The three brightest natural objects of our sky, after the Sun, will join to form a nice group tomorrow morning. The dawn of 14 July will see a thin crescent Moon and Venus only 11° apart. The bright Jupiter will be in between, only 6° from Venus. Jupiter will be shining brightly at better that -2 magnitude, Venus will be even brighter at over -4 magnitude. The pair will be a nice match for an 18% illuminated Moon.
The next morning, July 15th, will still see the trio quite close. The Moon will have moved east to a position just 4° north of Venus.
The W. M. Keck Observatory has been awarded two major grants to help build a $4 million laser system as the next leap forward in a technology which already enables ground-based telescopes to exceed the observational power of telescopes in space. The new laser, when installed on the current adaptive optics system on the Keck II telescope, will improve the performance of the system and advance future technology initiatives.
The Keck 2 AO Laser attempting the first target of the night with the light of sunset and a setting Moon behindIn early July the Observatory received a $1.5 million grant from the W. M. Keck Foundation, adding to a $2 million grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation awarded eight months prior for the multi-year project. Keck Observatory is charged to raise the remaining funds needed from its private supporters over the next two years.
“Ever since Galileo, astronomers have been building bigger telescopes to collect more light to be able to observe more distant objects,” said Peter Wizinowich, who leads the adaptive optics developments at Keck Observatory. “In theory, the larger the telescope the more detail you can see. However, because of the blurring caused by Earth’s atmosphere, a 10-inch or a 10-meter telescope see about the same amount of detail.”
After five years of living on the Big Island we finally took a few days to hop to another island and do some exploring. The selected target was Oahu, a place we have never properly visited before, changing planes at the airport does not count.
First impressions… Oahu can be a nice place to visit, but the traffic is beyond terrible! The roads packed with cars playing by aggressive city rules. Even the North Shore and Windward were bad, not just Honolulu. After years of driving on the Big Island, where there are no interstate freeways and the driving is quite relaxed, it was an unpleasant experience. I managed, and we got around with little real trouble, re-learning the old skills of dealing with heavy city traffic. I am so glad to be back to Hawai’i and out of that traffic.
The Fourth of July is a pretty good day to visit patriotic monuments like the battleship Missouri and the Pacific Aviation Museum. This was the plan and it executed well.
The 16″ guns of the Battleship Missouri in Pearl HarborI had wanted to visit the Missouri for some time, I love museum ships, such tangible remnants of the past. This battleship is simply big, everything about her was big, from the enormous guns to the massive anchors. The exception was the average crewman’s bunks, which were stacked in ranks throughout much of the first deck. There was a tangible sense of history here, the silent guns spoke of the fierce battles of WWII. A simple plaque in the deck marked where that terrible war finally ended.
For the Fourth all of the ships in the harbor were decked out in flags, including the Missouri, the many US Navy and foreign ships gathered for the upcoming RIMPAC exercises. Another treat was the Mississippi Lions All State Band performing pier-side the battleship.
Hawaiian reefs are well studied, so much so that identification of what I find is often fairly easy. Various resources from popular guide books to professional papers list most of the species one is likely to encounter. There are also severalexcellentonlinereferences that I make regular use of.
There will be situations when identification is not quite so easy… There are critters that are difficult to identify from a simple photograph. Such is the case with this small group of cnidarians I found in a crevice. They caught my eye enough that I took the photo, but proved a bit more difficult when I hit the books. The best I can guess at is the family Protopalythoa, among the zoanthids. I have no need to collect a specimen and find an expert, thus these will most likely remain unidentified…
Most likely a member of the zonanthid family Protopalythoa, just a handful of animals in a reef crevice at Puako
Tomorrow morning, July 8th, Venus will pass less than 1° from Aldebaran. The Eye of the Bull may be one of the brightest stars in the sky at 0.9 magnitude, but it is no match for Venus at -4.4 magnitude.
On the morning of the 8th the planet will be 59′ from the star, just an iota under 1°. On the morning of the 9th the distance will be slightly closer at 55′. The pair will rise about 03:18, to be well up in the sky before sunrise.
