From Spaceweather.com Kids night for those little astronomers in your midst. Tonight is not the only night to look, in case you don't have clear skies or the time. Saturn with its rings is the best thing to show young kids in a telescope. The little guys aren't too impressed by dots of light in a scope, but Saturn will wow even the youngest of them that is old enough to look through the lens. When my son was young and Saturn was big in the sky, I set the scope up in the front yard and we had a neighborhood full of kids lined up in no time.
The night sky up North is impressive. So many satellites in polar obit and the space station is nearly the size of a 747 at 35k feet.
Very cool. When I was a kid I had a telescope and would watch Saturn and Jupiter from our driveway. You see so many pictures of Saturn in magazines and on the net and on TV that you'd think seeing it through a telescope would be unimpressive and somehow redundant, but that isn't so. When you see it with its rings with your own eyes, you realize it's really there - it has an immediacy that's more emotionally affecting than a mere photograph could be.
I bought an eight inch dobsonian and a three and a half inch mak-cass last year. Jupiter has been in the West, just after dusk, for some time now. It is amazing to see the stripes of the planet, which is the size of the head of a pencil's eraser, and its four visible, star-like moons that change position night after night. My view of the East is obstructed with tall pines - so I've been waiting to see Saturn. I use a free program, called Stellarium, to predict the best nights to skywatch. But the weather, which isn't good tonight, is often a problem.
[GC reminiscing, people may want to skip this] In my younger life, Jupiter's moons were the second thing that amazed me after seeing Saturn. You can see that they orbit Jupiter and your sense of the planets being real things changes, just like seeing Saturn in the sky is surreal. Other things I've been amazed at in the sky: When when I went to Australia and the Moon was upside down. (People who've traveled to the two hemispheres know what I mean.) From my balcony in northern WA State, the planets looked like they were on the ecliptic instead of overhead. The Leonid's meteor storm, a comet with a tail that stretched across most of the sky, and the aurora borealis were all up there in my best Universe experiences. And not too long ago I was lucky enough to see Venus transit the Sun. It was much bigger than I had thought it would be. I failed to see the solar eclipse 3 times, so in 2017, I am determined not to fail again. The shadow will be passing right across the US. [/reminiscing/daydreaming]
We get to Bellingham once or twice a year. Beautiful part of the world. Love the summer daylight, the blackberries, going crabbing, digging oysters on the islands and fishing. But winter, got an idea what cabin fever means.
I had the best view of the bay and night sky from my back porch. Now the rooming house is a work release prison, but I swear it wasn't when I lived there.
Also from a SpaceWeather link: The life of space balloons (~4minutes). Sure wish I had that science teacher.
