Has a December full moon and a Santacon parade in sub-freezing weather all taken place on one day? Not in my memory! It was after 9 p.m. when the moon, Jupiter and Aldebaran lined up in the constellation Taurus, and the crowds of revelers were thinning out, except for two guys who almost poured their beers down inside the telescope while leaning over to get a look. They told me I should have a bottle opener attached to the tube...
The one that blossomed yesterday evening in the cool air was a beautiful prelude to a magical night in which the day-after Full Moon chased the planet Saturn across the heavens ... and it was not easy to get both of them into a single photo.
Saturn, at about 1 billion miles away, was a tiny jewel whose rings will flatten out by next April, and then it starts a new seven-year cycle of widening.Billed by Space News as an occultation, but not in New York City at ground level. And not everyone who stopped by could see the rings, only those who have taken care of their vision health.
After a long month of almost non-stop clouds and rain, the crowds came out for this afternoon's stupendous 120,000-mile wide cluster of sunspots. Lucky for us, it was not pointing directly at the U.S. when the coronal mass ejection (CME) erupted. Stay tuned for an almost-total eclipse of the Sun on April 8, and lets hope for another clear day!
Aquarius is low in the sky, and the glare from the streetlights on East Third Street made it very difficult to make out Saturn, some 800 million miles distant. Thanks to everyone who stopped by...
Waning crescent Moon and very close by, the Pleiades in the constellation Taurus, high over East Third Street at 4 a.m. on Wednesday.All Seven Sisters could clearly be seen, especially if you blocked the glare from the Moon, but only three of them showed up in the photos.
For about an hour this afternoon, while the bright sun was still in the sky, and before the cloud banks covered it over, there was an unobstructed view of the active sunspot regions that have appeared this month.
The full Beaver Moon of November 2021 passed through Earth's shadow in a partial lunar eclipse overnight on Nov. 18-19 in what was the longest eclipse of its kind in 580 years.And this was obviously a big event for Felton Davis of the Second Avenue Star Watchers.
After a long, cold and drizzly night, the clouds over 2nd Avenue finally parted, revealing a slow eclipse of the Moon that was already in progress. Three or four times from 3:15 to 4:30 a.m., the Moon disappeared behind the clouds, and came back out, and each time I had to reset the (icy cold!) telescope ... and take a few photos.
Venus and the Moon were low over the Avenue tonight, and disappeared behind Avalon and the Public Hotel soon after sunset.The top pic shows the view from Second Avenue and Third Street ... while the shot below is what people saw through the telescope he had set up on the corner (click on the images for a better view!) ...
Crystal-clear blue sky this afternoon, for an unusually large sunspot left of center, but the attempt to angle my aging telescope almost straight up was very difficult. Joanne stayed the course through about 45 minutes of agonizing adjustments, and then the sun promptly disappeared behind the clouds. The sunspot was approximately 8,000 miles in diameter, or a hundredth of the diameter of the sun.... and a view of the sunspot...
Amazing lineup of planets setting in the southwest this week: the sun in Ophiuchus setting at 4:30 pm, Saturn in Ophiuchus setting at 4:55 pm, Mercury in Sagittarius setting at 5:34 pm, Pluto in Sagittarius setting at 6:56 pm, Venus in Sagittarius setting at 7:30 pm, Mars in Capricorn setting at 9:30 pm, and Neptune in Capricorn setting at 11:19 pm. What a spectacle for people viewing over the Hudson from High Line Park or from Battery Park.
What does that leave for Second Avenue Star Watchers? It leaves a nice four-day old waxing crescent Moon about seven degrees north of Venus in the constellation Capricorn, and if it doesn't cloud over, later in the evening the famous Pleiades star cluster rising high in the heavens between Aries and Taurus.
If it stays clear I'll set up outside The Bean (East Third Street & Second Avenue) at 5:30 pm to show the Moon going down, but don't get your hopes up for the Pleiades, because that one is difficult to spot from the street.
