2012 da14 Asteroid Observing Expedition from J.D.Strikis on Vimeo.

ex·pe·di·tion

I so like this short video, kudos to the producer.  Over the years I’ve taken many pictures of my own expeditions and found still shots rarely capture the essence of the experience. It takes video and a soundtrack to express it. But what the hell is going on in this video?!

We start indoors with a telescope, then someone that appears anxious, someone is working at a computer and a telescope mount is seen slewing.  This is the planning stage, perhaps the final test and preparation stage before leaving. In this case the expedition will attempt to photograph asteroid 2012 DA14 as it flies close by Earth. They will only get one shot at this.  It appears they have developed a custom program to move the telescope mount to follow the asteroids path. A challenging task as mounts are not made to do this,   hard to simulate this motion ahead of time.

We cut to the waxing moon and all the activity taking place in the field.  Equipment is setup and aligned, tested, checked again and shared with others around. If something breaks or fails to work as planned you hope spare parts or a friend can help. Otherwise your mission will fail. I’ll note there is a whole bunch of white light around, there would be howls of protest from the star party light Nazi’s I’ve known.

Around the two minute mark we see the fruits of their labor, it appears they were able to image the asteroid and track it reasonably well. Seventeen seconds later in the video they are packing up to head home. I’m going to bet they were a happy bunch!

All this is speculation on my part, I don’t know this group of astronomy enthusiasts. But I do know what its like to plan a trip, chart my target, fret over the weather and finally be under the night sky to implement my plan.  Successfully completing a quest is exhilarating.

The days are getting shorter and the nights longer. The final month of the year features two great night sky events worth catching. Both are late in the night to early in the morning but worth staying up for.

First up is the Geminid meteor shower peaking the night of December 13th, morning of the 14th.  Perhaps the finest meteor shower of the year its only drawback is the winter temperatures. But those of us willing to stand the cold are rewarded with a steady stream of falling stars. This year the moon is first quarter and will set around midnight local time. Just as its fully dark the meteor shower will be ramping up to full strength, around 120 meteors/hour (ZHR). With a clear dark sky you should see more than one per minute.

The second big event is a total lunar eclipse on December 21. Interestingly the 21st is also the Winter solstice: the shortest day of the year and the start of winter. Its been 2 years since the Midwest last saw a total lunar eclipse and we won’t see another until 2014!. But this one we’re in the right place, the Midwest is perfectly situation to see all stages of the eclipse. For a neat animation of these eclipse stages check out Shadow and Substance website. What dark color will the moon be this eclipse? Perhaps with this years volcanic eruptions we’ll see a deeper red.

This year the Okie-Tex Star Party was held October 2 through October 9th and the weather was very good.  There were six consecutive nights of clear or mostly clear sky, this maybe a record for the Kenton site. The weather might not have been ideal for everyone, persistent gusty winds typically started at darkness and lasted until 2:00am in the morning. Temperatures were unusually mild during the night with lows around 54° F (Saturday morning was lowest at 44°F). I will post temp and SQM data later.

While I imaged many targets throughout the week I had two particular photographs in mind: Comet 103P/Hartley 2 and the morning Zodiacal light. The comet I shot every night and have a pile of imaging data to reduce.

My Zodiacal light plan almost became an epic failure. I needed all night energy as its best around the end of darkness (start of morning twilight) and petered out on several nights.  In fairness most of us had a tough time Wednesday night, it started out cloudy and we broke out the beer, then it cleared up! Friday morning arrived with decent skies,  I was fired up and ready to go. I ascended to my planned location to find I had miscalculated the relationship of the star party field and the Zodiacal light.  To say I was pissed at myself is an understatement. With little time remaining I descended and repositioned myself on top of a boulder further north. Anyone awake in that area probably thought a bull was stumbling down the hill and through the uncut field.  To make matters interesting I fell off the boulder my first attempt climbing it,  the entire journey would have made a comical movie. Perseverance paid off, thumbnail to the right is the best image taken at the very end of darkness (click for full size version).

More updates and images to come later.

It seems like shit  happens when I’m not connected to the Internet, the Jupiter impact the latest example. I heard about this event at NSP yet I never got a chance to see it there. Kinda odd given the hundred plus scopes in that location. Not to be denied I setup my telescope Saturday and waited first for Jupiter to clear my trees and then for the impact zone to rotate into view. According to Spaceweather.com the new dark spot transits 2 hours after the great red spot,  of which Sky and Telescope has transit times on their website. At 01:30 CDT on July 26 it was visible in my 8inch Celestron SCT, cool. Kind of alarming that nobody saw the impactor coming and it left a huge scar on the planet.

It was cool to see my aurora picture on Spaceweather’s front page for three days!

Stardate 07.19.2009: the start of the Nebraska Star Party (NSP). I’ve never been to NSP, let alone Northern Nebraska so this should be an interesting adventure. I’m planning on being there Sunday night through Tuesday night, hoping mother nature is nice to me.

This trip brings a brand new capability for me, one I’ve needed for some time. I recently aquired a Kyocera 43w solar panel and 6 amp charge controller from Northern Arizona Wind and Sun.  I can now recharge my batteries in the daytime,  making me  self sufficient for powering my astronomy equipment. When not traveling it will be mounted on the observatory, one tiny step to being off the grid.

The International Space Station (ISS) flies over Clearfield observatory Tuesday night (7.7.2009) speeding along  at 17,500 mph.  Photo on right (click for larger image) captured 30 seconds of the nearly ten minute transit across my sky. Taken around 22:06 it was still twilight with a nearly full moon low in the east.

The most amazing part of the night was that it was a clear sky! This has been a very poor year for astrophotography in my area. So I’m rusty, the photographs from camera ridding piggyback in the photo to the right did not turn out very good. Then again it was the first time I’ve tried to capture a fly over by the ISS.

This is a really good week for watching the ISS pass over the United States.  Heavens Above has excellent details and charts for pass overs.   Spaceweather.com has a simple  listing for pass overs (click the Satellite Flybys graphic on the right).

Its the next day and the excitement of being a part of the change, to be one of those millions of people that helped elect Barack Obama is awesum.

The message of hope overcame the message of fear.  The message “there is no red state, there is no blue state, there is only one United States of America” won. I am proud of my fellow citizens that  choose to change the direction of our nation.Â