ALL ABOUT STEVE 9/19/2023

    Just after 9:30 last night, as I was settling in to watch Monday Night Football, I decided to check spaceweather.com to see if the predicted aurora had developed. Indeed it had. Although the website was listing a Kp value of 4.66, the Auroral Oval Diagram displayed in the left-hand column showed yellow and red in addition to the normal green indicating stronger activity was at hand. 

  I took the camera rig out on the deck and fired a few shots capturing the elusive lights but they faded within minutes.

   After waiting in vain a few minutes for a rebound in intensity, I went inside to download and process the images.  By the time I finished editing the photos the lights once again returned.  I'm obligated by contract to get the classic shot of the lights reflected off of Lake Michigan

  But as midnight approached a wispy cloud-like structure developed at the western horizon and eventually spanned nearly 180 degrees to the eastern horizon.

  Thirty second exposure with the camera revealed the cloud's colors of red, pink and purple. It looked similar to auroral pillars but they usually stand vertical in the north. Instead this was a Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement or STEVE. The STEVE phenomenon has just been identified and studied in the past decade. 

   The Northern Lights are the result of molecules in the upper atmosphere that pick up energy from charged solar particles, putting them in an energized unstable state. Analogous to fluorescent lighting they give off light to return to the stable neutral state.  STEVE's light is analogous to incandescent lights, as it is caused by the heating of upper atmosphere molecules by speeding solar particles. The heat of these molecules can reach an astounding 5000F.  

My house at the intersection of STEVE and the Milky Way

Occultation of Mars. 12/7/2022

    A rare alignment of the Moon and Mars took place on Wednesday evening. Observation of the event was threatened by 99.99999% cloud cover. I took my Celestron C-8 out on the driveway about 20 minutes before the Moon was to cover the Red Planet, even though a glow in the clouds was the only indication that the Moon was above the horizon. Eventually a thin patch in the overcast reached the Moon's position and allowed me to quickly align the telescope and finder scope. At this point I attached my camera to the scope and waited for a clear spot to pass over the two targets. At 10:10, two minutes before the beginning of the occultation my patience and preparation was rewarded with a two second window of clarity. I held the shutter release down and fired off 30 photos until the clouds once again obscured my view. I never did get a visual sighting of Mars but it did show up in the photos.

   Photos were not perfect but I was happy with the results considering I didn't even have time to fine tune the focus. Instead I relied on the setting that I had on Sunday when I did a practice session. Below is a photo from Sunday

Lunar Eclipse 5/15-16/2022

  There is a school of thought when it comes to eclipses that 'it's solar or nothing', but a lunar eclipse has many advantages.  

  Most importantly, a lunar eclipse is visible everywhere that is the moon is above the horizon, as opposed to a solar eclipse's path of totality that typically has a width of around 100 miles or less. 

  Secondly the totality of a solar eclipse can last only 7.5 minutes for a particular location while a lunar eclipse can be up to 1 hour and 45 minutes in duration. 

  Last night's lunar eclipse lasted nearly an hour and a half which was fortunate for me since clouds blocked the whole moon for the first half hour of totality.  But patience paid off as the clouds parted somewhat and the rest of the show could be leisurely viewed through varying degrees of wispy clouds.
 

Morning Planets 4/25 and 4/28/2022

    A couple of weeks ago I received a cryptic text from my friend Kevin Welsh, that read

"Lots going on in the sky". Not sure what he was referring to, I sent him a photo of the Sun that I had taken that day with the caption "Lots going on on the Sun today"

   He responded by clarifying that he was referring to the morning planets lined up in the eastern predawn sky. The next clear morning on Monday the 25th. I hopped in the car and drove down the road to get a view of the eastern horizon.

  After receiving constructive criticism from my friend, Tim Bresnahan about the glow of the chemical plant in the foreground, I went out on Thursday the 28th to try again.

 

....and the answer is.

January Waterspout(s?) 1/10/2022

     Yesterday morning with the temperature of Lake Michigan in the low 40's and the air temperature steady at 9 F the steam rising off of the water created both clouds and at least one waterspout.  In the videos below some of the clouds appear to have some rotation.

 

Geminid Meteor Shower Dec 13-14 2021

 

  Conditions were not optimal for the annual Geminid Meteor Shower but light winds and temperatures in the mid 30's were nothing to complain about.  The biggest hindrance to ideal conditions was the waxing gibbous moon that washed out the dark background sky most of the night and made the dimmer meteors difficult to impossible to see.  Making the best of the situation I let the abundant moonlight illuminate the foreground as I locked the cable release on the camera hoping that some of the 6 second exposures would catch a few of the brighter meteors.  The evening session lasted from 7:45-9:15 pm and I counted 12 meteors.

Lake freighter Joseph L Block on the horizon.

    Moonset occurred at 3:45am and it made a big difference as I was able to see 81 meteors from 3:15 to 5:15 am.

Moonset

     

Geminid at the border of Orion and Taurus

Geminid between Canis Major and Orion

December Waterspout. 12/2/2021

 

    I noticed a colorful sky developing just before sunset so I grabbed the camera and went outside to get some photos.  

  Sure the sunset was picturesque but 10 minutes later after I was back in the house I looked out and noticed a funnel dropping down from the clouds.  It was the first waterspout of the year for me. So I ran out on my deck in my socks to try to capture the rare event. 

   Waterspouts form when cool air passes over much warmer water.  With Lake Michigan at record high temperatures for December waterspout season has lingered past its normal November 30th end. 

   As the funnel drifted south it lined up with the path that setting sun had taken, adding a dramatic color element to the photos.

Partial Lunar Eclipse 11/19/2021

   The longest partial lunar eclipse in over 600 years took place early on this cloudy windy morning.

   I woke up around 3 AM and could see that there might be some breaks in the heavy overcast.  The photo below taken when I stepped out on my deck almost an hour before the peak of the eclipse, shows the moon more than halfway covered by the Earth's shadow.

    There was a brisk wind gusting up to 30 mph on the deck side of the house so I grabbed a tripod and went around to the front of the house to get some shelter from the breezes.

   The wide-angle shots below show the near-totally eclipsed moon among the star field in the constellation Taurus. I was hoping some of the red in the moon would show up in the photos but the color got washed out because of the long-exposure needed for the stars to appear.  

   Of course I can't step out of my house alone at 3:30 in the morning, as my dog Nico followed me out.  I gained an appreciation of her night vision when she dropped a tennis ball at my feet. An impromptu game of  fetch commenced, illuminated only by the cloud-reflected lights from the power plant over a mile away.  The low lighting didn't prevent her from short-hopping grounders on the driveway. 

2021 Perseid Meteor Shower 8/14/2021

 

  This year's Perseid Meteor Shower was met with periods of perfectly clear skies and a new enough moon so that it was out of the picture by midnight.  The first photo is from Thursday night when the peak of the shower was predicted.  The rest are from Friday night which was slightly past peak but still provided a respectable showing.

 The next two photos were taken consecutively with camera's cable release locked, and they appear to show the same meteor, unless a fragment broke off of the main piece of space dirt. Never photographed that before.

  The last photo shows a jet and 6 satellites which superficially could be mistaken for meteors.

Triple Digit Weather...The Hard Way 8/10/2021

        Usually when the number 100 enters the conversation in a discussion of August weather, it is in terms of heat index or the actual stifling air temperature.  But on Tuesday evening when a line of thunderstorms crossing Lake Michigan reached the eastern shore it kicked up a 90.6 mph sustained (2 minute average) and a gust of 105.1 mph.  My 3-digit gust even got a mention on the online news site MLive

     My house survived unscathed but the winds took down a couple of my dead trees and up 5" diameter limbs off of some of the live ones.  It also mangled the middle section of the pole that supported my Purple Martin house and tossed the bird house and top 6-foot section of pole a little over 90 feet.

  The next morning I took the photo below, when I had to go to Ludington for a dentist appointment.

  The storm took out power to over half the customers of the company that supplies our electricity.  My power was out for 49 hours, but the standby generator was up to the task.

Sunrise Solar Eclipse 6/10/2021

 

Partial Solar Eclipse  with Old Presque Isle Lighthouse

  Though the actual sunrise was obscured by a narrow thick band of clouds, I was able to get some photos of the crescent sun as it rose a little higher.  

Frustrating band of clouds

Clouds thinned to the point that they enhanced the color

Solar filter required for the clear patch of sky

Lightning over Lake Michigan 4/5/2021

 

  An unexpected thunderstorm woke me up around 5 am today as it rolled in off of Lake Michigan.  The cloud-obscured flashes were nearly continuous before the storm crossed the shoreline.  As the storm got closer the frequency of the lightning diminished but the bolts themselves became visible.

      

   Below the map from Lightningmaps.org shows the strikes in my area during the storm.