Seattle Astronomy turns nine; our favorite stories of the year

We’ve been at this for nine years now! The first post on Seattle Astronomy happened January 11, 2011. It’s been a fun ride! On our birthday we’re looking back on our favorite stories of the last 12 months.

Moon landing anniversary

The big story of 2019 was the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11 and the first human landing on the Moon. We had quite a lot of activity around the anniversary. The best had to be the Destination Moon exhibit at the Museum of Flight, which included the command module Columbia that carried Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins to the Moon and back. We wrote about the Seattle exhibit, and were fortunate enough to have seen it in St. Louis during the summer of 2018.

We did a series of talks about the Moon landing for Tacoma Public Libraries, reviewed Dr. David Warmflash‘s fine book Moon: An Illustrated History (Sterling, 2019), made a lunar reading list, and heard an interesting talk by UW astronomy professor Toby Smith about an almost accidental discovery from Apollo 11 that gave us new insight about the formation of the Moon.

AAS visits Seattle

Every four years the American Astronomical Society meets in Seattle, and 2019 was one of those years. Our favorite session of the meeting was a talk by Yale astronomy professor Gregory Laughlin about ‘Oumuamua, the strange interstellar visitor that whizzed through our solar system in late 2018. Our article also included information from  Ka’iu Kimura, executive director of the ‘Imiloa Astronomy Center in Hilo, Hawaii, about how objects discovered by instruments on the islands are being given Hawaiian names.

We’d love to cover more such events even when they’re not held in Seattle. Your support with a subscription through Patreon can help bring that about. Please consider contributing; even a dollar a month will bring us closer to being able to support travel to events of interest to the astronomy community.

Meeting David Levy

Seattle Astronomy's Greg Scheiderer (left) visited with
comet hunter David H. Levy at the Seattle Astronomical
Society banquet Jan. 27, 2019. Photo: Greg Scheiderer.

The year started off well with a chance to chat with David Levy, author and comet discoverer who was the keynote speaker at the annual banquet of the Seattle Astronomical Society last January. Levy gave an engaging talk about his life and his love of astronomy and writing.

This year’s SAS banquet is coming up on January 25. The guest speaker will be meteorologist and astrophotographer Kerry-Ann Lecky Hepburn, who has had a number of her shots featured on Astronomy Picture of the Day.

Observing highlights

Our final two favorite stories of the year involve a couple of observing opportunities, one of which was successful, the other maybe only kind of so!

Back on January 20, 2019 there was a total lunar eclipse. Contrary to our usual weather in January, we got a clear evening and the eclipse was visible from Seattle. It was a good show! The next total lunar eclipse possibly visible from Seattle will be in May of 2021.

The semi-successful observation was a try at a rare transit of Mercury across the face of the Sun on November 11, 2019. In our story we describe waiting out a possible look at the transit through insistently cloudy skies that morning. Finally there was a Sun break, just minutes before the transit was to end. I thought I caught a fleeting glimpse of Mercury just before it cleared the Sun’s disk, but then, Mercury being speedy of foot, was gone. I and a group of interested folks to gathered at Seacrest Park had fun anyway. We successfully viewed a Mercury transit from there in 2016. The next visible from Seattle won’t happen until 2049.

That’s our recap of the year. We look forward to our tenth anniversary celebration 12 months hence!

Total lunar eclipse visible from Seattle

Seattle astronomy buffs are downright pessimistic about seeing celestial events, even those that happen during our good-weather months. (And we have them.) Thus in the week before the total lunar eclipse of January 20, 2019, I posted this on the Seattle Astronomy Facebook page.

Amazingly enough, at about mid-day on eclipse day the clouds actually did begin to part a little, and a check of the Seattle Clear Sky Chart revealed a prediction that we’d have just 30 percent cloud cover come eclipse hour, and that it would be downright clear late in the evening.

One learns not to trust these things, but when the full Moon actually got up above the trees and into a clear sky out back of Seattle Astronomy headquarters, I decided this was going to happen and hauled the telescope out of the basement and onto the back deck. As the eclipse began I snapped a quick photo in order to express my amazement.

The shadow of Earth is moving across the Moon and we can SEE it in Seattle! pic.twitter.com/xgt4oF2RpH

— Seattle Astronomy (@SeattleAstro) January 21, 2019

I am not an astrophotographer, as people who evaluate the entries for the Seattle Astronomical Society‘s quarterly photo contest always remind me. This one was shot with my smartphone, though when using it with the telescope I find it devilishly difficult to get the proper aim through the eyepiece (must pick up one of those gadgets from Cloud Break Optics soon.) My other “astro” camera is an old Canon Powershot A530, which is pretty easy to just stick up to the eyepiece and shoot.

I used the phone to get a pretty OK, if somewhat pixellated, pic at totality, too.


Interestingly enough, I found that the color of the “blood Moon” wasn’t quite so pronounced through the telescope and camera is it was in my naked-eye view. I think the magnification diffuses the color a bit, and the camera isn’t really made for that sort of work.

Even my sweetie, who is not normally prone to looking through telescopes at night in January, or any other month, for that matter, went out quite a few times for a magnified look, and we both spent most of the eclipse watching from a warm environment inside behind the glass of the French doors.

I hope you got a chance to see the eclipse wherever you were. The next one visible in Seattle will happen in May of 2021.