On Sunday, I participated in the Great World Wide Star Count. The idea is to track light pollution and get people (especially kids) stargazing. They ask you to look at either Cygnus (northern hemisphere) or Sagittarius (southern hemisphere) about an hour of two after sunset, and match what you can see against a set of charts. Each chart shows the sky with only stars at a certain magnitude or brighter. The website has activity guides in various languages.

I was actually surprised I could see more stars than I expected once I let my eyes get dark-adapted. It’s been unusually clear over the last few days, though it looks like that’s coming to an end. Of course, the magnitude 4 stars were only barely visible, and the sky never quite seems to get black here.

The event runs from October 1–15, so there’s only 4 nights left! Get out there, and take a look at the stars!

I watched as the crescent shrank to a sliver, and finally the moon was shaded dark red to dull red to light red to a much dimmer white than usual. The deeper reds slowly spread across its face, edging out the brighter colors near the edge of the Earth’s shadow.

I brought my cheesy little digital camera, and took some photos. It promptly started warning me the battery was low, and I had to dig around in the dark to find the spare. I think this is the best of the pictures, as far as showing the eclipsed moon itself goes:

Eclipsed Moon, 3:13 AM

Earlier in the evening I was testing different shutter settings. I thought this photo from the floor of the balcony turned out interesting:

Yes, that’s lit by moonlight (in a long exposure).

OK, I’m going out to take one last look at the moon (I think I heard the downstairs neighbors’ door open a few minutes ago, so at least I’m not the only one up for this) and then go back to bed. I’ll look through my photos again tomorrow and post anything else that looks good.

Update: Here’s a shot from deeper in totality, just after the mid-point of the eclipse:

Eclipsed Moon, 3:40 AM

And here’s the Pleiades, which I spotted when I turned around and looked up. A far cry from this, but hey, I figured I was doing pretty well to be getting photos of stars with this type of camera in the first place.

I think the last time I saw the Pleiades, Hyades, Taurus and Orion in August, I was something like 14 and on a trip with my scout troop to do whitewater rafting. We slept out under the stars and I just happened to wake up at 3 in the morning.

OK, sleep is calling to me. Signing off…

Update 2: After I went to bed, I realized that I shouldn’t have dismissed my idea of scrounging up some film and pulling my manual SLR camera out of the closet. Between the better optics, more shutter control, and an actual telephoto lens, I probably would have gotten considerably better pictures. I just don’t think we have any rolls of film lying around that haven’t expired, and I didn’t want to run out at 11:00 to get some. Ah, well. Something to think about for next time.

Also, I realized that these blurry pictures look kind of like a Moon-sized version of Mars. Hmm, that might confuse some people.

Update 3: You have to check out Thursday’s APOD: an incredible telescopic image of the moon taken during totality.

I mean, I should be able to walk outside and look out at a blood-red moon… at 3:00 in the morning.

*grrr*

(links via BA Blog)

Update: Ah, the wonders of text search and delayed indexing. It seems that lots of people are searching for the phrase, “eclipse tomorrow,” leading to a spike in hits to this entry from last March… even though today’s post would be a more appropriate destination.

Update 2: I went for it. Here’s my write-up.

This background (which only seems to show up on the solo post page) is a clip from a photo posted as the August 12 Astronomy Picture of the Day. It’s my current desktop wallpaper on my Windows box at work. And it’s got about a zillion times as many stars as I usually get to see at night.

Back when I was a teen, I was in Boy Scouts, and we went camping almost once a month. At home, in a suburban housing tract, I could see the major constellations, and I remember once just managing to pick out the fainter stars of Orion’s head, arms and club from my bedroom window. But out in the desert, you could see thousands of stars. In summer, you could see the Milky Way. I don’t think I’ve ever seen it from a city of any size. One summer camp at Lost Valley I went out into one of the meadows with a tripod and my SLR camera to try my hand at amateur astral photography. I got some pictures of Scorpio and Sagittarius, and I really should try to figure out where they ended up.

A few nights ago I stood out on our apartment balcony, looking up at the sky. I could see only a handful of stars, and one of them was Jupiter. Even knowing it was in Scorpio, I could spot maybe one or two stars. Tonight was a bit better, even with the waxing moon. I set out a blanket so I could lie down and let the sides of the balcony block out the lighting from walkways and other apartments, though it couldn’t do much for the moon or the slowly developing cloud layer.

The best view of the stars I’ve had recently was two years ago, on our trip to the Big Island of Hawaii. On the day we visited Kilauea, we drove back across the desolate lava fields of Ka‘u at night, and stopped the car by the side of the road for a few minutes just to look at the sky.

I think it’s time to go camping again. Somewhere out in the desert or mountains. Somewhere without all the haze and light we have here.

Notes on style: I used Trevor Creech’s Per-Post CSS Plugin to assign the background and appropriate foreground colors on this post. I originally tried it with inline styles on a div, which worked, but left the links illegible. Also, I’ve enhanced it using the CSS3 border-radius and box-shadow for browsers that support it. Unfortunately Gecko doesn’t trim the curved corners off the background image, so right now that’s just the Safari 3 beta and Webkit nightlies.

As the freeway twisted and turned, and we went through areas full of houses, retail centers, and trees, we lost and regained sight of it. The moon illusion was in full effect, making it look huge, plus the bottom edge was flattened, just like the sun at sunset—only you can look at the moon much longer. (Well, except when you’re driving.)

It rose through a bank of clouds or haze, climbing through dark bands, and slowly turned from orange to yellow, then turned paler. By the time we got home at 10:00, it had assumed its normal circular shape (with a tiny bit shaved from the upper right, since it was a day past full), and didn’t look particularly bigger than usual.

We don’t get to see the moon so close to the horizon very often. For one thing there are mountains to the east, but more importantly there are buildings all around. As we saw with the drive home, it doesn’t take much height to block the horizon from view. By the time we got home, roughly an hour past moonrise, it was just visible over the tops of the nearby buildings from our balcony.

Interestingly, the map of where the eclipse will be visible manages to cover the major land masses almost exactly. The only region that won’t see it at all is the Pacific Ocean.

(via SANS ISC)

My parents gave me a flexible mini-tripod for Christmas, and it proved very helpful here, as there was nowhere flat where I could set the camera and still get a good view. I ended up coiling it around a stair railing, which held the camera in place long enough to get a decent exposure.

I seriously thought about pulling my SLR camera out of the closet and seeing whether I had any film for it, but ultimately decided against it.