A gorgeous day yesterday, temps in the eighties and nary a breeze or discouraging word. Great day turned into great night and I hauled the telescope out on the deck to take in all of the planetary action. Saturn and Venus glowing brightly in the west with the Moon and Jupiter hanging out overhead.
It's always fun to look at the moon, especially if you haven't done so recently. Such a brilliant, pock-marked sphere. I took a photo for you, it's down at the bottom of this entry.
Even with the Moon shinning brightly Jupiter was pretty cool. The bands were quite distinct and the moons visible as you can see in the photo I took. The moons reminded me of the book Longitude and how Galileo proposed using the moons of Jupiter to determine time and thus correlate it to a longitudinal position (great book, btw). A little tough to do on a boat, at night, or in bad weather.
Note: you may need to turn contrast up to see all three moons
The bottom image is from Starry Night, which runs on OS X and is really a great little program. It regularly updates its database and thus it shows Comet Bradfield in the early morning sky.
It was such a nice night that I decided to leave the telescope in place and sleep out on the deck. Maybe wake up in time to catch the comet? Out comes the inflatable mattress a bunch of blankets and a grumbly old dog. See, Zeke doesn't like sleeping out on the deck. Not when there's a comfortable mattress inside. Why bother?
Begrudgingly he'll lay down on the mattress, sighing and groaning, making it clear to everyone that this isn't the way to treat a dog. I snuggle in under the covers, watch the sky for a little bit and fall off to sleep.
I never really sleep when I sleep on the deck. It's more of a study in sleep moments. Fall asleep, wake up to realize you'd fallen asleep, fall back asleep, wake to find the cat bouncing around on the air mattress, fall asleep, wake to sorrowful sigh as the dog rolls over, asleep, awake from the air mattress sucking all of the heat from my body, asleep, awake...noisy star twinkling, and so forth.
At the magic hour, 3:30, everyone wakes up. The cat and dog are standing expectantly at the screen door, "Enough of this, let us in!"
So we all go inside, tumble into bed (surely waking Faith) and fall back to sleep, except for the cat who's decided it's a perfect time to clean between her toes. At 5:00 I wake up but it's too late, the horizon is starting to glow and is ringed in scruffy clouds, not a sign of comet to be found.
Ah, but here's that moon I promised...
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Cool!