Wind & Sky

Get ready... on June 5th, last opportunity at a twice in a lifetime event, Venus passing in front of the Sun (called a transit). It happened in 2004 but after this one you'll have to wait another 105 years to see it happen again.

This photo is one I included in a Flickr gallery called Transit of Venus that highlights a few interesting pictures of past transits on Flickr.

More to come after the 5th.

A fisheye lens borrowed from a friend (thanks, Steve) produced this interesting view of the Moon, Venus and Jupiter reflected in our pool.

It's that time again... time to get outside, check out the sky for a few minutes and make a contribution to preserving dark skies. Time for GLOBE at Night. If you didn't see my posts in 2009 or 2010, read on.


GLOBE at Night is a citizen-science campaign open to people all over the world to raise awareness of the impact of light pollution by inviting citizen-scientists to measure their night sky brightness and report their observations to a website from a computer or smart phone. Light pollution threatens not only our “right to starlight”, but can affect energy consumption, wildlife and health. Through 2011, people in 115 countries contributed 66,000 measurements, making GLOBE at Night one of the most successful light pollution awareness campaigns to date. This year, the campaign takes place over 4 weeks:

• January 14 through 23
• February 12 through 21
• March 13 through 22
• April 11 through 20

To learn how to help, check out the campaign at www.globeatnight.org.

Been much too long since I've posted anything here. Not for want of topics...

• I have some thoughts to share on the travesty of Texas education funding in the current budget crisis and its impact on science education (three local school districts closing down their planetariums).
• There is a lesson others may benefit from in the story of our experience in buying a new telescope from Orion earlier this year.
• Recently replaced my Nikon D40 with a D7000 and I'm excited by the early results in terms of quality of astrophotography images.

For anyone who's downloaded (or interested in downloading) the Google Earth plug-in for Google Maps, here's a glimpse of its power and a handy place to refer back to when checking how much light pollution there is in a given area. This gadget doesn't include a search capability, but it is pretty easy to interactively search for a spot on the map. Also, the map below is just for North America but you can Google "google earth light pollution overlay" to find similar maps for other areas of the Earth.