Skies are  clear for public observing tonight, starting at about 7pm, and we’ll have the usual planetarium shows at 6pm and 7pm.   Tonight is also a good night to stay late for viewing Leonids, if the skies stay clear.  There were predictions that there might be a mini-”storm” in Asia today (this afternoon Eastern Time), which I think led to some over-hyping in the media about this year’s shower (it’s odd what the media chooses to latch on to with regards to astronomy news), but I haven’t heard any reports yet about bursts.  People watched the shower this morning, and the rates weren’t stronger than average (I stayed up until about 2:30 doing some work with the telescope, and I saw two meteors over about 20 minutes of watching).  The rates tonight should be about the same.  At least the weather is unseasonably warm, so that sitting outside viewing is reasonably pleasant (I remember freezing to death in the New Mexico desert for the 1999 shower).

I did take some interesting all-sky photos last night with the fish eye lens from our planetarium projector:

And I also tried some wide-field photograph with one of our new CCD cameras.  Here’s a very quick image of the belt of Orion, with the light pollution subtracted off:

Both of these cameras could make for some interesting student projects.  If I get any good photos of Leonids tonight, I’ll post them here.

I was interviewed recently by Ray Bendici for the “Damned CT” blog about astrology, astronomy, and the situation of the Leitner Planetarium.  Here’s the interview:  http://www.damnedct.com/damned-interview-michael-faison/

Happy Tuesday, everyone.  The observatory and planetarium is open to the public tonight, starting with the show “Two Small Pieces of Glass” at 6pm and then “Black Holes” at 7pm.  The skies do not look clear for tonight, so we will not have public observing tonight.  However, we will be raffling off a couple of Galileoscopes to students at the planetarium shows again.

We had hoped to debut our new show about Yale astronomy, “Tour of the Universe,” but I have underestimated the amount of time it takes to produce a show during the semester, especially one that is video intensive.  We definitely will have a new show for the Winter Solstice holidays which will be shown on Dec. 15 and Dec. 22, and after the winter break, we will have another show to debut to replace our 2nd Tuesday show (in case you are getting sick of “Black Holes!”).   Thanks for bearing with us!

A few people have asked me if the Leitner Observatory is going to do something for the Leonids meteor shower that peaks on the night of Nov. 17…   That’s a Tuesday night, so we will have a regular public night along with public observing if the skies are clear, but the observatory is actually not a very good place to watch a meteor shower.  To view a meteor shower, you want to go some place where the skies are dark, where you can see as much of the sky as possible, and you want to start your viewing after midnight.  You don’t want to look through a telescope during a meteor shower, because you’ll miss the meteors that are flashing all over the sky.

The sky isn’t very dark up at LFOP, and we also have a lot of trees around the horizon (especially to the south and to the northeast).  It would be better to go out to a suburban (or even better, rural) soccer field somewhere for viewing the meteors, anywhere where the sky is darker.  You have to start your viewing after midnight because after midnight, the earth will have turned around so that you can see the direction in which the earth is orbiting.  (If you are riding in a car during a rain storm, you’ll see more drops of rain hit the front windshield of the car than the back, and likewise we see more meteors when we look in the direction in which the earth is orbiting.)

There are several of these annual meteor showers throughout the year as the earth hits the dust trails of different comets.  Most them are not particularly rich, however, and on any given night you are almost as likely to see a random, stray meteor as you are to see one from an annual shower.  However, there are two that are fairly rich: the Perseids shower that peaks on the night of August 11 and the Leonids shower that peaks on Nov. 17, both of which tend to have a rate of 100-120 meteors per hour.  The Leonids sometimes will show a brief burst of meteors, as happened in 2001.  (There is some chance that there could be a small burst this year, but it will not be visible from North America.)  It’s especially worth trying to watch the shower if the moon is below the horizon, as will happen this year for the Leonids.

So, dress warmly, make a thermos of hot chocolate, and take a lawn chair out some place where the sky is dark after midnight on the morning of Nov. 18 (but not to the Leitner Observatory).  Within a few hours you might see up to a few hundred meteors.  The ones that streak across the sky from the northeast (appearing to come from the constellation of Leo the lion) are Leonids, remnants of Comet Tempel-Tuttle.

Hello all.  Today was a beautiful day, and it should be clear tonight, so we will have the telescopes open for public observing after Bob Crelin’s talk tonight at 7pm on the phases of the moon.  This talk is based on Bob’s children’s book about the moon, and it should be fantastic.  After the talk, we’ll be looking at (of course) the full moon and Jupiter through telescopes.

There will also be a regular planetarium show, “Two Small Pieces of Glass,” at 6pm, but no show at 7pm (due to Bob’s talk).

It’s a rainy night, so we won’t open the domes for observing, but we will have regular Tuesday night planetarium shows at 7pm and 8pm.

We’re showing a movie in the planetarium tonight at 7pm, Tim Ferris’ documentary “Seeing in the Dark,” which is about amateur astronomy.

Skies look good for observing tonight… we’ll have telescopes set up after twilight, at about 7:30 or so.  The regular planetarium shows are still at 7pm (”Two Pieces of Glass”) and 8pm (”Black Holes”).

Hello all– it looks like it’s going to be partly clear tonight, clear enough to see Jupiter, so we will have the telescopes open after dusk, starting at about 7:30pm or 8pm.  We’ll also be raffling off Galileoscopes after the planetarium shows tonight!

Also, we’re still working on the new planetarium show, “Tour of the Universe”… there are a lot of details that are taking a long time to finish, and our production staff (i.e., me, Heidi, and Victoria) has been busy with other projects.  We’re moving the opening back to the time change, when we’ll also move shows to 6pm and 7pm, on November 10.

There are a lot of astronomy events coming up this week.  There’s a STARRY meeting at the observatory on Thursday, Oct. 15.  There’s a talk by Dr. Jennifer Wiseman from the Space Telescope Science Institute *tonight* at 7:30pm in Davies Auditorium on “Searching for God in the Cosmos” (so if you are looking for God, you might want to go to the talk).   Joel Primack will be giving talks on Cosmology next week, starting on Oct. 20.    On Oct. 23 we will have a special movie night at the observatory, showing Tim Ferris’ “Seeing in the Dark.”  Then on Nov. 3, Bob Crelin will be presenting a special talk on the faces of the moon, intended for younger children.

Several people have asked me if we will be doing anything at the observatory for the moon impact by the LCROSS rocket on Friday morning.   NASA will be smashing a probe into a crater at the south pole of the moon to see if any signs of water show up in the plume of debris that fly out.  Telescopes all over the world (and in space) will analyze the light from the plume to see what it’s made of.

Unfortunately, the impact will happen at about 7:30 am on Friday morning in New Haven, and by then, the Sun will have risen and the sky will be too bright for us to see anything of the impact, if it’s even clear on Friday morning.  However, check the NASA website later in the day for images of the impact.