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Moon Occulting Mars for 61 minutes - compressed into 17 seconds
Dec 7, 2022
2 hours of a 3 hour Lunar Eclipse - compressed into 22 seconds
May 15, 2022
12 hour Circumpolar time lapse - compressed into 20 seconds
The Earth's spin axis is currently pointing very near Polaris,
the bright star directly above the observatory.
But Earth's spin is slowing down. And, like a gyroscope or a child's top,
as it slows down it begins to precess.
Precession changes where the axis points.
In about 13,000 years the spin axis will point towards the star Vega.
In about 26,000 years Polaris will once again be the pole star.
8 hour Milky Way passage - compressed into 20 seconds
Comet Neowise (C/2020 F3) rising on July 14 , 2020
This is a short video of about a dozen Starlink satellites passing over our area. It gives you an idea of the devastating effect it will have on astrophotography when Elon Musk, et al, orbit 60,000+ satellites.
And it won't just be beautiful images that will be impacted. There are numerous survey programs, such as NEAT and LINEAR, which scan the sky each night, looking for dangerous objects which could potentially end all life on the earth if they crash into us. The search for such objects isn't carried out by telescopes which orbit out in space above these satellite swarms. These surveys are carried out by ground-based telescopes using computer programs which analyze the images, looking for faint objects that move from one night to the next, relative to the background star field. Can you imagine the difficulty of writing a computer program that can deal with thousands of satellites obliterating the images?
What's the good of having 100,000 or 200,000 satellites orbiting the Earth, trying to bring internet access (and the all-important social media like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, etc) to all areas of the globe, if an asteroid or comet impact has already killed all the humans?
If this happens, the Starlink satellites and others will still be up there, circling for millennia, around a dead planet.
Mercury's grazing transit of the sun
The 14th and final transit of Mercury during the 20th century
November 15, 1999
Dark limb of 77% phase Moon occulting Spica - June 8, 1995
from San Francisco bay area
Dark limb of 72% phase Moon occulting Saturn - December 8, 1997
from San Francisco bay area
All images Copyright © 2000-2024 Charles & Pat Briley
Astronomy - Terrestrial Photos - Weather