A couple of good astro tools from the NY Times

Perseid meteor shower in 2015 from
Joshua Tree National Park. (NPS/Brad Sutton)

Happy New Year from Seattle Astronomy!

The New York Times has published a useful article and a nifty tool to kick off 2022. The article is a list of the year's meteor showers, with some background on the showers, how they form, and how to watch them. It's out just in time for the Quadrantid shower, peaking right about now.

The tool is a 2022 space and astronomy calendar that covers a variety of celestial shows and scheduled mission launches during the year. It's a simple, one-click process to subscribe and add the calendar to your own. Subscribe here or save the trouble and visit our events calendar from the menu above; we've already incorporated it into our listings.

Astronomy events inching back, COVID may have other ideas

After a year and a half of COVID quarantine that has limited personal contact of most sorts, including astronomy events, there's some evidence that northwest astronomy clubs are at least considering the notion of holding events at which humans gather together to look at the cool stuff in the sky.

Will astronomy events soon
resume at the UW and other
venues? Theodor Jacobsen
Observatory photo by Greg
Scheiderer.

The Seattle Astronomical Society held a star party for its members in Goldendale in May and has another on the calendar for September. Likewise the Rose City Astronomers in Portland have planned a similar event for their members. 

Now comes word that at least one club is calling its members back together. An email from the Everett Astronomical Society announces that it will hold an in-person meeting at 3 p.m. this Saturday, August 21, at the Evergreen Branch of the Everett Public Library. This has been their meeting spot for some years, and it's finally opening back up. The club has set its monthly meetings for the third Saturday of the month at least through the end of the year.

There will be some limitations. The email notes that, "With the highly-infectious COVID delta variant still circulating, we ask that attendees be vaccinated, or masked, or ideally both." It notes that they'll keep some spacing between seating, and adhere to any masking and other requirements that the library may establish.

Will other clubs follow suit?

The Seattle club may not be far behind. A notice for its scheduled online meeting next Wednesday, August 25, explains that, "We have a (sic) tentative plans for resuming in-person monthly gatherings in September pending regulations and safety." The SAS typically meets in the physics/astronomy auditorium of the UW in Seattle.

The Tacoma Astronomical Society also meets at a college but has not yet considered starting in-person gatherings, though there's hope the club can resume its popular public nights in late fall. The society is also providing telescopes for viewing for attendees of the "Jazz Under the Stars" concert series at Pacific Lutheran University.

Many other astronomy clubs are incommunicado on the subject. We found many in the area that have not done updates to their websites or Facebook pages since March 2020.

Astro material

Regular readers of this blog may have noted that we haven't published much in the last year and a half. Astronomy events have been a big part of what we've covered, and there just haven't been many. That dearth continues. The Museum of Flight is open for regular hours but many of its events remain online. The Pacific Science Center in Seattle and OMSI in Portland are also open only on a limited basis. Astronomy on Tap Seattle, since 2015 a reliable source for a monthly lecture or two, hasn't had an in-person event since February 2020. While they've held numerous online events in partnership with the UW Institute for Data Intensive Research in Astrophysics and Cosmology (DiRAC), it's just not the same without the beer. Town Hall Seattle is ramping up its schedule of lectures, but most of them at present remain online only. All of these have been great sources of live events that we've been happy to attend and share with you.

The wild card in all of this is the delta variant of the COVID virus and the recent surge in COVID cases and hospitalizations. Some guidelines around masking and gathering have already been made more restrictive, and there's some considerable possibility that the virus could force astronomy club activity to resume later rather than soon.

Two online author talks on the docket from Museum of Flight

The Museum of Flight has re-opened, albeit with some limitations in consideration of safety amid the COVID pandemic. The museum continues to offer online events as well, and a couple of author talks with space themes are on the calendar for the next couple of months.

Kellie Gerardi, author of Not Necessarily Rocket Science: A Beginners Guide to the Space Age (Mango, 2020), will talk about the book and non-traditional paths into today's commercial spaceflight industry during a talk at 11 a.m. on Saturday, April 10. Gerardi, whose work to promote citizen-science and inspire women in STEM has been featured across a broad range of media, shows us that humanity’s next giant leap will require the contributions of artists, engineers, and everyone in between. She will talk about this unique window in history and offer an inside look into the commercial spaceflight industry and all those working to democratize access to space and tee up a golden age of spaceflight for scientists, students, and tourists alike! There's more info, including instructions for viewing the event, on the museum website.

Dr. Teasel Muir-Harmony has penned a book titled Operation Moonglow (Basic Books, 2020). Muir-Harmony writes that the Apollo missions were more than just engineering and science, but also part of a broader geopolitical strategy to build alliances, win "hearts and minds," and secure superpower status during the Cold War. Muir-Harmony, who is the curator of the Apollo Collection at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum and teaches at Georgetown University, will talk about the book and the topic in an online event at 6 p.m. Thursday, June 3. There's more info, including instructions for viewing the event, on the museum website. Muir-Harmony is also the author of Apollo to the Moon: A History in 50 Objects (National Geographic, 2018).

You can pick up the books in advance by clicking the links or book covers above. As an Amazon Associate, Seattle Astronomy earns a small commission from qualified purchases, which supports our storytelling efforts.

Delayed gratification for achievement in astronomy

I recently received a certificate and pin acknowledging my completion of the Astronomical League Urban Observing Program. The Astronomical League is an umbrella organization supporting local astronomy clubs and promoting astronomy outreach and education. It has more than 70 different observing programs that create challenges and add structure for amateur astronomers in their observations.

I got interested in the programs after seeing a presentation about them by former Seattle Astronomical Society member Burley Packwood, who has completed a dozen or more of the programs and really touted their value for getting observers out under the stars and not just looking at the same old things.

I decided to give it a try and picked the Urban Observing Program for obvious reasons. I do the vast majority of my observing in the backyard of Seattle Astronomy headquarters in West Seattle, Washington, where it's not only cloudy all the time but also meets the program's requirement that observations be made from light-polluted skies, defined in this case as "any skies where you cannot see the Milky Way with the unaided eye."

The program has a list of one hundred celestial objects that can be spotted from places like West Seattle, though many of them are extremely difficult. Galaxies in particular are challenging. It's often tough to tease out M31, the Andromeda Galaxy, much less some of the smaller, fainter fuzzies. In my observing notes I often referred to my target object as "just a smudge," and often went back out the next night to try to see it again and confirm that the smudge wasn't just where a mosquito sneezed on the optics!

The observing was fun even though, and maybe even because, it was challenging. I completed the observations what I perceived to be a few years ago, but never got around to organizing the observing notes that the paperwork for the program award. Then a few weeks ago the new issue of Reflector, the Astronomical League's magazine, arrived in my mailbox. It made me think that getting that stuff submitted would be a nice little social distancing project. Turns out I made that last of the one hundred observations BACK IN 2011! The first came in 2006, so I spent 14 years on the project, the last nine of which were completely inactive. If there was a certificate for procrastination, I might be in the running.

I had to drop Packwood a note about my achievement. He responded that he is the point person with the Astronomical League for the Sonora Astronomical Society in Green Valley, Arizona where he now lives. He noted that he still has "a lot of respect for those programs" and that he "always learned something when I worked my way through an award."

Packwood, by the way, is a talented astrophotographer who was recently featured in this article from the Green Valley News.

Get out there and look at the stars. You could win a major award!

Optimism in amateur astronomy

I am an optimist by nature, but this sunny disposition is often greatly challenged by one of my chosen hobbies in amateur astronomy. There's a lot that can happen to foil your best laid plans for a night of observing, especially when you live in a major urban center with a marine climate that is hell-bent on throwing clouds your way about 98 percent of the time.

Perhaps that last statement wasn't entirely optimistic. Yet I enjoyed a couple of clear nights of observing on Monday and Tuesday this week, and with a good weather forecast for Wednesday I set out to improve my views of Mars for that evening's session.

This involved a trek out to Ballard for a visit to Cloud Break Optics, where proprietor Stephanie Anderson was able to set me up with a set of planetary filters that could well improve my observations of Mars.

My new set of planetary filters.

I have not been much of a filter user in my astronomical observations. Up until this week I only owned one filter, a 13-percent Moon filter that tones down the light reflected by Luna. Without it, viewing the Moon through a telescope can be downright uncomfortable. Still, I'm always willing to try new things, and Stephanie set me up with a Mars Observing Kit made by Celestron. The kit included four filters: an #80A blue filter that can enhance views of surface features and polar ice caps; a #56 green filter that improves contrast for polar caps, low clouds, and dust storms; a #25 red filter can darken the seas on Mars while lightening its orange deserts; and a special Mars filter that combines the features of the red and blue filters. It also included a Barlow lens that doubles the magnification of any eyepiece you use in observing. I already had one of those, but will soon hold a competition to find out which is better.

The weather held as predicted on Wednesday, though as I made my way home from Cloud Break Optics I noticed some ominous clouds off to the west and, in another example of shaken optimism, immediately recalled the old adage that buying new astronomy gear means bad weather for weeks. It's sort of like rain being caused by washing your car. I am occasionally chided for passing along "weather superstitions" (most recently when I blamed my putting up the lights on our deck umbrella for causing rain). Some say they're not useful or helpful. Nevertheless, I think they're true.

I gave my new filters a test and could tell right away they worked. The glare of a super-bright Mars was greatly reduced, making more detail visible. It was a little strange looking at green, hot pink, blue, or purple Mars after years of seeing the unfiltered orange/red version, but I'll get used to that soon enough. The bad news was that while the details of Mars became a bit more prominent, it was difficult to really make them out because even though the sky was clear the viewing conditions were atrocious. The seeing, though not as poor as it was Monday, wasn't great. The transparency was truly awful because of high moisture in the atmosphere. So while I could see a bit more detail on Mars, I had a decidedly muddy view of what the details actually might be. The moisture was bad enough that pretty early on in my viewing session my optics, including my new filters, collected a heavy layer of dew that brought my work for the night to an end.

I remain undaunted. As I write this in the early afternoon on Friday, the sky is mostly clear, with a little haze off to the west. As an optimist, my telescope is still by the back door, not down in the corner of the basement where it sits for months waiting for the clouds to clear. I'm planning another shot at Mars for tonight.