STARS.

entity

My sweetie and I went out to look at stars last night, and we saw Eta Persei for the first time, and I saw Castor(I, II, and III) through a telescope for the first time.

Eta Persei are, to my eyes at least, an orange and purple binary star. That was nifty. The colors are pretty cool looking.

Castor are THREE binaries in one star system—two binaries that are very bright stars very closely orbited by dim red dwarfs and one binary that is two dim red dwarfs orbiting each other. In the telescope it looked like three stars, two close together and bright and one further away and dimmer. If you've got a telescope turn it on Castor at some point in the near future. It's appropriate that Castor is made up of so many twins, since it's in Gemini. They're all actually gravitationally bound, even... although the pair of dim red dwarfs appears to have been added to the system later. And in answer to my agog speculation, my sweetie gently suggested that probably the system is too gravitationally chaotic for a planet to form a stable orbit.

What've you been looking at lately?

EmberLeo

I tend to track the big obvious ones - the Moon, Venus, sometimes Mars or Jupiter when it shows, and then Orion and the Big Dipper, and sometimes Cassiopeia.

When my Dad had land I was comfortable visiting without warning up in the mountains, I would drop by in the middle of the night if it was clear to borrow his field for stargazing. It's been a little while since I've sat out stargazing really, but I used to have a lot of the constellations and the stories attached to them memorized...

-E-

Sekhmet

I've been enjoying Venus and Jupiter lately. We don't have the best star-watching environment as there is a lot of light pollution here, so it's nice when there are planetary goings-on that are highly visible.

Apparently this month and next month will be spectacular for planet-watching: Five Visible Planets.

grant

I used to be in an astronomy club, but nowadays, I use our rather nice Dobsonian reflector almost exclusively to look at the moon.

I really should get one of those yellow-glazed oculars, because it's nearly blinding through the untreated one.

That and the moons of Jupiter.

I go for drama, I guess.

entity

I should have mentioned we were in his backyard in the middle of San Francisco. City skywatching is less spectacular than being out under a really dark sky, but it's still nice to do. Even just taking some decent binoculars out, or trying to catch a pass of the International Space Station near sunset (I like to wave).

grant, we took a look at the moon too—he has a moon filter to shut out some of the glare. Nice view of the rays around Tycho.

Thanks, Sekhmet—we'll have to get up higher to see Mercury; probably up on Bernal Hill will do it. Jupiter and Saturn are still at opposition, so we won't get to see all five of those at once, but knowing him he's been staying up late looking at Mars and then getting up around three or so to look at Saturn too.

entity

Yesterday my sweetie loaned me his astronomy magazine long enough for me to read about these fine folks. If you're in London and want to look at some things in the night sky that you can see despite the ambient light pollution, meet them in Regent's Park.

And we went up to our local observatory and took in decent views of Venus, Mars, and Saturn, and a few nebulae, before the fog rolled in.

Howdy, Stranger!

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