Last Thursday March 12th, we attended a lecture by
Ed Lawrence, a master gardener with a regular call-in program on CBC Radio. Maybe 30-35 minutes of the time was spent on general background on the ontario cosmetic pesticide ban and the next 90 minutes or so on Q&A from the audience.
The International Space Station made a very high pass Monday night (2009 March 16) and we captured it on two images from the allsky camera.
The maximum altitude was 81 degrees and the estimated magnitude from heavens-above.com was -2.3.
The camera picked them up with no problem. Each exposure was 120 seconds long with about a 20-30 second gap while the firsti mage was downloading from the camera.
The Lunar Werner X
2009 Observing Last Night
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:
Comet Lulin
2009 We were up very early this morning taking our last look at Comet Lulin for a couple of days… snow on the way…
Here is a 15 second exposure from our Canon camera.
All labels are to the immediate right of the named object. The comet is very very faint (Magnitude 5-6).
Click on the image for a larger version.
rain
Just came back from a Lennox & Addington Horticultural Society meeting wondering about precipitation… so off to The Weather Network to mine their historical data for Kingston Ontario.
The results are here in a handy PDF file with graphs for the June-Sept growing season.
We have similar data for our own area, which does have a different climate than Kingston does, but that is a project for another day.
New scope on display
This is our new Meade DS90 refractor on display at the last months Public Observing Session.
The finder battery died pretty quick so we are waiting to replace that before trying out some more testing.
2009 We look so forward to weekends to escape the mind numbing stressful workplace… and then are so busy trying to do some of the items we want to do and the things that we are doing for others, that come Monday morning you look around and say.. what happened?
Case in point:
Performance is noticeably faster as is the heat output. The Kill-a-Watt power meter shows these starting up at 165 watts and settling down to 125 watts running.
at Stirling Hall Theatre A, Bader Lane, Queen’s University Dr Gregg Wade (RMC) will speak on recent “Large Programs” that have been established at the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope.
These are really exciting, and range from a census of the Virgo cluster to
detailed mapping of individual stars. One of the four Large Programs is his own project called MiMeS, which is about stellar magnetism.
Saturday February 14 2009, 7:30pm: The KAON (Kingston Astronomy Outreach Network) Public Observing Session Queen’s University Ellis Hall Observatory
Feature IYA Talk by Susan Gagnon “How Has Galileo’s Scope Evolved?”
If the weather permits there will be telescopes out on the Observing Deck.
ground hog day + 1
A lot of little catch up items .. groundhog day was yesterday and with groundhogs only at 39% with their predictions, at least the big 3 all agreed on seeing shadow and more winter coming.
We of course watched Groundhog Day.. an annual tradition.
The snowblower went out twice in the last week, clearing out over 50 cm… at least we can get to the greenhouse and observatory now.
The KAON400 (Kingston Astronomy Outreach Network) kickoff event on January 10th went well as described earlier. The guest speaker kickoff at RMC had a hiccup or two… a widespread power outage the afternoon and night of the talk on Tuesday… during a blizzard…
so it was rescheduled for Wednesday and everything went well.
Dr. Sara Seagher spoke on extrasolar planets and methods of detecting them.
We have wondered for some time what an LCD monitor placed out in the observatory would do.. and if it would hold out… and so far it has been out for 3 weeks and is doing wonderfully…despite -10, -15 and -20C temps.
IYA Kickoff1
On the evening of Friday January 9th, 2009 the RASC-Kingston Centre held an International Year of Astronomy kickoff lecture in Stirling Hall.
The very next night we held a public observing session at the Queen’s University Ellis Hall Observatory but got clouded out. As a kickoff event we had a talk on Galileo by Dr. Judith Irwin with a visit from Galileo and Cardinal Barberini
Along with our Kingston City Mayor Harvey Rosen reading the City Proclamation of IYA Kickoff Week.
We closed out the kickoff week with a talk by Dr. Sara Seagher (MIT) on Exoplanets at the Royal Military College Currie Hall, a day after originally scheduled due to a widespread power outage.
BSG returns tonight!
I don’t know about you, but we are going to settle down in front of a large warm fire, with a nice warm pizza with a lot of nice warm cats and going to watch the HOT HOT HOT debut of this latest and last season of Battlestar Galactica! The Spacecast channel here in Canada has been running the first 10 episodes of the current season all day long and there are several specials tonight as well, before the big event at 10pm EST. Here’s hoping that the nuclear devastation we saw at the end of the last episode was really a big dream sequence!
IYA 2009
And of course this is the International Year of Astronomy!
Check out the local Kingston effort at kingstoniya.ca, bringing together the Royal Military College, Queen’s University and The Royal Astronomical Society of Canada – Kingston Centre.
Another 3 hours spent organizing last night for our kickoff week starting on Friday January 9th. The City of Kingston Council proclaimed the IYA for us last night as well. Pretty Cool.
Saturday the 10th is another big day and we close off the week with a talk on Tuesday the 13th. You can see the Canadian IYA site as well.
happy new year
1st day of a new year, start it out with observing in the -18C cold!
This is an image of the 5.44 day old moon, 1/160 sec through Starbuck, our 20cm telescope. Virtual Moon Atlas tells us the biggest crater on the terminator near the centre of the crescent is Theophilus. This crater is 100kmx100km and forms a trio of craters with Cyrillus and Catharina.