holiday market

Tuesday, December 1st, 2020 02:39 am
darkoshi: (Default)
On Saturday I went to an outside holiday market downtown. It was open til 9pm, and I made it there shortly before it started getting dark. It was very nice. I bought a cool art print and a pretty little clockwork owl ornament. There was nice music. I walked down to the Capitol building with the big Christmas tree full of lights. A guy with a really nice voice was singing Christmas songs over there. The moon was full in a hazy sky. Mars was to the right of the Capitol dome's flagpole.

I want to post a video of some clips I took. But one song a DJ was playing was a popular one; Youtube might mute the whole video. This was the second time I've been to Soda City market, and this DJ was there both times, playing awesome music of the kind I like. I left him a tip both times. I think his sign said "Wylde Childe" or something similar, but I can't find any info about him online.

the moon

Sunday, November 22nd, 2020 05:33 pm
darkoshi: (Default)
escapes from Jupiter and Saturn...

...straight into the clutches of Mars!
darkoshi: (Default)
like the big dipper
like the giant bear being spun around by its tail by the gods
Go look and see!*

I took a quick ten minute walk.
Need to get out of this house,
need to start walking again
even if it is in the dark

The sky is vast at night
all the familiar and unfamiliar constellations
still reassuring, encouraging, twinkling.

Walking down a very badly lit street
I realized I hadn't even brought along a mask.


*I looked it up now. The moon's tethered by Saturn and Jupiter. Hah! It is indeed being swung by the gods!
darkoshi: (Default)
If you're awake and have any kind of interest in such things, and if it's not all cloudy, go outside and look at the moon right now. Mars is right above it; I've never seen them so close together.


I happened to notice it while looking out the window; hadn't even read that tonight is also their closest approach:
https://www.space.com/see-mars-moon-labor-day-2020-weekend-skywatching.html

Well, dang. In the time it took to write that, some hazy clouds moved in and right now Mars is no longer visible from here. But let me check the photos I took before...

The photos are meh. With this camera, the moon always turns out as a bright blob with no details no matter what settings I use. Although I just thought of another setting I should have tried changing (light metering method), but now the clouds are darkening even the moon too.

.

It's interesting that I still get excited over things like this.

Perseids

Thursday, August 13th, 2020 02:11 am
darkoshi: (Default)
Yay, I saw two meteors! From my driveway. Among the chirring insects of the nighttime, in the shade of the juniper bush (if only I could turn that street light off for occasions like this). And not even any mosquito bites in spite of not having covered my arms or legs.

You, you, you, you are my shooting star...

on comet

Tuesday, July 28th, 2020 01:39 am
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Yesterday I think I saw the comet, though I'm still not certain. Using binoculars, I repeatedly saw a faint blob, which I recall from somewhere is how comets often look, in the general area of where the comet should be. It was round, with no visible tail. Fainter but larger than the nearby pinpoint stars I could see.

I also saw another meteor right by the big dipper! That was spectacular but short-lived

Today I looked for the fuzzy blob again, but this time couldn't find it at all. The moon is bigger and brighter in the sky tonight; that might be why.
darkoshi: (Default)
8:05pm The sun is setting and gray clouds are eating up my blue sky again :(

Later: a few breaks in the clouds; only 2 unidentified stars visible in that direction.

Toads galore. Every night on the back porch. It is the year of the toads.
In the beginning I took photos. Now I just shoo them away.

The Ursa Major stars don't look anything like a bear. For that matter, bears don't even have long tails! What is up with that? ... it says Zeus swung Ursa Major and Ursa Minor around by their tails, which caused their tails to get stretched out. Hmmm. Right. That's rather a stretch, innit?

Tomorrow is forecast to be partly sunny again in the day, and thunderstorms towards evening.
Not a single fully sunny day forecast in the next 2 weeks. But a mostly sunny day on Wednesday.

bah dah dee, bah dah doe. hey, it is Friday. already.

aaaaaaahhhhhh!

Wednesday, July 22nd, 2020 11:37 pm
darkoshi: (Default)
Tonight may have been my best opportunity to see the comet. About 9:30pm I looked outside, and could see the big dipper, but there were white clouds along the horizon. So I checked again later, and the clouds were gone (though the sky still doesn't look very clear).

I walked out onto Qiao's pier, which gives me a better view of the sky, and looked through binoculars. I did see a star in the general location where the comet is supposed to be, with the brightness I'd expect. But I saw no tail on it. So it might have been the comet (?) but I'm not very convinced. There were other fainter stars also visible through the binoculars. It might be that the actual comet was lower in the sky, behind the trees.

I looked at other parts of the sky for a while, then back at the big dipper again, getting ready to go back inside.

Then right then, at about 11:31pm, I saw a meteor streak right through the big dipper towards the horizon!

..

The comet has its own twitter account: https://twitter.com/c2020f3
It has some nice timelapse videos and photos.

This is a very neat moving diagram of the solar system and the comet:
https://theskylive.com/3dsolarsystem?obj=c2020f3

Dragging with your mouse shifts the perspective so you can watch it from any angle, and you can zoom in or out with the mouse wheel.
I think even the stars in the background are accurate; I found the big dipper, though I can't make out any other constellations what with all the faint stars and milky way also visible.
darkoshi: (Default)
This website shows the location of the comet in the sky based on the current date and time, compared to the stars and constellations (search on your location and then on that page, click the "Find Comet NEOWISE" link):
https://www.timeanddate.com/astronomy/night/usa/columbia

Currently it should be visible after sunset towards the northwest. Look slightly north of where the sun sets. Look for the big dipper and from there, lower towards the horizon.

The comet visualization on the above page's sky-map makes it look very bright, but it isn't.

Based in this page, it's brightest magnitude was(?) expected to be about 2; we are now on the part where the magnitude is waning:
https://theskylive.com/c2020f3-info#brightness

The below page shows it as currently 1.8 (more negative numbers are brighter)
https://theskylive.com/c2020f3-info

The upper right star in the Big Dipper's dipper is Dubhe, with a magnitude of 1.79.
https://theskylive.com/sky/stars/dubhe-alpha-ursae-majoris-star

The lower right star in the Big Dipper's dipper is Merak, with a magnitude of 2.37.
https://theskylive.com/sky/stars/merak-beta-ursae-majoris-star

So I'd expect the comet to be similar in brightness to them, or fainter.

By comparison, Saturn and Jupiter, which are easy for me to see towards the southeast, are 0.9 and -2.75:
https://theskylive.com/saturn-info
https://theskylive.com/jupiter-info

I haven't had any luck seeing the comet myself so far, due to light pollution where I live, cloudy or hazy skies, and possibly not an unobstructed enough view of the northwest horizon.
darkoshi: (Default)
This would have been neat to see. I wonder if I ever *have* seen something like that, though surely not that many in a row and not so close together, and thought it was simply a military exercise, some kind of formation flying.


Video title: SpaceX Starlink Satellites Spotted Over Netherlands
Posted by: VideoFromSpace
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytUygPqjXEc
Date posted: May 24, 2019


Whenever I see a bright star in the sky, I think to myself, that is Jupiter, or Venus, or Saturn. Whenever my mom sees a bright star in the sky, she tells me it's a satellite and won't believe otherwise. Maybe she's right some of the time after all.

This is amazing. So so so many dominoes that you might actually get impatient waiting for them all to finish falling down.



Video title: 128,000 Dominoes Falling into past a journey around the world 2 Guinness World Records) YouTub
Posted by: Ahmed Samir
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLRjiiAawGg
Date posted: Aug 24, 2013
darkoshi: (Default)
On PBS, I watched the Nova episode The Planets: Saturn

From the transcript:
"At 5,000 miles deep, the pressure of the atmosphere is 80 times greater than that at the bottom of our deepest oceans, enough to transform this sooty, graphite rain into diamonds. But even these diamonds are likely destroyed by the pressures of Saturn, eventually dissolving."


Here's another article about it:
'Diamond rain' falls on Saturn and Jupiter
Lightning storms turn methane into soot (carbon) which as it falls hardens into chunks of graphite and then diamond. These diamond "hail stones" eventually melt into a liquid sea in the planets' hot cores...


It made me think of a song I once downloaded and bought, named "Diamonds Shower" by Friedrich Liechtenstein:


Video title: Friedrich Liechtenstein tanzt zu Diamonds Shower vor Raffinerie
Posted by: Gebrueder Beetz Filmproduktion
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Mb3MqB6YNU
Date posted: Oct 12, 2015


I looked up info on the artist...
Once an Ornamental Hermit, Now a German Media Darling

I found this amusing Edeka (German grocery store) ad featuring the same artist, which I'd actually seen before, but it is still funny. The video doesn't show an English translation, but "Supergeil" means basically "super-cool" or "super-awesome", although the word "geil" originally meant "horny".


Video title: EDEKA Supergeil (feat. Friedrich Liechtenstein)
Posted by: EDEKA
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxVcgDMBU94
Date posted: Feb 20, 2014


Then I found these even more amusing videos by BVG (the Berlin Transport Company), which runs the public transport in Berlin. The videos have English closed captions that can be turned on. This first one feels especially heart-warming to me:


Video title: BVG "Is mir egal" (feat. Kazim Akboga)
Posted by: Weil wir dich lieben (BVG)
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvcpy4WjZMs
Date posted: Dec 11, 2015


"Alles Absicht" means "Everything on purpose".


Video title: BVG "Alles Absicht"
Posted by: Weil wir dich lieben (BVG)
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pic3FnvUrY
Date posted: Sep 26, 2016



Video title: BVG-Arie
Posted by: Weil wir dich lieben (BVG)
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlKhh6HFGdI
Date posted: Jul 5, 2017



The guy in the first BVG video is Kazim Akboga:
https://www.youtube.com/user/KazimAkboga/videos

From reading comments on his videos, I found out the sad news that he had suffered from depression and killed himself in Feb. 2017.
:-(
darkoshi: (Default)
But I just remembered, it's the winter solstice today... in 6 hours, tonight.

..

It's grey and cloudy out
Do you wanna shout or go about exclaiming,
it's the solstice day tonight.
Whoo rah, whoo rah.
The tree will come out, and the tree will go up,
on the solstice day, the solstice night.
Ding aling aling.

jupiter bright

Friday, August 9th, 2019 09:36 pm
darkoshi: (Default)
Jupiter is bright, right next to the moon tonight.

Yesterday I saw a hawk, on a low tree limb not 20 feet away from me. It must have been a young one; it flew up to that limb as I was walking by, else I might not have even noticed it.

When I work from home, alone, I'm such a chatterbox sometimes, talking to myself. Sometimes my voice even gets hoarse from it, though that might also be due to outbursts of annoyance. It's strange, as I hardly ever feel the urge to talk to myself out loud like that when I'm at work, or around other people.

Perseid

Thursday, July 25th, 2019 01:00 am
darkoshi: (Default)
I saw a very bright light in the sky (descending, moving too fast to be a plane) right around 11pm. But it was behind the cedar tree (I had seen the light thru its branches), so I couldn't see it well. In the few moments it took me to scoot sideways to see the sky behind the tree, it was gone. I checked if there are any meteor showers active, and I think it must have been a Perseid because it was towards the northeast.

It must have been a very very bright one for me to see it so brightly from here in this light-congested area.

moments

Saturday, March 30th, 2019 02:54 pm
darkoshi: (Default)
A little bird, soft-looking yellow and grey feathers, dead on the ground. Apparently having hit the glass windows of the building at work. Its friends and family must be sad.

Headless carcasses in body-tight white plastic suits. No one else in the grocery store seems to think there's anything wrong with that. Glumness, walking through the aisles.

Baby don't walk yet but she sure crawls fast.

These dogs need a bath.

There are skies I've never seen, in the Southern hemisphere. Stars I've never seen.

"You sound like your mother." Ooh, insulting two people with one stone.
darkoshi: (Default)
Leaving work, turning onto this one road,
BOOM there is the ~MOON~
right above the trees at the end of road
towards which I drive,
the biggest Moon I've ever seen.
Orange tinted.
Big enough for my eyes to scan left, right
looking at its details,
thinking to myself, yes, this is surely larger
than usual. So much larger.

I wanted to stop in a parking lot to take a photo
of the Awesomeness.
But when I got there, the moon was gone.

So instead, I turned onto the other road,
glancing to my left again and again,
waiting for it to reappear.

Finally.
Still hovering near the tree-line,
but small now, and distant.

You will never convince me
that the moon does not change size
Logically, I know it doesn't.
But my eyes have SEEN.
They have swept across the face of the moon,
left and right.
darkoshi: (Default)
This site is pretty neat:
RAMMB Slider (Satellite Loop Interactive Data Explorer)

It shows an animated video of cloudcover over a whole hemisphere of the earth. You can select the time period to loop through. There's a choice of 2 satellites - one shows the Americas, and another shows Asia/Pacific.

I've had some trouble with the page, especially when trying to zoom or move the viewpoint, and when changing the options, but when it's working, it's very cool seeing how the clouds move, in daytime and at night.

The website was linked to from this report about the Total Eclipse in SC.
It linked to this video of the animated cloud clover over SC on the day of the Eclipse. Based on that, it was at least partially cloudy over most of the state.

Eclipse Day

Monday, August 21st, 2017 10:24 pm
darkoshi: (Default)
It was partly cloudy here today.

I got to see a lot of the partial eclipse. A few minutes before totality, a big cloud moved in front of the sun, so I didn't get to watch that most special part. But I did get to experience the sky darkening (not nearly as dark as in the middle of the night; more like shortly after sunset), and the temperature dropping, and the wind whipping up, and a few cicadas starting to buzz, and part of the horizon looking pink.

It was very similar to a big thunderstorm building up. That's what the dogs seemed to think, anyway, as they rushed for the porch and pawed at the front door to be let inside. I let them in and then us humans remained outside to watch.

One curious thing is that the partial eclipse started with the moon entering the upper right portion of the sun, and ended with the moon leaving the upper left portion of the sun (when viewing generally southwards for both). That's not what I had expected. Maybe I'm mistaken about what direction I was looking when it started.

Many people here in town did get to see the totality; it just depended on where one was, and where the clouds were. But in some areas, it even rained.

My neighbor was visiting a relative at the hospital this afternoon, and she told me that a lot of the hospital staff went outside to view the eclipse (but staff who were needed inside stayed in). She said that the Emergency Room remained open, but the normal operating rooms were closed for that time period. That answers one of the things I had wondered about.

Click to enlarge...


darkoshi: (Default)
For the last 3 days, I've seen the crescent moon in the sky during the late morning.

2017/08/16, 10:16am EDT:


2017/08/17, 8:43am EDT:


(On 2017/08/18, I saw the moon around 10:30am, but didn't think of taking a photo.)

But I have been unable to find the moon in the sky around 2:30pm (during my lunch breaks). I've been wondering why I can't find it in the afternoon.

(No wonder I've never paid much attention to the path of the moon in the sky. At night, I'm usually inside or asleep. In the daytime, even when the moon is in the sky, it's hard to see.)

On all 3 days, it's been partly cloudy, with today being the least cloudy. So it's possible the moon was behind a cloud. But as much as I've searched the sky, it seems unlikely it's *always* been behind a cloud.


As of today (2017/08/18) at my location, per the NOAA solar calculator (Find Sunrise, Sunset, Solar Noon and Solar Position for Any Place on Earth), solar noon is around 1:30pm. So at 2:30pm, the sun is still fairly high overhead.

On 8/16, it was 5 days before new moon and the eclipse, so the moon would have been about 5 * 13 = 65 degrees away from the sun. So that was most likely too near the horizon for me to see, as there are some trees and buildings around.

On 8/17, the moon would have been 4 * 13 = 52 degrees away from the sun. I think I should have been able to see it at that angle.

Today on 8/18, the moon would have been 3 * 13 = 39 degrees away from the sun. Surely I should have been able to see it at that angle.

The closer we get to the new moon, the thinner the crescent is. So the harder it is to see. It is hard to find a tiny arc of white in a light blue sky, and even more so when there are distracting white clouds around. But is that the only reason I haven't found it?

Per this page: Finding the Moon, crescent moons are "not observable" except right before sunset or after dawn. But I've seen it at 10:30am which isn't right after dawn. So I think it would be more accurate to say "not easily observable".

If I can see it at 10:30am when the sun is already bright in the sky, why shouldn't I be able to see it at 2:30pm?

I got to wondering whether how I think of the angles in the sky is wrong. I am thinking of 45 degrees as being the distance from straight overhead to a point halfway to the horizon. But the 13 degrees that the moon moves per day is in relation to the center of the earth, not to my spot on the surface of the earth. Therefore, is how I'm visualizing the angles in the sky wrong?



When the moon orbits 45 degrees around the earth, is that a much greater distance than the distance I see from overhead to halfway to the horizon?

But... as can be seen in the diagram, the larger you draw the earth, the closer the 45 degrees gets to one's visible horizon, and it would eventually even pass below the horizon. Yet I've been able to see the moon in the mornings, and the distance between it and the sun hasn't seemed such a large angle. So surely the above diagram can't be right.

(Update #2, 2017/08/20: I've figured it out. The diagram is basically correct, but my assumption about the 45 degree line eventually passing below the horizon was wrong (just because I don't draw the horizon line to infinity, doesn't mean it doesn't go to infinity). If the angle to the moon as measured from the center of the earth is 45 degrees (from directly overhead), then the angle as measured from the surface of the earth would be more than 45 degrees. But because the distance to the moon is so large in comparison to the size of the earth, the angle is only slightly more. See follow-up post.)

On the same topic, I got to wondering how much of the sky / celestial sphere am I actually capable of observing from a point on the earth, at any moment in time. Ie. if I turn all the way around, looking towards the horizon, and up above me, how much of the sphere of the sky which surrounds the earth, am I seeing?

Based on the diagram, the amount of sky seen would not be half the sphere, as I've previously assumed. Yet again, the larger one draws the earth, the less of the sky one would seem to see. Surely that can't be right?

Based on these answers, it sounds like you should be able to see half of the sky at any time. But I don't understand the formulas and calculations listed.


Update (afternoon of 2017/08/19):

Today, the morning of 8/19, around 7:40am and again at 10:20am, I wasn't able to find the moon in the sky, even though it was clear with no clouds. So as of 2 days before new moon, the crescent must be too small and faint to see in the daytime. Perhaps a clear sky being so much brighter than a partially cloudy sky, also makes it harder to see.

MoonCalc.org - shows you the current position of the moon in the sky, and moonrise/moonset directions, for any position you select on the map.

Sun Locator Lite - a free app which lets you find the sun and moon by pointing the phone at the sky (as long as the phone has an internal compass/magnetometer - mine doesn't, but Qiao's does). The Pro version lets you get information for any day and time of the year.

Today, 2 days before the eclipse, the moon should be about 2 * 13 = 26 degrees from the sun. I used the above Sun Locator app to find the position of the moon and compare it to the sun's position, and estimated the angle between them. If anything, it seemed less than 26 degrees, not more. So that indicates that there's something wrong with my thinking in terms of the above diagram. But where have I gone wrong? I still haven't figured that out.
(And even with the app to show me its exact location, I still can't see the crescent moon in the afternoon sky.)

But I did have an epiphany on how much of the sky is visible from a point on earth at a single moment in time. It depends on what I'm calling the "sky". I think of the sky as a sphere centered around the earth, upon which I see moon, sun, stars, clouds, etc. But there are many such possible spheres around the earth, different distances from the center of the earth.

How much of the sky is seen depends on which of those spheres one considers. If one considers a sphere which is say, 10 kilometers above sea level, you can calculate the surface area of that sphere. The earth's diameter is 12,742 km. So the sphere's diameter would be 12,752 km, its radius (r) would be 6376 km, and it's surface area would be 4*pi*r^2.

[ another interesting thought... For an infinitely thin sphere, the size of the inside and outside surface areas should be the same, right? But how can that be? I can't visualize them being the same size. ]

Imagine that we cut a small slice, 10 km deep, from the top of that sphere. We can then calculate the surface area of that slice (with some formula, which I would have to look up.) That would tell us how much of the whole sphere we can see at a single moment, and it would be a fairly small portion.

But now, consider a sky-sphere with a much larger radius of 5 light-years - reaching the nearest stars - or even larger. At such distances, the diameter of the earth is minute in comparison - it can be considered negligible. A plane which touches the surface of the earth at one point is practically the same as another parallel plane which intersects both the center of the earth and the sphere. Either way, half of the sphere is above the plane, and half below. So the person can see half of that sky-sphere.

Now, what about a sphere with radius of 150 million km (about the distance from the earth to the sun)? In comparison to that distance, the earth's diameter is roughly 0.01%.* So again, it's basically negligible, and we can see practically half of the sphere at any moment in time.

..

Other interesting tidbits:

How far away is the horizon? Short answer: About 4 to 5 kilometers away, at standing eye-level for an average-height adult.

I see the moon: introducing our nearest neighbour - has several good diagrams/images.
Per this page, the moon's orbital plane is tilted 5 degrees from the ecliptic. That's not as much as I imagined. But when you add in the 23.5 angle of the earth's axis, the moon can orbit up to 29 degrees above or below the earth's equator.

Lunar Orbital Libration
Libration definition: "a real or apparent oscillatory motion, especially of the moon."

Altitude and Azimuth

* A lot of these numbers are rough calculations I've done, and they may have errors. Please don't rely on any numbers I've posted, without verifying them. If you find an error, please let me know so that I can correct it.

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