Jun 252023
 

Many of you will have no doubt heard of the “HOUSE SIZED ASTEROID HEADING TOWARDS EARTH !!!”.

Well, there is one that will pass by the Earth this afternoon (25 Jun 2023) at 1819 CDT. JPL estimates the size, on average, to be 5 meters in diameter (16.4 feet). My van is 20′ feet long so it must be a really small house. However, it will get no closer than 134,788 miles away. That is a about 60% the distance to the Moon. It is traveling at a speed of 10,107 mph. That speed, and its proximity to the Earth, is evident in the animation below.

 

The asteroid orbits the Sun in 490.9 days. As you can see in the orbit diagram, it spends most of its time in between Earth and Mars but crosses inside Earth’s orbit for about 2 months.

2023 MU2’s orbit.
(Graphic courtesy of the JPL Small-Body Database Browser)

At the time, from our point of view, the asteroid was traversing the constellation Scutum (The Shield). This location puts it crossing into some of the denser star clouds of the Milky Way. This is why there are so many stars in the background.

The animation is composed of forty-five cropped 120 second exposures. They were taken on the evening of the 24th.

 Posted by at 14:22
Apr 202023
 

I am starting to prepare for next year’s total solar eclipse. This means refreshing my memory on the procedures and set up of my mobile telescopes, mounts and cameras.

I took this image using one of my very first webcams: a TIS DMK21AU04. The camera is long out of production but as you can see, this one still works. It has a very low resolution of 640×480 and that is very obvious in this picture. I have much higher resolution cameras, but I think this will be fine to live stream the eclipse given the chance. It is also much easier to set up and configure. The telescope is my Hydrogen-Alpha telescope which allows us to view the thin layer of the Sun’s atmosphere known as the chromosphere.

Sun (HA:225×0.2ms)

You can see several dark thin thread-like filaments in the image. This is solar material being held off the surface by magnetic fields and because it is above the surface it is cooler and thus darker. The patchy bright areas are locations of increased magnetic strength known as plage.

 Posted by at 15:08
Apr 152023
 

The European Space Agency(ESA) launched its JUICE mission to Jupiter on the 14th of April 2023. Its ultimate targets are the icy moons of Jupiter, hence the JUpiter ICy moons Explorer moniker. But its first planetary target is not Jupiter. First off, it is heading for the Earth. In fact, Jupiter will only be its 5th planetary encounter. The space craft will get a velocity boost from Earth in August 2024, Venus in August 2025, another from Earth in September 2026 and the final Earth gravity boost in January 2029. Only then will the JUICE spacecraft have enough energy to make the trek all the way to Jupiter. It will arrive at its final destination in July 2031.

The mission’s purpose is to investigate the possibility of habitable environments on the three Jovian moons that are suspected to have significant amounts of liquid water beneath their surface ice: Ganymede, Callisto and Europa. To that end the mission carries a suite of science instruments contributed by Japan, France, the US(NASA), Germany, Italy, the UK, Sweden, and the Netherlands.

This animation is a set of ten 60 second images taken on the evening of the 14th. I hope to get additional imagery of the JUICE spacecraft on each of the 3 Earth gravity assist passes.

 Posted by at 14:24
Mar 232023
 

Asteroid 2023 DZ2 is headed towards a close approach to Earth on the afternoon of the 25th of March 2023 at 1451 CDT (1951 UTC). It will pass by at an estimated distance of 108,000 miles or just under half a lunar distance. It is estimated to be about 70 meters in diameter. A light curve shows a 6-minute rotation and about a half a magnitude range in brightness leading to the conclusion that the asteroid is not spherical.

 

This is an animation of 2023 DZ2 as it approaches the Earth. Taken on the morning of the 23rd of March, it is a set of twenty 300 second exposures.

2023 DZ2’s orbit.
(Graphic courtesy of the JPL Small-Body Database Browser)

2023 DZ2 is classified as an Apollo class asteroid. These asteroids orbits have an semi-major axis greater than that of the Earth but their perihelion is less than the Earth’s aphelion. Simply stated, these asteroid’s orbits take them closer to the Sun than the Earth and further from the Sun than the Earth. This means the asteroid’s orbit crosses the Earth’s orbit.

 Posted by at 12:36
Feb 112023
 

It looks like I got the SID detector remounted just in time. The Sun is coming out of a long, low solar minimum. It is now starting to show an increasing level of activity as evidenced by the number of sunspots starting to show up in the Sun’s photosphere.

I originally installed the observatory’s SID detector at the end of 2018 just as solar cycle 24 was winding down. Even at cycle 24’s maximum, the sunspot count was noticeably low with an even lower count of flares. There was some activity but none that effected the ionosphere enough that my equipment noticed any changes. Then at the end of 2020 I had to take the detector offline due to renovations in the observatory office.

With the solar activity finally starting to increase, I made the effort to finish the reinstallation of the SID equipment. This involved moving the antenna outside and dealing with the complications of routing the cables into the office. I finished that effort on the 17th of January. Even with the number of sunspots and associated flares climbing I still didn’t see any response from my equipment. That changed this past week. There was an M class flare on the 8th that just bumped up the signal I was monitoring. Today however, was the first X class flare that I noticed since I originally installed the equipment.

The upper half of the chart shows data reported by the GOES 16 spacecraft as a white line. The same chart shows the signal received by the PTO from the Navy’s NAA VLF transmitter as a blue line. As you can see, even though this was a minimal X class flare (1.1), the impact on the strength of the transmission received immediately increased. A subsequent M class flare resulted in a proportionally smaller increase.

The sunspot count anticipated for cycle 25 is already ahead of prediction. Cycle 25 may be one to pay close attention to. The SID detector data is available using the Observatory->Solar Conditions menu.

 Posted by at 23:14