Space Station and Venus

The International Space Station was visible from Bonaire on Wednesday and Thursday evenings this week. On Wednesday, it passed quite close to Venus. In this video, Venus is the bright object to the right of the four palm trees. The ISS pops into view to the left of Venus at about 5 seconds into the video clip. The ISS gets quite close to Venus and then they both disappear behind clouds. The ISS emerges from the clouds first, and then finally Venus is visible again. The light down low on the left side among the tree trunks is an airplane headed to the Flamingo Airport.

Here is a link to the file on YouTube.

Moon and Planets Tuesday Evening

The sky was pretty clear tonight, so I zoomed to the beach and snapped the Moon, Venus, Regulus, and Mercury making a nice line in the sky.




The five stars to the right and upper right of Regulus form the Sickle, which is also the head of Leo the lion.

Moon and Venus on Monday night

The Moon was a little below Venus last night. It was a nice view. 

 

Tonight the Moon is to the upper left of Venus. If you start at the Moon, pass through Venus, that line will continue to the star Regulus and then on to Mercury.

 

Here is the view from last night.

 

Moon, Planets and Milky Way

The super skinny Moon will be right next to Mercury tonight, at least as seen from Bonaire. (if the skies are clear) Mercury is to the left of the Moon. Venus shines up above the Mercury-Moon pair. The Moon will move up closer to Venus by Sunday night, July 15.

 

Here is a Milky Way panorama I shot last week after the rains cleared the dust out of the skies for a day or two.  Not sure how it will look downsized here.  The original file would print about four feet wide at 300 dots per inch. If I ever shoot this again, I'll try getting closer to the huts so they don't end up so teeny tiny in the image.

 

That's Mars coming up to the right of the red light on the horizon.  The red light at the top of a radar tower.  The Southern Cross is at the far right.  The Northern Cross is at the far left.

 

Kibrahacha Trees 2018

I shot a zillion Kibrahacha tree photos over the last two days. I haven't even inspected them all yet. Here in no particular order, is a short selection of images so far.

Kibrahachas Are on the Way

Following the big rains on Sunday, we've been eagerly anticipating the blooming of the Kibrahacha trees.

There is a lot of yellow on the hills of Sabadeco and the ones east of Antriol. I haven't been up north but hopefully those trees will all bloom too. I think tomorrow will be awesome.

Right now the flowers haven't quite popped yet.

Vesta July 2

We had 1.75 inches of rain on Sunday, the first real good rain in months. It may have washed some of the Sahara dust out of the sky because the sky was pretty clear Monday night, at least in the South where we wanted to see the Milky Way. Most of the rest of the sky was murky.  I never did see the North star for example.

But we were able to see, from west to east: Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, and Mars.

Here is a shot of the summer Milky Way showing where the asteroid Vesta has moved to. That is a cloud at the top left.  This is a much wider shot than the one I posted a week or so ago.

Another look at Vesta from June 18

Here is a wider view of the Milky Way, were the asteroid Vesta was hanging out last Monday. I labeled a bunch of the cool things that we were looking at with the binoculars.


I also drew a red line to about where Vesta should be tonight


Oops - That bright blob labeled Jupiter is really Saturn!



The Pipe Nebula is a dark nebula created by foreground dust that is obscuring the background stars. If you look at this whole image upside down, like you would be seeing it in Australia, you'll see that the pipe forms the head of the Kiwi figure.



I use the pipe nebula to gauge how clear the sky is. If I can make out the pipe shape with my naked eye, the "seeing" is as good as it gets here.

Asteroid Vesta

The second largest asteroid, Vesta, is "close" to the Earth right now, as it orbits the Sun. Kind of like Mars will be at the end of July. They say that it can just barely be detected with the naked eye right now. Well, the sky was clear last Monday, so we zoomed out to a dark site to see what we could see. 

 

The moonlight was interfering until it set around 23:30. Then the clouds swarmed in. So we didn't get to see Vesta with the naked eye. We observed it in binoculars though. I snapped a couple pictures with the zoom lens at about 200mm. You'll need to click on the thumbnails to see much of anything in these images. 

 

The darker picture is a 58 second long exposure and shows fainter stars than we could see in the binoculars. The lighter picture is 96 seconds long and is starting to show the Milky Way star clouds. By now, Vesta will have moved towards the upper right side of the frame. If we ever get a cloud free night, I'll want to check it out again.

 

Oh, and that clump of stars to the upper left of Vesta is M23.

 

Mini Moon

 

The moon was "new" yesterday afternoon, so I was curious to see if I could see a moon sliver tonight. There was quite a bit of haze, but no clouds, and I was able to spot it. The Moon is a little easier to see in the photos than it was with the naked eye.

Sunrise Video Clip

Here is a short time-lapse sequence of the sunrise this morning.

Sunrise

I went out this am to get a sunrise sequence, based on yesterday's scouting trip.

I'll eventually have a 4 second time-lapse video. Here is an individual frame.

Moon Pix

While I was out taking pictures of Jupiter and Zubenelgenubi last week, I also took a few of the moon. I used the phone and a pair of binoculars on Wednesday night and the telescope and a camera on Thursday night.

I guess it is no surprise that the telescope and camera did better, but it was sure fun to mess with the phone and binoculars. Sometime I'll have to try the phone and the telescope.

With some work, both night's images could be made better, but there would probably always be a difference because of the difference in the raw images..

Jupiter and Alpha Librae part 2

I got the telescope out last night to take another look at Jupiter and alpha Librae. They just barely fit within the field of view of the f10 scope. Jupiter is at the top left of the frame and Zubenelgenubi a and b are at the bottom right of the frame.

For the second image, I centered Jupiter in the frame and cropped the heck out of the image so the moons were more visible. The top right moon is Callisto, Europa is between Callisto and Jupiter. And then during the time i was out there, Ganymede popped out below Jupiter.

That is what i like about observing Jupiter, one can watch the moons orbit around the planet, which by the way, was the beginning of the end for the theory that the Earth was the center of the Universe.

 

Jupiter and Alpha Librae

Jupiter is hanging our right next to Alpha Libra these nights. Alpha Librae is also known as Zubenelgenubi.  a-Librae is an easy binocular double star.

 

So last night I connected my cell phone to my binoculars to see what I could see. You can see Jupiter and some of its moons on the left side of the frame and a-1 and a-2 Librae on the right side of the frame.

 

I'm also going to include a screen shot from the Stellarium software. It identifies which of Jupiter's moons are which. The moon below Jupiter is lost in the glare of the planet. It looks like you'll need to click on the pictures to see the whole frames.

 

Radio World Article about TWR Bonaire

The May 9 issue of Radio World magazine has a well rounded story about the new TWR Bonaire transmitter.  You can read it here.

There are quotes from TWR President Lauren Libby, from Nautel, the TX manufacturer, and from Tom King of Kintronic Labs, who designed and built the antenna tuning systems.  They even have a picture of me in there, and used one of my night time shots, (not this one.)

Be sure to check it out.

Moon and Venus

The Moon and Venus made a nice pair in the evening sky last night. 

Here are a couple shots.

Those streaks aren't UFOs. I think there is some goop on the lens.

Moon, Saturn and Mars line up

From top to bottom, the Moon, Saturn and Mars were lined up nicely in the pre-dawn sky this morning. By tomorrow, the moon will be to the lower left of the planets.

 

I shot this with a 85mm lens so we are looking more "zoomed in" than my previous shots made with a 35mm lens. The darker picture is a short exposure so that the moon isn't blown out.

 

The longer exposure shows more stars. I labeled some of the Messier objects in the frame. Most of them have cool names in addition to their "M" numbers. You can Google them if you'd like to see more.

 

Big Fire

It appears that there was a pretty big fire east of Antriol, here on Bonaire, this morning

 

While I was watching the thick black smoke started changing to grey and white, which I took to be a good sign.

 

Planets Update

Mercury is gone from the evening sky, but Venus is impressive.

 

In the pre-dawn sky, Mars has been "zooming" to the East and is closing in on Saturn. They will be even closer on Monday-ish.

 

Here is a shot from 05:45 this morning. The lines point to Saturn, on the left. Mars, in the middle, and on the right is where Mars was 10 days ago, right between the Lagoon Nebula and the Triffid Nebula. I have a picture of that too, but it is grainy.

 

On this shot, I drew in the Teapot of Sagittarius. To the right of the spout, open cluster M7 is quite visible with fainter M6 to its upper right.