Author: Andrew

An electrical engineer, amateur astronomer, and diver, living and working on the island of Hawaiʻi.

Venus Disappears into the Sunset

Crescent Venus
Venus approaching inferior conjunction, 24Dec2013
Over the next few days Venus will slide into the sunset on its way to inferior conjunction on January 11th. This evening the planet is 16° from the Sun, this decreases by about 1° each day. As the new year begins the planet will become ever more challenging to see as it orbits into the Sun’s glare.

Tomorrow night, January 1st will see a nice conjunction of Venus and a thin crescent Moon

Full Macro

One of the real advantages of the mirrorless cameras, like my little EOS-M, is the ability to mount just about any lens.  The small cameras have very shallow back focus requirements, the distance from the lens mount to the sensor.  With the correct adapter they can mount the old Canon FD, Nikon, Leica, anything! I find myself unpacking my old photo gear, and wondering about the possibilities.

I do have some really good old Canon and Nikon primes around, lenses from the manual focus days.   When I assembled an EOS-M to FD adapter, an extension tube, and a 50mm f/1.4 lens onto the front of the camera it resulted in a rather odd looking setup.  Odd looking, but it works, providing an impressive macro capability.   With better than 1:1 magnification I was able to keep a reasonable depth of field in the test shots. I need try some tests with the 100mm f/2.8 lens, for even higher magnification.

Aside from the FD to EOS-M adapter this is all gear I had sitting about unused. I never used it much in my film days. Digital is different, the ability to examine the result immediately and the elimination of per frame costs enables an ease of experimentation that was not there before. I am going to play with this a bit!

Maco Circuitry
Testing a macro setup that uses a Canon 50mm f/1.4 lens, and a 50mm extension tube mounted to the EOS-M.

Keck at the End of the Rainbow

Waimea could honestly use the tagline “Place of Rainbows”. I see more rainbows here than anywhere else I know of. The trades blow the wet tropical air into the saddle between Mauna Kea and the Kohala. This creates a bank of clouds that dissipates right over the town. Clouds and rain on one side of town, clear skies on the other side, add low morning or afternoon sunlight and the rainbows appear. Sometimes they appear in convenient locations…

Keck at The End of the Rainbow
A brilliant rainbow ends at the headquarters of the W. M. Keck Observatory in Waimea

Quadrantid Meteor Shower

The first meteor shower of 2014 is the annual Quadrantid meteor shower. The Quadrantids are a reliable shower, producing 60-120 ZHR, one to two meteors per minute. The Quadrantids are named for the obsolete constellation Quadrans Muralis, now part of the constellation Boötes.

Leonids in Orion
A pair of Leonid meteors streak through Orion
Unlike other showers where activity can occur for days or even weeks, the Quadrantids have a sharp peak, activity falls off rapidly on the preceding and following nights, or even a few hours away from the peak. Thus it is important to observe the Quadrantids quite near the peak prediction. For 2014 the peak is predicted for January 3rd around 19:30UT, or 09:30HST on this side of the globe. The best timing for observers in the islands is during the predawn hours of January 3rd, a few hours before peak, the best we have for this year. The good news is that the night will be nearly moonless, with wonderfully dark conditions for observing.

Watching meteors requires no more equipment than your eyes and a dark sky, and can be enjoyable for just about anyone. Set the alarm early?

Comet C/2012 S1 ISON Closest to Earth

Hubble C/2012 S1 ISON
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope provides a close-up look of Comet ISON (C/2012 S1). Credit:NASA, ESA, J.-Y. Li
Today comet C/2012 S1 ISON will pass closest to Earth. No worries here, close is relative in space and in this case means a comfortable 0.43 AU (64,200,000 km or 39,900,000 miles) from Earth. The comet should be easily visible well up in the dawn sky as an unaided eye object in northern Hercules.

Update: Yes, this post was written and scheduled well before the comet disintegrated at perihelion. If there is anything left it is closest to the Earth today. Many amateurs, large scopes, even Hubble have attempted to recover the remains. No one has reported finding anything.