A bird's nest in our front driveway light



Moonrise from DM04iu or DM04ju

The Transit of Venus as viewed on the road on the way to John and Trisha's Wedding.  2012 June 5, late afternoon in Central Texas.

The weather was not good.  We were in a major thunderstorm with hail warnings as we passed through Brady on the way to San Saba with only a few moments to go before the event started.  Thought about altering the route and going south, but decided to go into the teeth of it and hope to get some clearing later, but before sunset.

From several roadside stops and one gas station (Gatesville), got some reasonable views through the haze.  And some roadside flowers too.





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The partial eclipse of 2012 May 20 as viewed from Crescenta Valley Park during a one-week-late mother's day tea.



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Want to know where the International Space Station is?  Check here.

Want to know the next time you can see it in Pasadena, California?  List here.  Or you can use the previous link to do your own location.

What has to happen is that you on the ground have to be in the dark when the ISS is in sunlight above.  This means that you can only have these sightings an hour and a half or two before sunrise or after sunset.

The orbit forms a plane passing through the center of the earth and inclined 51.6 degrees to the equator.  Your piece of the earth has to be in twilight when the orbit is overhead and then the ISS has to pass through your portion of the orbit for you to see it.  The reason you can ever have sightings is because this plane "precesses" like a top precesses due to the non spherical bulge of the earth.  This means that the plane preccesses through the place that will make sightings possible for a particular location every several weeks.  During the "season" when the sightings can occur, there will be one or two per day on three or four successive days, after which you have to wait another few weeks until the orbit plane comes around again (or get up at 4 a.m., which I've never been able to do with gusto.

Note that your "maximum altitude" needs to be at least 20-30 degrees (depending on your neighborhood) for you to have a chance of seeing anything.  Better 60 degrees or more, especially if you want something obvious to show to a beginner, but those are somewhat rare.  Typically there's be about one in each 3-4 day visibility season.

What is really cool is when a progress supply ship or the space shuttle is nearby.  Due to the orbital mechanics, the visiting ships will seem to be ahead or behind the space station along its path, and a little different in brightness, but they are all easily visible.  I remember once seeing four in a row on such an opportunity.  There were 13 people in three space ships and an unmanned object all in one pass!

In amateur radio, we use predictions like this to work our satellites.  It doesn't matter what time of day so long as the radio works.  I have a friend whose goal was to see and hear a satellite at the same time.  I know this is possible but I've never done it.

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The triple conjunction of 2008 December 1.  The objects are too far apart for the telescope (see "lunar eclipse" next) so that's just a poor, handheld picture (still, best).  The visible planet is Venus.  To its right and slightly up is the dim smudge, Jupiter.



I did get a picture of the crescent moon through the telescope.
 

The lunar eclipse of 2008 February 20.  First astronomical image taken with the Orion SteadyPix.  (Low end mount for just some camera to just some telescope, using the wide field, lower power eyepiece on the Astroscan shown below and a Canon PowerShot A640.)



Pictures of the transit of the planet Mercury across the face of the sun.
2006 November 8, as viewed from southern California.



This is shortly after ingress.  I walked out to the car in the parking lot about 11:30 PST, set up the telescope (an Edmund Astroscan with sun projector) and got this.  The big spot in the middle is a prominence.  Mercury is the little spot to the left.



The telescope and my lunch.



Then I halued all my stuff except the telescope up to the JPL Amateur Radio Club meeting and gave my DSP-10 talk (same as at AMSAT in October 2006) for them.  Then I came back and set up the telescope again and got this mid-transit shot.  Mercury is the spot above the support post in the middle.  The smaller spot to its left is a flaw on the screen.  You can tell which is which in real time by bumping the telescope.  The features on the sun move around with the image, the flaws stay put with the screen.  That's the prominence there nearly off the picture to the right.



See how low the telescope is pointing this late in the afternoon?  The sun would set in the trees over by the horse trail towards Viro before the transit ended.

Members of the astronomy club set up safe and approved viewing scopes out on the mall to the east of the parking lot.  I walked past them three times going out to my own little scope.  The lines were long.  One guy in my [then] work group who had an inside to the Mt. Wilson helioscopes (because that's where he took data for his PhD) had several of the guys go up and see the transit on the big 17" image of the sun those scopes make.

Here is a link to a pretty cute animation.  By watching it you can see that my images are "inverted."

The next transit of Mercury is in 2016 but there is one of Venus in 2012.

My brief history of viewing transits.

There was a grazing transit of Mercury visible from the western U.S. on1999 November 15.  I observed it with the same telescope and in the same mode as shown above but did not have a good camera that day.

1970 May 9, the end of the first transit that I was aware of was to be visible near sunrise in Taylor, Texas.  I was 14 at the time and this was the event for which I built my first telescope (2-1/2" reflector from Edmund Scientific parts) with oatmeal box sun projector.  This was all tested and my friend Rob Aanstoos and I had seen prominences, that being a during a sunspot maximum.  We were ready to go that morning before light and had carried all this equipment on our bikes out to a place north of town with a good eastern horizon.  Sunrise was at 0630 local and the transit was to end around 0700.  We hoped to see egress -- contacts "3" and "4."  The sky was perfectly clear except for a cloud in the east about 30 minutes high.  By the time the sun finally emerged from that cloud it was all over.

There was another transit of Mercury on November 10, 1973.  At that time I lived in Hubbard, Texas but did not attempt viewing as it ended right before local sunrise.