Fyi

[berettabone]

For all who haven't heard, we will be visited this year by the "star of Bethlehem". December 21st. This hasn't happened since the Middle Ages. Supposed to happen again 60 years from now. Hopefully, we have clear skies that week I know this will be MY only time to see it................................................ ........................................

[Bobshouse]

Thanks for the heads up!!

[JohnR]

Saturn/Jupiter conjunction. I saw it Saturday night through my spotting scope, and they're pretty close but not close enough to be mistaken for a divine signal. I hope to see them on the 21st, just because.

I could clearly see Saturn's rings and four of Jupiter's moons. I'm one of those geeks who gets all giddy seeing things like that.

[AJBert]

Seems like a perfect way to end this year.

[Armybrat]

Saturn/Jupiter conjunction. I saw it Saturday night through my spotting scope, and they're pretty close but not close enough to be mistaken for a divine signal. I hope to see them on the 21st, just because.

I could clearly see Saturn's rings and four of Jupiter's moons. I'm one of those geeks who gets all giddy seeing things like that.
Years ago I gave my 60 year old (now a classic collectable) Unitron refractor telescope to one of my sons, so haven’t seen them in decades. (Pic below shows it set up for viewing a solar eclipse a couple of years ago)

[berettabone]

I have a friend who has a Meade LX200, and I've seen some pretty amazing stuff through his scope. I have to say the best thing I've seen is Saturn when it's tipped up on it's side. It's the best view angle because you see all of the rings. I've been to the Hobbs Observatory in Fall Creek, Wi a few times. It's one of only a few designated dark areas in the state. They have a 24" telescope in a computer controlled dome house and a 14" Meade. On Saturday nights from May to October, you can go and look through the scopes for free. They also have an area where like minded people come from all over and set up their own equipment and allow others to view through their scopes. All different types and sizes. I was there on a night where there were about 20 scopes set up by different people and I looked through them all. Figured it was the least I could do after the time they had spent. That night happened to be a pretty good night to view Jupiter. It's so dark that they all need to have some type of red light on their equipment so people can find their way to the scope/owner without running in to something. Regular lights are not allowed, so red lights work well. Once you get out of the car and the headlights go off in the parking lot, it's unbelieveably dark. No red light and you could end up on your keaster, or someone else's......................................

[Armybrat]

Those Meades are the gold standard for amateur astronomers. Refractors like my old Unitron are as obsolete as a rotary dial phone.

[JohnR]

I keep wanting to get a nice Dobsonian, but I know it won’t end there.

[getsome]

I have always been fascinated with astronomy and study of the heavens...The one time I was able to take a good look at the stars was on a cruse ship vacation and in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico at night it's about as dark as you can get and on the upper deck of the ship they had a nice telescope set up and I remember being blown away and staying up there for hours, I was amazed because living in the city you can hardly see the stars at all from all the surrounding light at night......Being on the open ocean at first made me think about how big the earth and the sea is but when you look out at the heavens it makes you realize just how incredibly small we really are and how infinitely enormous our God the creator of all things is...

[wyntrout]

I am always disappointed that my pictures of the moon are just blobs... my first digital camera, my present one, and all of my phones always present the moon as a blob with no definition.

I like seeing the stars and wish that I had gotten a telescope that would let me take pictures through it.

While I was in Germany, on one of my trips to Munich and the museum there, I visited the planetarium and watched the show... I guess. I woke up as the show ended and everyone was getting up to leave. :(

When we have clear skies I always look up and find some of my favorites. I've never really used a telescope. Some of the most awesome skies at night were on a mountain road in Colorado when we pulled off the road for a nap before continuing to my wife's folks home in SW Colorado east of Durango in the winter. There are NO city lights or even a hint in any direction. The entire Milky Way is visible and the stars are just overwhelming!

Though I used the stars for navigation in the USAF, I'm not that familiar with most and don't remember where they are. But, I can always find my favorite, the Pleiades, when I can see the Belt of Orion. I can find the North Star, Polaris, too, with or without Cassiopeia(the "W") or the Big Dipper being easily seen. It's kind of funny that the Pleiades are the stars on the Subaru emblem! I never knew that until after we got our Forester over 2 years ago!

Unfortunately, we have tall trees to the west of us and in my backyard, so it's hard to see anything to the West. :( The street lights out front don't help, either.

I've always liked astronomy, space, and science fiction books.

I'm really bummed tonight with the death of BG Charles Yeager. I really cried. :(

[berettabone]

I've heard that the word Subaru is Japanese for Pleiades.

[Armybrat]

RIP General Yeager.
Awesome American with balls bigger than church bells.

[getsome]

Just heard about his passing....Had to be one of the bravest man to have ever lived to strap himself in an unproven rocket plane and having the stones to hit the red button anyway to see what happened.....God Speed General Yeager....

[wyntrout]

Yeah. General Yeager was a real hero. I cried several times. I know he was not doing well, but it was still so sad. :(

[AJBert]

We live in southern Colorado away from any city lights at 9100 feet, so seeing the stars clearly has become common place for us. We had one of our grandkids with us a few years back and I took him outside on a moonless night and told him to close his eyes for about a minute. He had thought I had lost my mind but did it anyway. I told him to look up into the sky and he was amazed. I asked him if he knew what what he was looking at and he replied, "A cloud?" It was the Milky Way. He had heard of it but had never been able to see it.

So sad when kids never get the chance to see the stars like we get to see them when the skies are clear. I sure hope they will be come the 21st of Dec!

[getsome]

Saw the International Space Station come over Atlanta last night at 8:35 pm.....TV weather man gave the time to look for it and sure enough it was plainly visible and right on time, NASA is never late......It looks like a large, very bright star that is moving fast, it went horizon to horizon NW to SE in less than a minute....Pretty cool

[Armybrat]

Years ago we saw the Space Shuttle making its approach to the Space Station...... two bright stars zipping across the sky.

[tokuno]

Years ago we saw the Space Shuttle making its approach to the Space Station...... two bright stars zipping across the sky.

My Dad just passed, day before Thanksgiving. He was hired by NACA (morphed into NASA) as an aeronautical engineer, and one of his last projects prior to retirement was the first space shuttle. I was excited to visit the wind tunnel where they were refining some of the re-entry stuff, anticipating seeing a full scale model in one of the giant tunnels, and was taken aback when he walked me over to a cozy, hall-shaped room with a small, ~foot-long shuttle model mounted at an angle on a skewer - barely room for the two of us. I was impressed that the engineers could scale the data up that much. I thought all these years that he was part of the team developing the heat dispersion re-entry tiles, but my brother told me recently that he was working on the wing leading edge. Regardless, pretty cool.

[mr surveyor]

speaking of the "Shuttle", I had the privilege of being asked to participate in the "recovery mission" of the late STS-107 (Columbia) in Feb. 2003. I had (RIP Jeff) a close surveyor buddy that lived in Nacogdoches County (Texas) about 50 miles South of me to call just a few hours after the crash and asked what we could do to help. The local university "gis department" had already paired up with the county emergency management director to work out an initial plan, so we were at the daylight meeting the next morning to offer assistance. Within 24 hours, we carved our own niche in the program and developed a means to set up a search control system to assist the search teams in being able to officially clear areas without rambling all over the countryside. In about 10 days, and seeing many hundreds of thousands of fragments of the spacecraft (anywhere from thumb nail size to 6 feet long panels .... and intact fuel cells - still spewing) while ground marking (flagging/painting) over 40 one kilometer square blocks. We obviously had some nasty weather as well as rough terrain to work with. We did have as many as 20 other surveyors that volunteered to help us anywhere from 1 day to as many as 5 days ... Texas, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Louisiana and as far away as Indiana. I've never worked with a group of people (several hundred involved in the local area search - including county, state and federal agencies) that were as dedicated to reverently and efficiently taking on the challenges of a mission such as that.

As an aside, my buddy, Jeff, and I jokingly came up with a moniker for our little "department" ..... "Fast Action Response Team" .... we soon became affectionately dubbed "the FARTS) lol

That's a close as I ever got to a Space Shuttle. All I could think of back then was the terrible loss of lives, and do still to this day.

sorry for the ramble .... I do that ...


jd

[Armybrat]

That was a sad day indeed. Props to all of you on the recovery effort.

We hadn’t been back to NASA hq in almost 40 years, so when our English visitor expressed a desire to go tour the place last year we jumped right on it.

Awesome place if any of you have never been there....

[Armybrat]

More...

[mr surveyor]

that's some really good pics of history. I still can remember Alan Shepherd and Gus Grissom (and quite a few others) making history on the old snowy pictured black and white t.v.

Buried somewhere in a box, in a closet ..... I have a scrapbook of news articles related to the space race from the early 60's. I know I was absolutely fascinated by the whole program for a lot of years.


jd

[wyntrout]

I just posted this on FB... about the Shuttle Columbia landing on its carrier at Dyess AFB:

I remember this at Dyess and checked the dates in the past to find it was July 14/15, 1982. "July 14–15, 1982 Columbia, ferry flight from Edwards Air Force Base to Kennedy Space Center (via Dyess Air Force Base Abilene Texas) following landing of STS-4". It was memorable to me because it was my next to last flight in a D-model BUFF, #56-689 which is at the UK Imperial War Museum). We landed after a 10.5 hour mission and the security detail did NOT want us to taxi by the carrier and shuttle to our parking place. We had to sit in place for a while to let the Brass figure who had authority to "authorize" us to taxi and end our mission! Of course, NO one had a camera! I did get to look at it and see the re-entry burn marks and how it was flat black and crispied white. My flight record shows the date July 14, 1982. I had one more "D" flight the end of the month and then we started flying the H-model in August.