I N F I N I T Y…………becky ramotowski

A couple of days ago I mentioned that Venus would be very near Neptune tonight.  And indeed it is! I made a quick and dirty image of the duo and have it posted above, just in case you were unable to view them.

Venus is the bright spiky one, and Neptune is the much fainter speck at Venus’ lower right.  Teeny little guy!  All the other specks are stars and Venus is spiky because of camera shutter effects. I also viewed Comet 21 P Giacobini-Zinner, and the planets Jupiter and Uranus and then checked out Orion,the Pleiades and Cygnus.  Oh, and I also watched Tiangong 1, the Chinese Space Laboratory as it flew over.  Tomorrow night I’m hoping to image Phobos Grunt as it makes some of it’s last passes around the globe before falling back through the Earth’s atmosphere.  It was 31 degrees outside while I was viewing and taking photos and a bit windy so it felt like the wind was taking bites out of me.  The freezing temp caused two of my camera batteries to die a rapid death, so I stopped.  It’s okay because the Moon is on the way up and is going to blast the sky with light.  This was a very good night!

Well, not exactly but if you’ve been keeping up with that failed soviet satellite, Phobos Grunt, then you know it failed to reach orbit shortly after launch last November and is “predicted” to fall back to Earth sometime within the next few days.  These things are a bit unpredictable, but the guys that track satellites are pretty darn good at what they do and most of them are saying it will decay and come back to Earth sometime around January 15.  Where will it fall?  That’s a good question, but some say it will re-enter the atmosphere somewhere over the South Pacific which means it will probably ditch in the ocean.

Stay tuned for more info and if you want to know when you might have a chance at seeing this satellite, just go to heavens-above .com and look under the Satellites heading for times.  The satellite is listed as Phobos Grunt.

If you live near the Albuquerque area our next viewing chance is Saturday evening around 5:45 PM.   Currently the satellite is predicted to pass near the bright star Saiph.  Saiph is a bright star just left and below the Orion Nebula which is below the three equally spaced belt stars.  Orion will be rising in the east and just above the Sandia Mountains at that time, so it should be visible.  I’m going to attempt a photograph as it passes through that area and will have my binoculars at the ready.  If you have any questions, feel free to e-mail me at astrobeck at gmail dot com and I’ll do all I can to help.  Good luck!

This is pretty exciting!  Venus and Neptune are neighbors this week and Thursday and Friday evenings are when they are closest to one another, so if you want to knock a couple of planets off your observing bucket lists, now’s the time.

Venus is uber bright high in the southwest after sunset, about magnitude  -3.9 while Neptune is a dim little speck at magnitude 8.  You can easily find Venus naked eye.  To snag Neptune you’ll need some good binoculars or a telescope to coax it into view.

The star map above is courtesy of Chris Peat who mans Heavens-above.com.  Chris does an outstanding job of keeping the site clean and extremely helpful to all of us astronomer types.

six months of recording the Sun’s track across the sky….made with a homemade pinhole camera.

After a few requests from out there in the blogosphere, I’ve created a page of my astronomy targets for 2012.  I do this every year just as a way to keep myself organized and somewhat on track for seeing some of the sky’s best offerings.  I get derailed easily since there are so MANY amazing things to see in the sky, so a list keeps me focused on some of the year’s most exciting events.

You can read the list by clicking on the page listed in the right hand column under the Pages heading that says Becky’s Astronomy Bucket list for 2012.

Let me know what you think!

Good Hunting!