Tonight was an Astronomy Night at Intrepid. It wasn't supposed to have been great weather--cold, windy, and cloudy--but turned out to be not too bad.
After a lot of rain on Wednesday and some on Thursday the morning broke cloudy but by 1000 I was seeing some patches of blue sky to the west. It equivocated during the day and was looking pretty cloudy around 1600 but it was mild and not windy. By event time the sky was mostly clear, the temperature mild, and the wind calm. There was enough light cloud in the area that seeing wasn't that great and some bright stars low on the horizon disappeared.
There were at least ten telescopes and a pair of binoculars there tonight and the crowd was sparse when spread across all of them. I don't think my line was ever more than two deep.
I started off the evening looking for satellites. There was supposed to have been an Irridium flare just before an ISS pass but that didn't occur. There were discrepancies among the data three of us had on the ISS pass. Johnathan's computer was showing it in progress four minutes before it actually started. John't data showed it starting farther north and passing overhead. My data showed it starting farther south and only achieving a maximum altitude of 77°. The pass began roughly where I predicted and did pass nearly overhead as John had predicted.
I had wanted to do some binocular astronomy but wasn't finding much once I got the binocular mounted on the tripod. I think I got the Andromeda Galaxy in the FoV hand held but it has been so long since I have used the binocular on the tripod that I wasn't able to recover the galaxy. Likewise the Coathanger. Aside from translating from one location to another, the Coathanger was so high up that I couldn't get my head under the eyepieces.
I started the night on the Engagement Ring which I found to be a very good target for public observing since the North Star doesn't move and you don;t have to be reacquiring the star unless the tripod gets kicked. I never saw more than two stars in the ring but other younger eyes reported up to four. People enjoyed the story and knowing something about asterisms and how they relate to constellations.
Toward the end of the night I switched over to Alberio, which many people had trouble seeing and particularly the faint blue component. I attribute this to poor seeing.
They have a new exhibit in the Space Shuttle pavilion on the Hubble repair missions. They gave all of the astronomers passes to see it for free so since the crowd was light and I have never seen the Shuttle since it was hoisted onto Intrepid and enclosed in its building I availed myself of the opportunity. I set my tripod legs through the fence around the planes on the flight deck so that it would not get knocked over while unattended and aimed it at Polaris since it would not move out of the FoV while I was gone. The Hubble exhibit was nicely assembled but not a lot of stuff. It is all done in what looks like structural aluminum components and has a very clean, modern look. But other than about a dozen pieces of machinery that were designed to facilitate the repairs it was all text and a few big pictures. What was most impressive was Endeavour. When you come out of the tunnel entrance into the pavilion you are under the Shuttle and looking up you can't even tell what part of it you are under. It turns out it is the back end where the cover is over the motors. I have seen the shuttle as it has flown past Manhattan on launch, in transport on the barge going up the Hudson River, and at close range when it was hoisted from the barge onto Intrepid, but being under it it was at once larger and smaller than I anticipated. Not that modern airports all have jetways we don't have an opportunity to walk on the tarmac and look up at the plane we are going to fly in to appreciate its size. We may see part of it through windows in the departure lounge, it it has them, but mostly we walk from the gate through a small tube into a little bit larger tube and have no concept of how large that tube really is.
Standing under the belly of the Shuttle with it stretching out in all directions it appears huge. Standing at the back end looking into the landing gear well you can see heat shield tiles edge on and they appear to be 9"-12" thick. Then you think that this was used to construct piece by piece, the International Space Station which is the size of a football field
and you realize just how small it is.
