Before the night stars appear, there’s Venus setting in the west. Holy cow, is she ever bright.
Venus
Tag: observatory
Meteorites
In our cabinet of meteorites – because everyone has one of those in an odd corner, right? – we have a number of surprisingly-dense space rocks. You can’t really hurt them, considering they’ve already been dropped far harder than any puny human can manage, so occasionally we get to pass them around.
Here we have the Plainview meteorite, from Hale County, Texas. Discovered in 1917, the original find weighed over 400 kg (a lot!), and our little chunk is a mere 184 g. Isn’t it adorable?
Old Electronics
In the process of clearing space, you come across all manner of ancient and fascinating things. Desktop computers. Inkjet printers. CRT televisions. Slide projectors. Old motors and control gear to approximate sidereal motion.
Well, okay, reverse sidereal motion. The reason telescope mounts cost more than telescopes, because keeping stars and deep sky objects fixed in the field of view is no small task.
We’ll pop some of these open, gut ’em for any good parts, and move the remainder on to e-recycling. It’s the cycle of e-life!
The Moon
It is possible to snap a photo of the moon through the antique Clark refractor telescope. It’s just not very easy.
Views
It’s only one story up, and not the highest open view on campus, but the view from the top of the Observatory roof is special in one important way: virtually no one else gets to climb up and take in the sights.
On a breezy January day, it’s best to make one’s appreciation brief, sun or no sun. Brrr.
Astronauts
Some storage containers simply have more entertaining labels than others. Case in point: the cardboard box labeled “Astronauts & Space Toys,” which is neither large nor sturdy enough to contain a real astronaut, let alone several.
A find like this is just begging for exploration. We refer to a lot of things around here as “toys,” but these are the real deal.
There are buckets – buckets! – of astronauts inside! Or possibly pieces of astronauts. It’s unclear.
There is a choking hazard warning. One can reasonably assume that choking hazards in space are worse than here on Earth.
The jackpot: toys! Fewer astronauts than advertised, but a substantially higher proportion of Lunar Module Eagles and Hubble Space Telescopes than expected. (Always entertaining to write those as plurals.) Chalk it up in the win column.
If this is how you convince the next generation that astronomy is cool, sign us up.
Frost
Frost outside, frozen condensation inside. Welcome to December!
Lunar eclipse
The moon enters totality, as viewed from the SkyCam, 4:55 to 5:20 am. Not nearly as cool as in person, but eclipses are always cool.
“proper cleaning supplies”
Do not attempt to clean expensive optical equipment with the same things you use to clean your nose.
Remember: instructions that seem to lay out the most common-sense directives – on signage, in user manuals, in a specification document – are sometimes the result of people actually doing those questionable things.
You can bet someone tried cleaning a telescope’s eyepiece with the handkerchief from their pocket.
Meteoric iron
Meteorites – those shooting stars which don’t completely burn up entering our atmosphere and then crash to the ground – can be made of all sorts of stuff. The most commonly found in museums and collections are metallic, not because they’re the most frequent type of meteorite, but because they’re the most likely both to survive entry/impact and to be discovered. A stony meteorite might look remarkably like an ordinary rock. A big chunk of warped iron just sitting on the ground? Slightly more conspicuous.
We have a few meteorites and pieces of meteorites on display, including this big slab. Cut, polished, and given an acid treatment, it shows off its internal crystalline structure. Primarily iron and nickel in two different crystalline shapes, it has a characteristic pattern known as a Widmanstätten pattern. Given a sufficiently long cooling period to enable crystal formation – typically on the order of millions of years – it produces this distinct appearance that highlights its extraterrestrial provenance.
Can’t do this stuff in a lab is what we’re saying.
The acid-etching process enhances the pattern where the high-nickel taenite alloy is more resistant to the acid than the low-nickel kamacite, turning a smooth, polished surface into one that looks, well, really cool.
