Bill's Sky

    The sky cleared off nicely tonight. NELM is about 4-5. I can just make out all seven stars of the little dipper. The  There does appear to be some particulates or a little moisture in the air. The skyglow is pretty bright, with bright light domes from Hamilton and Darby. I set up about 22:45MDT and did a SkyAlign using Vega, Polaris, and Spica.    My first target was M53 , a globular cluster in the constellation Coma Berenices . Using the 25mm Plossl eyepiece (81x) it appears as just a small fuzzy ball. Not able to make out any individual stars. There is a small triangular asterism just below and right of the custer in the eyepiece. Adding the 2x barlow gives 162x and I can occasionally make out some indiviual stars on the clusters periphery using averted vision. At this magnification the core is fairly bright and fades out to the edge. One of the things that makes M53 interesting is that it is one of the furtest known globular clusters.NASA shows it as 59,7...

     I am trying to take advantage of as many clear nights this year as I can. That doesn't always mean they are the best for observing, but just getting out and trying to learn and see more is very gratifying in itself. 2 May 2026  2 May was a day past the full Moon. I was curious about how bright it actually made the sky so I checked out the Starry Sky kit from the library to use the SQM (Sky Quality Meter). These are made by Unihedron and measure the sky in magnitude/arcsecond. It is an objective measurement as opposed to the subjective Bortle Scale that is widely used by amateur astronomers. The SQM uses the same magnitude scale that is used for stars. Therefore, the higher the number, the less bright the sky background is. The brighter the background sky glow, the lower the number. At 22:15 MDT the Moon was  about 40 degrees above the horizon. Standing in a spot shaded from moonlight by a tree, I got an average reading of  19.17 with the ...

The full Moon is tomorrow, tonights is at 98% full. I haven't bothered to look at it because this full there is low contrast with no shadows. Most features are harder to make out. Common wisdom is that there really isn't much to see like this. However, I had read that sometimes when the surface is this bright you can see hints of the faint mineral colors. Professional Astronomers use filters and processing images to bring out these faint colors.             " Even if the moon really were made of green cheese it probably wouldn’t look this bizarre. Still, this mosaic of 53 images was recorded by the Jupiter-bound Galileo spacecraft as it passed near our own large natural satellite in 1992. The pictures were recorded through three spectral filters and combined in an exaggerated false-color scheme to explore the composition of the lunar surface as changes in mineral content produce subtle color differences in reflected light. Image credit: NASA/JPL "...