[Friends_of_SSASTROS] Notes From The Field - A Splendid Night at SLH

[Mike McCabe]

Greetings Friends and Members of the SSAStros,
About a half-dozen members gathered last night on the sidewalk down by the Scituate Lighthouse, and it was an amazing evening. We had three scopes on the ground, binoculars abounded all around, and we had a steady stream of curious and interested visitors for over an hour and a half. I didn't attempt an estimate, but we had a lot of folks both young and old put their eyes to the eyepieces and get questions answered about what they were seeing.
Targets included the 1st quarter Moon, a 36% waning crescent Venus, the colorful double star Albireo in Cygnus, Double-Double in Lyra, and M57 (The Ring Nebula) also in Lyra. We had tons of fun tricking people into thinking that they were looking at a tiny crescent Moon (really Venus), testing folks' color vision with the contrasting Albireo duo, and of course showing many their first look at the surface of the Moon in high detail.
Perhaps the highlight of the evening was the spectacular atmospheric phenomena display put on by Mother Nature herself, where we had Crepuscular Rays in the west, Anti-Crepuscular Rays in the east, and the Belt of Venus on display in the east as the Sun continued to set.

Last night at the lighthouse offered one of the most vivid displays of anti-crepuscular rays that I've ever seen. You could just swing your head back and forth from east to west and follow the ray system all the way from its beginning where the Sun was setting behind a cloud to its termination at the anti-solar point over the ocean water.

As the Sun continued to set, the Belt of Venus became very prominent over the eastern horizon. The dark band down low is actually Earth's shadow, and the lighter colors above it are produced by the sunset on the opposite horizon. Coincidentally, today's APOD is about the Belt of Venus, the link to which is below.
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html


Keep Looking Up!
Sincerely,
Mike McCabe
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://ssastros.org/pipermail/friends_of_ssastros_ssastros.org/attachments/20230626/3e3cfc4e/attachment.html>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: 1687788416931blob.jpg
Type: image/png
Size: 11091228 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://ssastros.org/pipermail/friends_of_ssastros_ssastros.org/attachments/20230626/3e3cfc4e/attachment.png>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: 1687788435333blob.jpg
Type: image/jpeg
Size: 2523358 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://ssastros.org/pipermail/friends_of_ssastros_ssastros.org/attachments/20230626/3e3cfc4e/attachment.jpg>