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

As I write a beautiful three day old moon hangs low in the sky. I’m back early from the annual Okie-Tex Star Party (OTSP). This year it was held from September 27th through October 4th. I traveled down to Kenton, OK on Saturday the 27th and it appeared like everyone showed up on that day. There must have been two hundred people already there when I arrived that evening! Here is the week in review:

Saturday Night

Its always a difficult first night after driving for nearly eight hours. Spent much time polar aligning as the sky was not that great at first. Night turned out to be pretty good.

Sunday Night

Very good night with intermittent clouds that rolled through in the morning. During the day I setup my hillside camera mount and equipment. Before sunset I ran a series of auto-exposures and then switched memory cards and ran continuous 30 second exposures starting at 21:00. This went through morning until it filled the memory card around 9:00. My main telescope target was the cocoon nebula.

Monday Night

Outstanding night! The hillside camera was setup again and this time I started continuous 30 second exposures at 20:00 and never touched the camera until the next day. At about 2:24 in the morning a fantastic meteor lite up the entire area, it was incredible. The question was did I catch it? I imaged the Iris nebula in my main telescope.

Around 1:00 on Tuesday afternoon I retrieved the hillside camera and found I had indeed captured the meteor. Sweet!

Tuesday Night

Outstanding night again! No hillside camera, just my main scope. With excellent transparency I decided to image LBN 534. This is a fainter nebula I had never heard of until the November issue of Sky and Telescope. Kinda screwed up because I decided to reframe the object, after I had already taken two hours of exposure. Jeez.

Wednesday Night

Outstanding night surprisingly. The Clear Sky Chart forecast had predicted clouds before morning but that was not the case. I spent all night collecting images of the Pacman nebula, staying up past the official end of darkness. Around 6:00am the Zodiacal light was a fantastic cone of brightness in the east. In retrospect I wish I had taken a few images of it, what the heck was I thinking? Oh well, it was a visual treat.

The End

Through out the week we had very good weather until Thursday. Then a strong storm just missed us in the evening and the night was clouded over. Thats OK as we needed an excuse to drink the beer we all brought, party time. With a poor forecast for Friday night I left around noon. While I hated to leave it was obvious a front would move over the area and reek havoc with any photography.

One surprising thing all week was the wind. Until Thursday night we had virtually no wind which is unusual. I collected the weeks temperature data on my 4000NV. Click here for the graph. Ignore the daytime high points but the nighttime data was logged in the same location six feet off the ground. Apparently I am a nerd.

This was the 25th anniversary of the star party and the tenth anniversary at this location by Kenton. I saw many a familiar face this year as I’ve gone nine out of the ten years at Camp Billy Joe. Congratulations to the Oklahoma Astronomy Club for putting on a great star party.