Lunar Eclipse 1/21/2019

   Winter weather tried to dissuade me from viewing the total lunar eclipse last night but it's going to have to try a little harder next time.  When the eclipse began the temperature was 5 F and conditions were both clear and snowing.  The light snow must have been blowing in off the lake while mostly clear skies were present at my location

Meteor and Comet 12/15/2018

 
The dingy winter sky picked the most opportune time to clear this month as the Geminid Meteor Shower and the closest approach of Comet P/46 Wirtanen coincided late this week.

  Thursday night before work I sat out on the deck with camera aimed skyward and caught a bright meteor streaking by.

   Shortly after 1 o'clock this morning I photographed the bluegreen peroidic comet P/Wirtanen as it shoots the gap between the Hyades and Pleiades Star Clusters this weekend.

The Hyades cluster makes up the face of Taurus the Bull.

Green Flash 9/23/2018

   When the Sun sets on an unobstructed horizon a phenomenon known as the Green Flash is sometimes visible.  The green color is due to the atmosphere working as a prism and breaking the Sun's image into its component colors with the green image being the last to set.

Hint of green around the edges

Green becomes a little more apparent

Mostly Green (but not always)

Everything's Gone Green

Morning Twilight Aurora 4/20/2018

  Earlier this week a coronal hole opened up on the Sun and allowed charged particles to stream toward Earth.  So even though the Sun was relatively inactive and devoid of sunspots a slight uptick in geomagnetic activity (to a Kp index of 4) was forecast for April 20.  When my ailing dog woke me at 5 AM a quick check of spaceweather.com   showed the index surged to 6, which put it within camera range at my latitude of nearly 44 North.

   I went to the end of the driveway and braced my camera against my mailbox and pointed it north for a two second exposure.  The photo below shows a purple glow through the trees.  At this point I knew I needed to get to a location with a clearer northern horizon fast because of the encroaching morning twilight.

     I quickly packed my camera gear and in seven minutes I was parked at a pull-off on M-116 where I took a quick photo with the camera held steady against the roof of my car.

   That method had my car's shark-fin antenna blocking the most intense part of the aurora.  I quickly searched through the car and found my tripod which allowed an unobstructed steadier view.

   The growing glow of dawn had me aiming more toward the northwest over Lake Michigan away from the eastern sky.  It appears that an atmospheric inversion was exposing the skyglow of cities across the lake in Wisconsin.

    In the photo above the two bright lights are from the freighter Roger Blough.

   The ship's ID was found on marinetraffic.com

  On a side note- last Friday our area experienced a seiche on the Lake Michigan shore.  News site Mlive reported this story........ ....http://www.mlive.com/weather/index.ssf/2018/04/thunderstorm_induced_seiche_ca.html
   It kind of sells the event short because what they described was a 1 foot increase of lake level in an hour was not what was observed elsewhere.  At my worksite the lake level is constantly monitored and recorded.  Our data and surveillance video show that at 1243 EDT the lake had dropped to 573' above sea level from the normal level of 580.5'.  Four minutes later at 1247 EDT the lake surged to 588' above sea level, a change of 15'. At my former worksite on Lake Erie we had seiches of 10-15 feet almost yearly when strong southwest winds would set up across the whole fetch of the lake and push the water toward Buffalo, NY.  But the time elapsed between the high and low was typically 6-10 hours not 4 minutes.

Geminid Meteors 12/14/2017

    What a difference 7 weeks makes around here. Back in the early morning hours of October 22, I was comfortably kicking back on the deck with a beer, watching the Orionid meteors with temperatures in the mid-60's.  Contrast that with last night's Geminid meteor shower  where the beverage of choice was a hot chocolate as temperatures held steady in the mid-teens.
   It wasn't the cool weather that ended the observing session it was the building cloud cover which brought some lake-effect snow showers that added another inch to the 6 inches that fell Wednesday.
 

   If you look close at the photo below you'll see the meteor streak is a squiggly line.  No grand  celestial phenomena at play here, just by my heavy footsteps causing vibrations as I was shoveling the snow off the deck after I set up the camera.

   By the time I got the deck cleared, the clouds became more intrusive.  Just after I sat down I spotted this bright meteor which was probably between magnitude 0 or -2.

Bright meteor to the upper left of the Olive-sided Flycatcher tree.

Crop of previous photo.

Aurora Week

   Last night an uptick in geomagnetic activity resulted in a modest, moonlight hampered northern lights show.  I left for work early and set my camera up to run all night and immediately caught a couple of faint pillars of light.

Aurora Pillars

  Within the hour, as I went about my assigned tasks the intensity picked up to encompass the entire northern horizon.

     Last nights display neatly fits into the pattern of my previous aurora observations.   The first time that I saw the Northern Lights was coincidentally 26 years ago to the day on November 8, 1991. Over the years I've seen them 11 times from the state of Michigan.

 Here is a list of those dates.
November 8, 1991
November 5-6, 2001
October 29, 2003
November 20, 2003
November 7-8, 2004
November 10, 2004
March 17, 2015
November 4, 2015

September 29, 2016

September 28, 2017

And last night November 7-8, 2017.

  What jumps out from the list is that 73% of the sightings occurred over 6% of the calendar that spans from October 29 to November 23.  An even tighter window from November 4 to November 10 includes 55% of my observations in a 7 day period.  The Northern Lights are more likely to occur in the spring and fall rather than summer and winter for reasons explained in the link below.
NASA explanation 

    The most frequent cause of an auroral display is increased activity on the Sun that results in a coronal mass ejections that releases charged particles toward the Earth.  But as can be seen in the photo below, the spotless Solar disk indicates minimal activity, as we are currently heading toward the end of the current 11 year solar cycle.  

  The cause of last night's (as well as September 28th's) northern lights was a hole in the solar atmosphere that released a stream of Earth-directed charged particles.

   After the aurora died down my camera captured the International Space Station as it zipped across the northern sky at 6:20 AM.

Orionid Meteor Shower 10/22/2017

  Last night after a 4 hour drive across the state, I stepped out on to the back deck to give a listen for owls.  With temperatures lingering in the mid-60's I decided to pull up a chair and crack open a beer and put some real effort into owling.  After a few minutes as I was staring at the clear moonless sky, I remembered that the Orionid Meteor shower was near its modest 20/hour peak.  So I grabbed the camera, cable release and tripod to do some serious multi-tasking. 

    The meteor in the above photos was a sporadic rather than an Orionid.  Its direction of travel would have been from the lower right corner of the frame had it been an Orionid.

  This one was a Orionid (I rotated and cropped the photo for composition's sake).

A burning grain of dust cast off of Comet Halley