He has a small telescope, and every night he sets it up in the Whole Foods parking lot in Lakewood, Texas (here’s a map). When people pass by, he shows them Jupiter and the Moon. A lot of them are looking through a telescope for the very first time.
They’ll leave with a profoundly new sense of the sky and the Universe around them.
Years ago, I did this every Halloween. I’d set up my ‘scope and let the trick-or-treaters get a look at the Moon, Jupiter, Saturn, whatever was up at the time. The looks of amazement made my heart sing every time. Every single time.
There’s nothing quite like your first good view of the sky… or seeing it through someone else’s eyes.
Anthony Wesley, who discovered the impact event on Jupiter yesterday, has posted a lovely color image of the flash:
Wow. He was only taking greyscale video, but put together a three-color composite and added in the data from the flash. So this image is not precisely real, but on the other hand is no less real than other astronomical images. He has also posted a greyscale video of the flash which is pretty tremendous, too. It’s also up on YouTube:
Wow! Note the color of the sky; it was about 9:00 a.m. local time when he took this shot, with the Sun well above the horizon. This is actually two images added together; the first shows the ISS to the lower right, and in the second shot it had moved to the upper left. Jupiter shows its disk near the center of the frame, it being easily bright enough to be seen using a telescope in daylight.
What an incredible picture! But it gets cooler… (more…)
I have few regrets in life, but if there’s one, it’s that I didn’t have access to all this amazing technology when I was a teenager and figuring out just how I was going to tackle my love for astronomy. How I would have loved podcasts, programmable telescopes, CCDs, websites with satellite pass information…
But that’s the way things are now, and lots of people are putting this tech to good use. Like, for example, Sirius Stargazing, a new YouTube channel with info on how to observe various astronomical objects. It’s just starting out but off to a good start. Here’s one video on the Pleiades. And who’s the dork in the tie introducing it?
If you have a YouTube account and are interested in observing the skies, then consider subscribing to Sirius Stargazing. They may just give you ideas.
Phil Plait, the creator of Bad Astronomy, is an astronomer, lecturer, and author. After ten years working on Hubble Space Telescope and six more working on astronomy education, he struck out on his own as a writer. He's written two books, dozens of magazine articles, and 12 bazillion blog articles. He is a skeptic and fights the abuse of science, but his true love is praising the wonders of real science.
The original BA site (with the Moon Hoax debunking, movie reviews, and all that) can be found here.
Contact me: The Bad Astronomer "at" gmail "dot" com
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