[Friends_of_SSASTROS] Our Upcoming Meeting, Plus

[Matt Schricker]

I’ll be there!  I’d love to go to Webb too. It technically closes at dusk
but I’ve stayed there after dark to shoot the Moon before.

Matt

On Sun, Feb 2, 2025 at 3:05 PM Mike McCabe <cartech2000 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Greetings Members and Friends,
>
> Please consider attending our February monthly gathering this coming
> Wednesday at the Norwell Council on Aging, 7pm start time. In addition to
> our normal monthly business, I'll be presenting a deep analysis that I did
> on Matt Schricker's oh-so-fine image of the Auriga region that he shared
> with us back at the beginning of January. I believe you'll find my results
> both educational and entertaining. This will not be a discussion about
> image processing techniques, thus I promise to never even mention things
> like pixel-scale, deconvolution, up-sampling, interpolation, flats, darks,
> flat-darks, dark-biases, etc. What it will be about, you'll have to come to
> the meeting to find out. ;-)
>
> As so many of us did last night, I stepped outside at the onset of
> darkness to marvel at that splendid sight of the Moon and Venus right next
> to each other in the sky. The family text groups were on fire. The pairing
> was simply beautiful. If you put a pair of binoculars or a telescope on the
> pair, you probably noticed that Venus is well into its waning crescent
> phases, and last night it was showing a 37% illumination.
>
> As I was looking that up, I noticed that Neptune was also nearby on the
> other side of the Moon and that there was an arrangement of stars with it
> that kind of looked like a squished heart, and so who doesn't want to see
> the *Heart of Neptune* when it comes around? :-)
>
> [image: Inline image]
> *This is what I noticed on my Stellarium app yesterday evening when the
> Moon and Venus were stealing the show. I went and got my 15x70 binoculars
> and put them out on a tripod. There was just one little problem...*
>
> I should have known. Neptune usually hovers around 8th magnitude in our
> skies, and HD 224037 isn't much brighter. The Moon, sitting just a half a
> degree from Neptune last night was at magnitude *minus* 8.2. That's a
> 16-magnitude difference in brightness. I know it sounds ridiculous, but I
> was caught out by how difficult it was to make out even just those two dots
> in the view, never mind all the dimmer ones that made up my so-called
> "heart." So, no heart was seen, but at least I got to see Neptune.
>
> Speaking of Neptune, the other feature in our skies lately being widely
> parroted by the mainstream media is this so-called *planetary lineup. *Well,
> it's pretty cool lately, and that's because Mars is now rising early enough
> to be pretty high before Saturn sets. In fact it's surprising how fast
> Saturn is diving for the western horizon these days, so getting out there
> sooner rather than later would be good if you are in fact interested in
> seeing it. It's absolutely a family-friendly activity, so drag everyone out
> there to witness the spectacle before it goes away.
>
> Gregg Dennizard and I have been in conversation about a potential
> lunar/planetary observing session being held at Webb Memorial Park in
> Weymouth. Looking that forecast, the soonest upcoming date that has a
> decent forecast at the moment is this coming Friday, the 7th of February.
> We'll update this possibility at the meeting, by which time we'll hopefully
> have a solid forecast.
>
> [image: Inline image]
> *The sky on this coming Friday evening, if clear, will offer a plethora of
> bright targets that would work just fine from a place like Webb. Four
> naked-eye planets, the Moon, and a host of bright stars will be more than
> enough to keep us busy until our better sense tells us to get out of dodge
> before we freeze to death. :-)*
>
> Welcome to February, folks! Hopefully it's a better month for observing
> that January was!
>
> Mike M.
>
>
>
>
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