Resident Astronomer tours Carnegie Observatory open house; original glass slide of Jupiter; American Astronomical Society in Pasdena; Comet 67P; Missed opportuity to photgraph novae

Greetings from (offsite) Palmia Observatory

Resident Astronomer George is offsite this week at the Carnegie Observatory open house.  I had not attended the open house before and it was quite interesting to walk on the grounds and down the halls and sit in the library where the great observers thought and pondered the images taken at Mt. Wilson. Check out this photo taken in the library

Hooray, Mystery of the "+" signs solved! Lessons learned about doing the blinking software; See you in Pasadena and be sure to check out Nightfall in Borrego Springs; And the Galaxy Song

Greetings from Palmia Observatory

Hooray, we got some good feedback and help understanding the mystery of the "+" signs, which were found in the images of the asteroid Ceres, about which we posted last week.  Remember that at that time we first used the blinking software help us see a slowly moving dim object against the nearly fixed background stars.  It turns out to be quite a mystery, but first we should

Hooray, that darn blinking software shows asteroid Ceres moving; "Beautiful" sunset; Repiping the observatory and next week calendar showing Carnegie open house, AAS meeting and free Coursera course on emergence

Greetings from Palmia Observatory

I had every intention of getting some more observing in this week but couldn't fit it into the schedule because of events at the observatory.  First, as I looked outside to get a sense as to what the cloudy weather was like and found this "beautiful" sunset.  I say"beautiful" because one hand sunsets are beautiful and on the other hand,

Physics colloquia about topological insulators; Nobel prize announcement; Set Silence Packing demonstration on campus; Gamma-ray spectrometry; Energy Storage conference and the duck curve; And finally getting another image to try getting the darn blinking software to work

This has been a busy week with a couple of off site activities including the physics colloquia at CSULB and the Energy Storage North America Conference in San Diego.  We finally did get a chance to schedule one brief observing time to get another image of asteroid Ceres as part of our ongoing program of trying out the blinking software used to detect faint objects like asteroids.  But first we have several comments about physics, gamma ray detectors and astronomy and findings from the energy storage conference.  So lets get to the

Found Asteroid Pallas! But what is that strange purple object in the image? Rare Earths and supernova element synthesis and the Oddo-Harkins Rule; Found Asteroid Ceres; Don't go observing without your masking tape; Its ok to blink when looking for asteroids; Using transits of Io to duplicate Roemer's measurement of the speed of light

D     This has been an especially busy week, what with physics colloquia and the Penrose lecture at Chapman University and the exciting finding of the asteroid Pallas as well as the brighter asteroid Ceres.  Before getting into those exciting topics we should