A Cheshire Cat on the moon

It’s been an interesting week.

I got a new scope…

That was sort of by accident. I really wanted the mount for my 5″ reflector, because it’s a bit too heavy for my current mount and tripod. Orion sells that mount as the VersaGo II for $199, but right now OPT has the SkyWatcher-branded version of that mount, the AZ4, and a nice 80mm refractor with finder and eyepieces for the same price. So by going through OPT I essentially got the scope and accessories for free. I originally planned on selling off the scope, but I keep hearing about people falling in love with the crisp views through refractors (which unlike reflectors and catadioptric scopes have no central obstruction), so I decided I’d give this one a fair shake before I got rid of it.

I’m glad I did. It’s a keeper–it has very sharp optics, gives a nice, clean, contrasty image, and is very fun and easy to use. It doesn’t pull down as much light as my bigger scopes, but it’s easier to handle and it cools down in no time, which is a big plus at this time of year. (One  of the biggest sources of image distortion at the eyepiece is heat waves coming off lenses and mirrors that haven’t reached ambient temperature.) Frequent commenter David DeLano has this scope as well, and he warned me that if I wanted to sell it, I shouldn’t look through it, because I’d get hooked. You called that one right, David!

I gave it a name, too. Some people name their scopes and some people don’t. I also talk to myself and to inanimate objects when I’m alone, and I suspect that those traits are highly correlated with naming scopes. Anyway, there’s a bit of back story behind this one. When I was a kid, my cousin Michael had a good friend, also named Michael, who was quite a bit taller than he was. They felt dumb calling each other by their own name, so my cousin Michael dubbed the taller one “Shorty Long”, and tall Michael retaliated by calling my cousin “Stubby Fats”. That’s never ceased to crack me up. And now I’ve got two shiny black SkyWatcher scopes that will be sharing a mount, one a long skinny refractor and the other a short fat reflector, so it made sense to name them Shorty Long and Stubby Fats.

With the moon and Jupiter both high and bright in the evenings this week, it didn’t pay to go after fainter fare, and I hadn’t put in any serious time on the moon in a long time.

Tuesday the moon was waxing gibbous. I got this shot through Shorty Long with my Coolpix 4500:

It doesn’t show everything there was to see. Sinus Iridium, the Bay of Rainbows, is the C-shape, open to the bottom, at the very top of the moon in the above picture; it’s an old impact basin mostly flooded by the later basalt flows that formed the maria or lunar seas. Just past Sinus Iridium I saw a couple of mountain peaks that the sunlight was just reaching, and they glowed like a pair of eyes staring at me from beyond the terminator. Here, I’ll show you:

Kinda spooky lookin’, eh?

It got better. As I stared back, the rising sun (from the perspective of those mountains) lit a couple of lower peaks, below and between the first two, and then a ridge running beneath all of them. It looked for all the world like the face of the Cheshire Cat, with two bright eyes, two nostrils, and a big wide smile. The nostril peaks and the smile ridge were too faint to show up in any of my photos, but a helpful guy on Cloudy Nights produced this image with the Lunar Terminator Visualization Tool (yay, more free astro software!) using my location and the time of the observation:

One of the nostril peaks was too dim to show up even in the LTVT shot, but other than that the face looks pretty much like what I saw Tuesday night. There is even a suggestion of eyebrows.

The peaks turn out to be the aptly named Harbinger Mountains. I asked around on Cloudy Nights and no one has reported seeing the Cheshire Cat “lunarism” before. I’m going to do a little more research on the features involved and report back.

That wasn’t the end of my weird moon adventures for the week. Last night I was back outside for the full moon:

I had basically just gotten set up when I saw a small, perfectly round object float by in front of the moon. I figured it was probably either a weather balloon or a satellite. Turns out that a CN user got video of the thing; the video is now on YouTube, here.

[Almost Immediate Update: the thing in the video is not the same thing I saw, or at least not the same pass, because that video was made about three hours before I made my observation. I just learned that in the CN thread, which is here.]

It’s probably a satellite; another CN user got video of a similar thing flying in front of the sun, and reports seeing them on a regular basis. So don’t get out your tinfoil hats just yet. But do get out and have a look at the moon when you get a chance. As this week has shown, you never know what you might find, even with this closest and most familiar of celestial objects.

Heavens Above

Here’s one of those “How did I not blog about this sooner!?” things: Heavens-Above.com. If you’ve heard of it before, it’s probably for the International Space Station flyover predictions, which are indeed great. But the site has loads more useful stuff; it’s basically one-stop shopping for the shallow sky* observing.

*If deep sky objects are multiple and variable stars, clusters, nebulae, and galaxies, then shall0w sky objects are those within the solar system–planets and moons, comets, asteroids, and artificial satellites.

So what’s good there?

First off, loads of info on how, when, and where to spot artificial satellites, including the ISS, Hubble, and Iridium flares. Iridium satellites are part of a big fleet of communications satellites. They have absolutely immense solar panels that produce extremely bright flashes of light, called flares, when they fly over. And there are dozens of these things in orbit, so they fly over fairly often. Flares often get as bright as magnitude -8, and sometimes hit -9.5, which is many times brighter than any planet under any condition, and almost as bright as the first quarter moon. Heavens-Above will tell you when and where to look, you just have to register (free) and put in your location.

Second, finder charts for the brighter asteroids and whatever comets are currently within reach of amateur equipment. If you’re working on the AL Galileo Club and you’ve been sweating how you were going to finish the comet observation requirement, here’s your ticket.

Third, loads of data on the Sun, Moon, and planets, including a cool solar system chart that shows where all the planets are in relation to each other right now (incidentally, this chart shows at a glance why we’re as close to Mars right now as we’re going to get on this pass, but not nearly as close as we get on other passes).

Fourth, an all-sky chart that shows what the sky looks like over your head, right this minute (weather notwithstanding), plus cool charts of all the constellations.

Fifth, whatever other goodies may be lurking in the links I haven’t gotten around to clicking yet. Seriously, just go there, register, and start playing.

I was first directed to Heavens-Above ages ago, and I’ve had it bookmarked forever, but I forget to go there. Not anymore! Late last fall my family and I watched the ISS fly right over our house, almost from horizon to horizon. My wife and I even got to see it through my 6-inch telescope. Even at low power, 33x, which I needed to keep a wide field for tracking, it was clearing a thing and not just a point of light. In fact, there were two bright thingies with a smaller, dimmer thingy between them–the solar panels and habitation modules, respectively. Some amateur astronomers have gotten pretty darn good images of the ISS and often the shuttle with it, using hand-guided telescopes and webcams. I haven’t tried that yet, but one of these days…

I’m telling you all this now because my buddy Jarrod has been checking out H-A, and tonight he went out and photographed an Iridium flare! He writes:

It was BRIGHT.  The prediction was for -8 magnitude, as we were only 2.5 km off the center of the flare, and it was every bit of that.  We weren’t sure what to expect, but it did NOT disappoint.

I set the camera up for a long exposure.  This was 99 seconds at f/11, ISO400 at 18mm.  I cropped the one pic down  to this, the other’s a small version of the full-width shot.  I had the lens as wide as I could get, because I didn’t have much confidence it my aiming.  But now that I know that with the compass and clinometer apps being this accurate (as you can see how close to center it was) I’ll zoom the sucker in next time.

Anyway, it was cool as hell to see.  Sydney [his daughter] really seemed to get a kick out of it (it was REALLY bright and easy to spot).  It was a fun thing to get us all out on the back porch for.

That’s his photo at the top. Now you know what you need to do…whaddaya waitin’ around here for?