuming it is a good thing, when modern studies show that it is
not… I would go as far to say as detrimental to energy use and conservation.

So the skies will not be totally dark as they would have been otherwise in
Eastern Standard Time.

Clear Skies… Keep observing!

2009 Observing Last Night Overall I found that the 5/4″ eyepieces on the 90mm Meade were a lot easier to hold the camera up to the eyepiece and snap off images (than the 2″ eyepieces). I was using a 25mm plossl (about x36 I think), 1/1000sec exposures and the camera on continuous motor drive as it were… Starting with wide angle and then zooming in to x4 on the camera optics and changing the exposure
up to 1/125 sec we had 100 images before you could shake a stick… good
thing too.. clouds came in and it was cold and Rick Mercer was about to
come on.

Then the cool thing happened… reviewing the images inside and
noticed a neat feature lit up on the moon… in the shape of an X

Cool! It looks like the Lunar X feature that was imaged without even
hunting for it! (see RASC Journal April 2007). Attached are two small
images.. one wide angle and the other heavily cropped…
Here they are: