Hard Day's Night

Just a quick look at "Looking Up" with flash and a long exposure of Moon and Vicki - looking up!

She had found the comet but the white thing above her is probably a nearby moth. The Moon is left of centre, above centre and is over exposed - too much flash?


WOB

The Moon and the Turtle

Last week, I saw my first turtle of this Spring - actually my 1st and 2nd and a frog. So ready or not Spring will arrive whether our parks and countryside are open to us or not.

I recalled a scene from early May 2013:

Can you see the pattern on shells?

The Indigenous people saw this as a calendar:

with 13 moonths per year and 28 days per moonth or month. It is a far more logical calendar than our Roman inheritance of Julius and Augustus displacing the seventh to tenth calendar months to September to December., not to mention the irregular number of days per month.

This is a solar calendar. However, to understand how the Moon was used to inform the people of the coming seasons, one has to understand that there is a stellar version, called a sidereal version, as in sidereal day, month, and year based on a relationship with a direction in space toward stars. And a solar version where the Sun is used as the marker.

So the following shows the difference between a day, really a solar day from noon to noon, and a sidereal day, the time it takes for a star to cross the meridian from day to day.

Because the Earth is revolving around the sun, successive sunrises, or transits at noon require the Earth to rotate just a little bit more than 360°. However, if one were to observe when a star transits, crosses the meridian, its highest point in the sky, we would see that it occurs about 3min  56sec earlier every night - that is the stars each night appear to drift westward through the seasons. I am using civil/solar time, hours and minutes - sidereal time uses the same names but their sizes are slightly different!

This also is true for the Moon motion:

The Moon requires just 27 days to go around the Earth when its position is measured against the distant background of stars. It takes nearly 3 more days for the phase, say New Moon, to repeat. The turtle's shell almost manages, but not quite. However, the Roman/Julian calendar was off too, and there have been several reforms to try to "control" time.

Let me consider just one example, the Moon in Taurus, near the Pleiades  - Sun Feb 17, 2013:

 

Jupiter was the disc near the "Vee" of Taurus and then the appearance of the Moon seen from Earth, here as a half of a disc. One "Moonth" later, sidereal, the moon is against the same backdrop of stars but the phase has  changed:

recall, too, that in 2013 February only had 28 days, a good turtle!

In 2020, in the midst of Covid-19, self-isolation, and time for contemplation we can, perhaps, begin to appreciate another way of learning. The example is the 3,600 year old sky disc or Nebra shield of copper with gold inlay.

You can goggle this for more information. The main thing to take away is that there is a crescent Moon near the compact group of 7 gold dots taken to represent the Pleiades, the 7 daughters of Atlas, and in the Indigenous culture, Spider Woman. The Moon has this phase near the Pleiades in Spring, and could, and probably did serve as a reminder that planting may start, animals will be migrating and fish will be returning to streams to spawn. Spider Woman lowered the first humans to "Turtle Island" and this time can also be associated with "birth" and Spring, a renewal.

I shall pause here and continue later with an introduction to Raven and the Orillia Camera Club suggestion to photograph the Moon.

WOB

Story telling - wise old bird style

The sun comes up every day and sets.
At night we see the moon - sometimes - and are aware that it moves from night to night.
We become aware of the stars around the moon.
And in March April we become aware of the Moon among the Pleiades. That was how I began my astronomy many decades ago and I suspect that humanity has behaved similarly over 100s of  millenia.

1950s
I grew into astronomy in North York in the 1950s. I have tried to date this - the partial solar eclipse on June 30th 1954 I remember - I tried to photograph it - $8 for a roll of Ektachrome 620(?) format. Took me months to save up for it and ditto to pay for the developing! Poor childhood, money did not grow on trees, had to collect a lot of pop bottles for 2 cents refund. Did help a friend, Richard, deliver newspapers. I recall see Uranus with my naked eye when there was a conjunction with Jupiter - I think May 1955 and that would have been a familiar part of the sky. That means to me that a) I had good eyes, and b) that North York was not heavily light polluted. I would have known the Pleiades and by the IGY in 1956-57 (18 months long year!) some of the meteor showers that were then known.





1972 - 1981
Fast forward to May 1972 when I arrived in Chile, the Atacama Desert, for the first of what would become over 400 days in the next 10 years (July 1981). After 1 month I encountered El Niño ,
 El Niño–Southern Oscillation
For the month of June there was 8/8 cloud cover just about every night. At sunset the horizon was approx 200km away, La Silla at 2200m elevation  - frustrating to see a green flash and yet not be able to observe.

It was while I was in Chile that I became aware of the following story:
Poor visibility of the Pleiades in June caused by an increase in subvisual high cirrus clouds is indicative of  an El Niño year,which is usually linked to reduced rainfall during the growing season several months later:
"Forecasting Andean rainfall and crop yield from the influence of El Niño on Pleiades visibility"
Benjamin S. Orlove*², John C. H. Chiang² & Mark A. Cane²
letters to Nature Vol 403 Jan 6m 2000 pp 68 - 71.
Sorry I do not have a link for you but if you write and enclose your email address I can send you the pdf.


I do not know the stories that would allow these observations to be passed along generation after generation. There are anthropological accounts of indigenous Aymaraand Quechua-speaking farmers of the Peruvian and Bolivian Andes .The observations are made in mid June to forecast the weather during the growing season from Oct to May and to estimate the harvest between March and May in the following year.

2009
In the 1990s, following the reunification of Germany it was possible to visit East Germany and in particular Thüringen and Saxony-Anhalt.  In 1999 the Nebra Sky Disc was discovered by treasure hunters.  In 2009 Vicki and I saw the disc personally, quite impressive. There is even less known about this tradition but surely we are looking at a crescent moon among the Pleiades - a Springtime observation - time to leave Winter quarters to find migrating wildlife, birds, animals
and fish.

This brings me to the present. One could have used the Moon among the Pleiades to remind the Anishnaaabe or Anishinaabe that the time to leave the  Algonquin Highlands was approaching, time to return to the Mnjikaning Fish Weirs  This is wonderful.

And now let Spider Woman lower humans to Earth from the Pleiades and hope that humans do not forget their origins.

Remembrance Day is every day; Thanksgiving is continuous -

Wise Old Bird

There was one other outside influence - a movie I have yet to see - that is similar to the idea of Spider Woman looking in, and that is "The Truman Show"

We are more similar than we are different. We are all immigrants if only history were better  taught.

WOB

But science is something anyone can do .... 

“This sense of purpose, the sense of hope, this lifeline, that each person is connected. To the bigger whole, the universe, the stars. Those stars are more than just balls of gas. When we do indigenous science, those stars are our oldest relatives.”

Sun and Moon and Venus and Mercury

I was reminded tonight at the camera club that I had not completed night sessions from Sunday March 18th

There were 7 of us on Saturday, 3 on Sunday Mar 18, 1/me on Monday Mar 19 and 3 on Tue Mar 20 (this time with no camera).

Here is what the sky looked like on Sunday March 18:

The moon was difficult to see at first.

















Matching exposures to pick up all three:

 Moon lower left,                                   Venus centre                    and Mercury between the red lines

To show how rapidly the moon moves relative to the line Venus - Mercury, I took some images from the earthobservatory blog: as seen from Spain 6 hours earlier:

by Annie Lewis in Madrid.


From Lakeland Florida:

by Michael Holland.

Mine when the moon was 34h 57m old:

The angle to the horizton is a function of the latitude of the observer - I was further north than Michael Holland in Florida.

And finally from Mike Morrison in Seattle Washington, approx 3 hours later:

So the moon does move!

W O B

Supermoon - or what?

I thought I could get through without being noticed but I didn't quite.

So , what is the deal? It is in this case a full moon very near perigee, the point in the moon's orbit when it is closest to earth. Perturbations on the earth-moon system mean that both ellipses, the orbits, drift systematically in space so that - in this case - the full moon does not occur at the same position in its orbit from moonth to month. The earth is also moving around the sun so the position of full moon also moves, occurs 2-3 days later  as the moon must revolve further to "catch up" with the earth.sun alignment to be at full moon.

Full moon was at 8:52am this Monday morning. The distance between the centres of the earth and moon was at a minimum at 6:23am (All times Easttern Standard). So was that when you were closest to the moon/the moon appeared to be largest? Almost certainly not - depends a little on where you individuals were. For most mortals living in Ontario they were closest - the moon was largest - around midnight. By nearly 7000km. And here is why:

This diagram is from my friend Daniel Fischer writing for Sky and Telescope
where you can get more insight. (Daniel got me involved in the ESA-Rosetta Mission back in February 2004.)

For a better understanding of the role being played by the elliptical orbit I refer you to another excellent article in Sky&Telescope
(I have been subscribing to Sky&Telescope since the early-mid 1950s.)

I still had Halloween on the brain Saturday evening when I took these photos:

Scary? Lunatic? Lover of the (unpolluted) night sky? Astronomer? Interested?

Actually, here is another link from the Canadian "Sky News"

W O B

Aurora alert - Kp 7 => clouds moonlight and other forms of light polution

Actually I took these 4 shots on Thanksgiving Monday, all at ISO 200 and 1/200 sec but
at different F/ratios. The secondary crop was from the original in each case.

F/10

F/11

F/13

F/14

Date 10 Oct 2016 at 17:05 for the 1st three, 17:06 for the last. Paint Shop Pro was used for post exposure processing. Pentax camera Sigma 18-200 lens

W O B

Tudhope Park

It was suddenly cold today and I have not adjusted to the wind chill - first time below -20C - however, the sky was clear and inviting.

I was all alone with my thoughts:

You can see from the depth of my shoe prints that the snow is not a factor.


W O B

 

Me and my shadow

Yesterday we flew back from Germany. From the wake-up call to bed was more than 23 hours. Our visits with friends and relatives - old and new - were very pleasant, even if brief. As they say, good fences make good neighbours! (But 8 hour flight back was a tad long,)

Here was the take-off from Amsterdam:

I hear some whinning about house prices dropping if a wind turbine were built in the neighbourhood. I personally am more concerned about nuclear reactors built for profit and not maintained.

Wind turbines can be situated so that they do not intrude. And quality turbines do not make much noise - just the sound of the wind in the forest. More noise means loss of energy..How many can you count? The towers, I think, are 50m tall and the vanes or sails are 27m long.

Now the other event of Monday in Europe - still Sunday for parts of North America - was the total
lunar eclipse.  In Germany Michael saw it.
Jens got up in the cold dawn, too
And it was cold where Al was
 And also here
I was too late.

However, from the airplane I saw this Monday night:

So sometimes it pays - no it does not - Hope everyone is well, wob