Monthly Archives: February 2002

astro-surfing

Rainy-Night Astronomy

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What to do when the weather isn’t cooperating with your desire to do astronomy? That’s the question of the ages. Last night, for example, I was all ready to observe the occultation of Saturn by the Moon. We had lots of breaks in the clouds (often called sucker holes) up to 30 minutes or so before the main event (which occurred at 7:32 p.m. at my location). Then, the rain clouds moved in, and by occultation time it was starting to sprinkle. The heavy rains soon followed. Well, we needed the rain…

What did I do? Since I’m in the middle of writing a new book about astronomy (plus a planetarium script about HST science) I came back in here and worked on the computer for a while. The European Southern Observatory site has some wonderful pictures and results from their many telescope installations in Chile. I noodled around there for a while, enjoying the views across the light-years and downloading some interesting additions to the chapter on galaxies.

If you’re clouded out from observing, it’s probably easiest to plop yourself in front of the ol’ Boob Toob and watch whatever plays across the screen. Sometimes I do that, if I’m not feeling particularly motivated and don’t want to work on my projects any more. But, with the Olympics on, I either watch those, or I can eschew the Plasma Goddess completely for some good reading. Lately I’ve been ploughing through some books for review, and of course I always have a science fiction mag or two to read.

Occasionally I fire up some astronomy software and explore the sky that way. I can always say that I’m learning about tomorrow’s sky — provided it clears up!

satellites, space birds

What’s That Thing Moving Across the Sky?

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When I was a little kid my dad took me out to look at the sky. All I remember about it is that I wanted to see a satellite called “Sputnik” because I had heard everybody talking about it. I probably figured (in all my 4-year-old glory) I could just look up and see something moving across the sky. I probably didn’t see it that night because, let’s face it, Sputnik wasn’t much bigger than a couple of bowling balls knocked together. But, it’s possible to see satellites moving across the sky these days — no problem!

A satellite is simply an object in orbit around a larger one. That’s why we call the Moon a satellite of the Earth. Jupiter has four main satellites (moons) and Saturn has dozens.

There are more than 8,000 bits of “stuff” orbiting the Earth alone, ranging from pieces of equipment to weather and communications satellites — plus the space station and of course, the Space Shuttle when it’s on a mission. The ones we can see from Earth’s surface look like small, slowly-moving points of light. Satellites don’t usually flash (like aircraft do) and they take a minute or two to move across your field of view. If you spend any time at all looking at the stars, you’ll eventually spot a satellite. Avid satellite hunters call them space birds.

As you might expect, there are websites that talk about satellites, what they are, how to spot them, and how to identify what you’ve seen. The best is NASA’s Satellites page.

There’s also the Heaven’s Above in Germany.

And, the The Visual Observer’s Satellite Page.

So check them out, and the next time you’re stargazing, watch out for the space birds!