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The Night Sky Podcast | An Occultation And A Meteor Shower
Hello, and thank you for listening to this episode of the night sky podcast. My name is Billy Newman. And I’m Marina Hansen. And really appreciate you guys tuning in. Once again, I think this is our fourth podcast in a row that we’ve recorded so far in July. I really like doing it with more regularity. I think that works, works pretty well for us. But it’s been fun trying to put a few more podcasts together and a few episodes that are longer and like so we’re trying to still play with like the, the format of how long these podcast should be, I guess if anyone out there is listening, and they have some input on, on how long of an episode they’ve enjoyed, or you know, how much time the format should really be. I guess you can always drop us a note. shoot me an email, Billy ability with photo.com or I think Billy at night sky.io to I don’t know if those email addresses have ever worked though. needy that annoying man, we gotta get a development in order. Yeah, do so much worse stuff. It’ll be really fun that I really liked what we’ve been doing and what we’ve been building up in the night sky podcast. And I’m really excited for the website stuff that we can put together. It’ll always be really simple on the website of it. But I really want to make something that’s just nice and simple. And I really like some of the art stuff that we’ve been talking about. Yeah, really fun to do. I’m excited for that to be developed. I think it’d be great. Yeah, I think it’ll be pretty cool. But in between time, we’re just going to try and put out more podcasts that are maybe a little bit longer and stretch into a few more subjects. But it’s really fun. I’d like doing it, especially this month with everything that’s been going on.
Yeah, I’ve I’ve liked getting to do it a little bit more often. It’s been cool. It’s been a good reason to need to go out more to Yeah, do smart durations check stuff out.
Yeah. And this time a year in July. It’s it’s just the best time of year for it. We have, we have so many good viewing nights available to us. And there’s so many features up and available to to get to look out at.
Yeah, there’s really a ton to look at. During this time of year, there’s just so much in the sky.
Yeah, I really like that. And it’s tough in the wintertime because we run into clouds or we run into just bad viewing whether or short daylight hours, which you think would work okay for trying to observe the night sky but but at least in our part of the country, it never really seems to help that much. I really prefer like the early mornings that we get to view where we get to view the sunrise and sunsets of the things that are going on around the Sun right now. Like there’s a handful of planet well actually like right now I guess we should get into like all like we talked about back. And what was it February of this year, when all five planets are up in the sky. And we talked about it a little bit on the last couple podcasts about how Venus is how Mercury is going to be up and then also how continuing as it has been for the last couple of weeks. We have Jupiter in the sky, Mars in the sky and Saturn in the sky. And so that’s all five heavenly bodies that that we had as planets, those first five, those five that you can see with the naked eye, and then our past that we can’t see those other planets, just with the naked eye or the unaided eye. So it’s kind of cool having them all visible at the same time. It’s still really a rare event when it when it does occur. And it’s a pretty good observational period right now. And it just makes it quite a bit easier. But you have to be able to catch it right after sunrise. Right? Yeah, you have to get it in right at the right moment. Yeah, we’re able to start Venus the other day. Yeah, when we were heading out. Yeah, we were leaving, we were leaving the kayak when we were kayaking. Yeah, and our drive back right after the sunset, when we watched for the lake that we were at, you could look up just a little bit above the horizon. And it really was only there for I mean, by the time we got home in the drive, it was already set by that point. So it really does, like move quite quickly at that section of the sky. And you have to think it would I guess if you’d imagine how the sun would be, you know, if it’s only just a few degrees up off the western horizon, it’s not gonna take too long before it drops below below the horizon. But I think I think Yeah, Venus is up right now. It’s really quite bright, but it’s in the bright section of the Twilight sky. And that makes it quite more difficult to get an observation in because at that time, even as bright as it is, there’s no other stars around it that have appeared through the Twilight mean, isn’t the only thing that’s bright enough at that point, to really emerge that you can you can track or see that’s the first star you see tonight. And so it’s a bit more difficult to get an observation at this time of day. Whereas like in the morning, what you think is, it would be the darkest first, you’d get to see Venus in the darkest, and then it would reveal itself into the daylight, and then it would disappear. And that makes it for that makes it much more easy. observation, right? Because it’s just right there already. Dark Sky, just the darkness. Yeah, and the dark sky getting brighter, whereas in this case, in a very bright sky getting darker and setting to the horizon really quickly. And so that makes it just a little bit more tricky. But the cool thing is, is Yeah, you can head out and see meaning if it’s dark enough on the horizon or you don’t have enough. You don’t have light pollutants on the horizon, like in some of the areas where we’re at Here in this valley, as you look out, for what, 1500 miles or so onto the horizon, you see dust kind of coming up just on that. The horizon plane.
Yeah, there’s the wire. We don’t really see any definition in the sky, cuz it’s too hazy.
Yeah, it’s been in some areas, it’s like, it’s like 615, almost 20 degrees up from the horizon line, you see just a lot of murkiness in the sky, or whatever kind of weather field that is or dust, it’s in the air, or fires that burn, like out here in the Pacific Northwest, when there’s when there’s like a forest fire that goes off, even just for really wide, like, you know, stuff that happens in northern Washington, we’ll still get a drift of that smoke that comes down. And even if that smoke is way out, you know, it gets dense, or the particulate gets really dense as you look through it horizontally through the atmosphere. If you imagine it, our atmosphere, we go straight out from here, straight up to the top of the sky. That’s about was it like, I don’t know, 678 miles or something? I was to the to the outer limits of atmosphere. Yeah. Well, I don’t know. I guess it’s like, it’s probably like 50 miles to the very, very end of it. It’s It’s very, it’s very close, like the International Space Station is remarkably close in elevation. We should look that up. What is that?
Yeah, it is. I can’t remember the number Exactly. But it is weird when you hear it because you think of, you know, that’s out. That’s out in space. But it’s just miles away.
Yeah, I wonder what it is. I’m not sure. It didn’t really bring it up as easy as I thought it would. But it’s really interesting, I’m pretty sure it’s really, really quite close to us, like outside of the atmosphere. So if you think like a plane is at 35,000 feet or something, it’s like five miles, like 5000 times, or like eight and then up from there. So I think it’s like around like 10 1520 miles or so as we get up into the stratosphere, exosphere. And then like up to the top of the atmosphere. But if you think of that, that big distance or the depth that we’d have to the outside, or close to the limit of the atmosphere and into outer space, if we look horizontally across the landscape, we can see much further distances horizontally across the landscape through our atmosphere, then we can’t if we would just straight up. And that’s like, part of the reason why when we look through the atmosphere, we get so much distortion, because we’re looking through so much oxygen before we get out into space. That’s where they say like, like, observations are best made, when something’s at its zenith point, which is going to be straight up in the sky. Because like we’re talking about when it’s at a lower position, when it’s right at the horizon, we’re gonna have more distortion more keep rising up off the land through the oxygen, and then causing ripples or distortions. Have you seen that before? Yeah, I have seen it guess distortions, yeah, we’ve seen like heat waves on a wall. Every day, you look at the blacktop. And then you look at a painted wall, and you’ll see kind of shadows, and it looks like ripples or waves kind of moving up. But you don’t see anything in front of you, that’s just like the the heat that’s elevated, or that’s rising from the blacktop up, it’s really weird to see that kind of energy happened, but, but you can see the same types of effects, when you’re looking at like twinkling stars, or things that are close to the horizon. And, like are, that’s what you know, like, why we get a different or different colorations in the sun as it sets. Like if it’s setting through a smoke, or through fire, something that turns really red, and, and are like that really red or blood red type of color. And the sun that we see is just cause from the particulate matter that’s there. And there’s also like a bending effect, I think, like a lensing effect on the curvature of the earth, like the oxygen that’s there, that causes some types of distortions for the light that we see. Add a line, like a straight line out from that. Because if you think of kind of like looking through the curb of a lens, there’s going to be some distortions that happen because of that. It’s interesting. So I don’t know, yeah, it’ll be kind of cool to get to check out a few of the things that are going to be coming up right in the morning, or like we’re talking about right in the evening when we see Venus, and then also when we see Mercury, now Mercury is going to be right up from Venus, if I understand, right, and there’s gonna be a handful of cool conjunctions that are happening in the next couple of days. And that’s what we’ll probably get to, we’ll meet. We’ll do a quick rundown of all of those in a couple of minutes, but it’s cool. We get to see Venus, just up from Venus right on the horizon, just up from the sun. A few minutes before we hit. We hit actually, what would it be? Few minutes after sunset. We have Venus right up from Venus, we have mercury. Further from that we still have Jupiter in between Leo and Virgo right now. And then as we cut over further to the west, we have Mars and then Saturn, like we’ve been talking about for the last couple months, right? Yeah, all up there. So it’s cool. We get to see all of them at the same time. So the cool conjunctions that are going on. Like what I was going to mention a minute ago is the night so what is the day today? The 20/28 Yeah. So, Midnight’s coming up fast. So tomorrow morning, and probably it’ll have just happened when people end up downloading this podcast, we will be able to see is that the occultation that we talked about on the last episode of the moon passing in front of all the baronne. And it’s going to do that for a certain section of the United States, I think a lot of that’s going to be further south, I’m not quite sure what the view will have here from our section of the Earth is, but it might just be a crescent, moon, and the star all around really close together. And then it might appear as an occultation and just a certain section of the United States.
Oh, that’s interesting. It’s sort of it makes sense. But it’s weird to think about how that is, or how things are going to be lined up differently in different parts of the country.
Yeah, and I suppose because the moon is just a much smaller object in total size than the Earth is. So we’re gonna be up higher than then the north pole of the moon, or further south than the south pole of the moon, where our perspective is when we’re looking at it. But I don’t know how much it really changes. I think that’s called parallax, right? Like when there’s a point further in the distance, like the star, all the bronze point of the moon in front of us. And then there’s our perspective from Earth. And that shift of weather on the north pole of earth or the South Pole of Earth, when we’re observing that point of the moon and what’s behind it, that’s going to affect the the parallax is going to affect like, what surfaces from from the backside of the moon. So I think, go ahead.
I was gonna say, I think that’s right. I was also, like, we were talking about, I think in the last episode of the night sky podcast, you were mentioning that there’s gonna be I can’t remember what it’s called. But it’s that other kind of occupation that the moon’s gonna do, or it’s gonna pop. occultation. Yeah, yeah. And you can only see it that way in a specific part of the world. So
yeah, you have to be very specific with that, I think like, like to the point of having like a GPS coordinate for your time and location, because it’s really almost like a line. Like, if you change in elevation, more than what the moon’s change in elevation is going to be, you’ll miss it, or you’ll be kind of out of out of the way of it. But yeah, there’s there’s some pretty pretty complicated scheme of the minute and time and place that you’re supposed to be to get that type of observation, which is cool, I guess. It’s like kind of near El Paso, Texas. And that sort of floats out toward the east coast until around dawn. And then that’s, that’s the other thing is so like, tomorrow afternoon or tomorrow morning. If we get out, we look up into the sky, the sun will already be up, it’ll be blue sky, and we’ll find a crescent moon in the sky. And right there is where all Tiburon is it’s in Taurus, but it’s just in the daytime, which is also kind of something fun to observe when you’re like, Oh, that’s where that’s where Taurus is. And then that’s where Orion is right next to it. And you kind of get a perspective of where those constellations that are in the winter sky are when it’s done. And you can do that at any time. But you just know right now, because it’s a, you know, it’s an Oracle t shirts. It’s right in Taurus. You can you know that. It’s in Taurus right now. And it’s in the daytime, but it’s also covering all Oberon. At that time, too. So I guess most of the occultation occurs during the day, so most people aren’t going to get to see it. But we could hear or we can see something close to it, we can only see those stars, or the star and the moon very close together. When when it comes up. So because I was trying to pick up these four and four, four in poker head out the window and see what stars we can we could poke out. That’d be kind of fun. Yeah, West Coast, Northern Hemisphere. West Coast, Northern Hemisphere. Yeah, I am. Yeah, it’s it’s about 4am. But I think that might have been even for mountain or central time. Or, you know, somewhere. So I don’t know how that’s just for us. But But yeah, for us, it will still be something I mean, it will rise for us around four I am. And that’s probably when we get a chance to see it. But I’m not sure yet. It’d be kind of cool. We’ll we’ll try and check it out. We’ll get some observations of it in at least poke your head out the window, say, Hey, I can’t see all the run. Hey, look, it’s not there we go. So I think I found but that’s, that’s happening this morning, on the morning of Friday, July 29. And that’s really cool. And then so this is what’s kind of interesting is there’s a lot of these types of events in succession with each other. And what I’m going to try and do is get an observation of each one of them, maybe we won’t make it to all of them. But I think it’d be kind of cool if we were able, so tomorrow morning, we have this occultation of all the baronne. And then on July 30, that following day in the evening, that’s when we have this really close conjunction of mercury, the planet Mercury and the star Regulus in Leo. And so that’s what I was talking about earlier, as right after the sun goes down past the horizon, we’re going to look up and spot Venus. And that’s going to be the brightest object in in that early Twilight sky when it’s still really quite bright out after the sun is set. And I think just up for on Venus, just a couple degrees, and there’s good guides on how to spot these things online, I’m sure you can find it. You go just up from Venus, and you’ll be able to spot Mercury, which will be really quite faint. But that’s going to be right next to the star Regulus. And I think that’s like the bottom of the backwards question mark. That’s most of the constellation of Leo, what makes the the tail of the lion? juicy? Yeah, if you were to think of that, so yeah, at the bottom of the tail, the lion is the star Regulus that’s the bright star in in the constellation Leo and Mercury was just gonna be right up next to it. And there’s a certain period, I think it’s like a 30 minute period, that the the two points are in a conjunction are so close that I guess they’d be considered and conduct conjunction. I’ve not really witnessed that before, like too many planets passing in front of a right next to other stars, you think it would happen more often? But because? Yeah, but often? Just a regular? Yeah, yeah, it’s one of those kind of rarities, in a lot of ways. So that’s happening the next day, which I think is kind of cool. And then just a couple days later, now that we have the moon, really like almost as a new, I think it’s a new moon on August 2 or August 3. And the first bit the first day after that when we have just that first little sliver of a crescent that we’d see on the evening side of the sun. On August 3, if we look at just after sunset, we will see this real close conjunction of the super thin crescent moon and Venus in the sky. And so that would be like the third conjunction event that’s going to happen just here in the next week. That’s pretty cool. If there’s a lot going on this week. Yeah, I think it was next week.
It really is actually at this time of year, there’s seems to be a lot of stuff going on, or you know, just a few minor things, those those aren’t really major events, in a lot of ways. But they are like kind of unique skywatching events that I think would be cool to check out for if we get a chance to. And definitely the kind of stuff we want to talk about here on a little podcast about skywatching events. Yeah, seems like that’s pretty neat. Yeah, that’s, that’s a handful of them. And you can see all five planets at the same time. We may even that is enough to, and it’s in the summertime. And it’s in the evening. It’s just one of the most easy times to get good observations. And of all five planets up. In fact, if you haven’t done it before, I don’t think it’s really going to get easier, or more common than it has, you know, in the last couple of weeks or the last six months when we got to see it a while back. And we before that, right? They talked about how it hadn’t been that way for like almost a decade or so
a long time. That’s cool that we’re getting to have it twice this year.
Yeah. So yeah, it’s a good year for us to be doing podcasts about it. And then in the future, what we’ll notice over time is that we’ll see the stars kind of separate a little bit. And we’ll have we’ll have boring years and a lot of ways this is really an exciting year. for first year we had like Saturn opposition and Mars opposition and Mars in retrograde, doing all that stuff. In the evening sky. Then we have the stuff with, you know, Venus and Mercury coming up and these little conjunctions and stuff. And all five planets up in the sky in the morning, and in the evening. Like happening, like twice, two different times in the year. Yeah, that’s pretty cool. It’s really cool. And then, you know, two or three years from now we’re just gonna have no stars or no planets in the sky. Little planner in the sky. Yeah. Yeah, we need to we need to look out ahead, try and get some programming in my ideas for 2017 skywatching stuff. But yeah, it’s gonna be really cool. I think getting to try and watch those three things. So like the, the, the conjunction of the moon, and Venus or see me Yeah, the moon and Venus, Mercury and Regulus, and then the moon and all Gibran tonight. I think those things are gonna be kind of cool to check out. Yeah, like, it’s definitely good. That’d be cool. And then even more than that, and this is the other thing that we should get into is, is the Delta aquarid meteor shower is going to be going on for for I think the next few days here. I think it’s really yeah. And then I think it’ll kind of tail off. I’m not sure how it they said. It’s, it’s hard to tell I don’t trust I don’t trust the predictions that come out.
I think the predictions are loose predictions. A lot of this stuff that I was reading said that predictions are really only roughly, it’s really difficult. I think that this meteor shower that we have going on right now, the Delta aquarids one I think that that was supposed to start it on the 27th Yeah. And I think that it says it’s supposed to go till about the 30th but probably a few days into early August.
Yeah. So given that like I cuz you’re right, because the way that I understand it is that there’s a ramp up and ramp down from the time that that means your sharp peaks and so that’s why this section of summer is so great to go out. Also because you get so many shooting stars during that period because we’re going to have this, this ramp up to the Delta aquarids, which I’ve seen a lot of good meteors out of in the past. They know during this time of year, it’s Yeah, you’ll be able to catch a few I think it, I think it was maybe like 20 an hour. Sometimes I think that they always try and sell the number, like, what’s the number that get you out of the house to look at it? That’s what will tell you. But I don’t know if it’s really, if it’s really known or not. I’ve gotten out on yours that we’re supposed to be great. And it was a little bit of a dud, it actually depends on what random material is floating in front of the atmosphere when our planet runs into it. Yeah, it’s really difficult to predict the say, okay, so we’ll, we’ll get that in a second. The prediction stuff about about meteor showers is silly. Or it’s just complicated. Yeah, I’m not sure. I’m not sure what they really notice or what would make like a peak or not. But the cool thing. So like we’re talking about, we had the Delta query ads, which were out for just a couple nights ago, we saw a few Yeah, we were trying to take some some photos, some really wide angle photos, we use like this 10 millimeter lens. To try and get some of those those photos of the Milky Way that we were talking about from the last couple episodes, like when we’re talking about Astro photography, and wide angle, Astro photography, use in high ISO high ISO on a digital camera with a really wide angle with a long exposure and getting a lot of light captured into that sensor. So we can make these photographs of the Milky Way looking really crisp, or some of the stars that we see in the in the night, just looking really crisp and bright, still similar to the way that the eye sees it. It’s interesting how that is right how the eye sees so much light in the night sky. But you know, a camera sensor doesn’t Yeah. To make it get what you see. Yeah, right. And to capture all that light that we’re able to see when we’re able to make out the Milky Way galaxy, you have to leave the shutter open for like 20 or 30 seconds or so to get that same effect. And so that’s kind of an interesting thing about how sensitive our our eyes are, as a tool to get to see or to get to look. Yeah. But it’s really fun trying to work with the camera and try to build some of these photos. I really like some of the stuff that we did, because like we were talking about in the last episode, how to spot the galactic center, right and like, where is it like the the front end of the tea pot? That’s a score that’s in Sagittarius at the backend of Scorpio. And so that was kind of fun going out and looking at as we looked at this time. Yeah, yeah, like if it gets a little bit late in the night, like we were looking at, you really see Scorpio kind of tilting out toward the west, quite a bit more than it was just a month ago. And then you see the Milky Way, just kind of beam straight down, do south and drop out past the horizon, which is really cool. I’m glad we get to see it. And we got some photos of it, which is fun.
Yeah, I’m glad we made it out to that spot. We were just a little bit outside of our apartment, part of town, which is to pretty much downtown in Eugene, where we live. So there’s a lot of light pollution here. But we Yeah, we drove a little bit out just to some country area. That’s always way and it was great. It was way better.
Yeah, we should. We will try and do that as much as we can. That’s what was great about growing up in Southern Oregon. And I was thinking about this now too. And what most people probably never had was that like, it’s, you know, that area in Southern Oregon, where we went to to look out to the southern sky there. If you think about it, there are no other cities there south for almost ever, right? When you think about that section of the earth, the geography of where Southern Oregon is and pass that there’s, you know, there’s Murphy, which is not but it’s really it’s just the hills. It’s just those big hills. Yeah, there’s that red one hurtings out there. Have you heard of that before the redwood curtain? I don’t know if I have is I guess for the redwoods sort of basically, it’s open. It’s sort of, it’s sort of this term for the geology of that area. How you go down, you follow the I five corridor, it goes all the way down to Southern Oregon. And then it just gets into this really intense mountainous terrain that’s up and down and up and down that we don’t really have and the rest of it like up here we have the Willamette Valley it’s his big wide expanse of stuff. There’s not there’s a mountain range over to the to the west, the coastal range, but that’s not as big and so that area of Southern Oregon, you know, by the river where all those hills are there and then down into the redwoods and into Northern California, and like into the Trinity Alps, where we were all areas all mountainous terrains built up in that section, and that’s what kind of blocked off a lot of development in Northern California over to the redwood coast, like to where Eureka is, and arcade is. And that’s why there’s not as much access out there because of this thing called the redwood curtain. Just Just that there are so many big hills for like 1000 miles. Yeah. Yeah, you look at a map of the US and there’s sort of like a clumpy block of mountains over there. But the siskiyou mountain range, like where we’re at Ashland is on the divide of Oregon, and California divided there, there’s big hills there that and you know, everything else is really mountainous.
That’s cool. I hadn’t heard it called the redwood curtain before.
Yeah. And so what I was thinking about is that That sky that we’re looking at to the south good view is a good view because there’s no cities there until or something way down like a few 100 miles into, into California. It’s really
it’s a great spot. Yeah, it’s
pretty cool. So you just you get a lot of, there’s no light pollution on that side of town. I think even if I lived on the north side of Grants Pass, there just would have been tons of light pollution in that section, I had that kind of view of the sky. So it was kind of interesting thinking about that. And thinking about how much better or just the benefit that that kind of view had of not having that much light pollution had and viewing things in the southern sky,
it really makes all the difference. Yeah, somebody that’s just a little bit darker,
a little bit darker, but even still, where we were when we went south of Eugene, here, we’d look at and you still see the lights from the small towns, little satellite towns that are further out from Eugene, that are still like within the 1520 mile range. And those little areas even put off and the little establishments of the communities that live there put off a lot of light pollution. Yeah, the horizon is, is all glowy like that. Yeah. Yeah, it was interesting. It was just kind of a strange thing to think about. But we’re talking about the Delta aquarids and going out for the photo, or taking the photos hanging out looking at the constellations and stuff that were out there. And while we were out there, we saw like a handful of meteor showers. Yeah, but just shooting stars. That’s pretty cool. It was pretty cool. And so that’s the Delta Aquarius are ramping up.
Yeah. And I was hearing that after the moon has set, and before dawn is a good time to look to because it’s that much darker. Without that.
Yeah, I think and we’re in a great spot right now. Because the moon will like tonight, what we’re talking about is the moon will rise probably at what like 4am. Because it was gonna be a cool thing all around tonight. So it’s gonna be up in the night sky. And then just in a couple of days, it’ll be a new moon. So there’ll be no sky, which would be great. And then here’s the great thing. So we’re talking about the Delta aquarid meteor shower. And it’s pretty cool. But it’s like a limited amount of stuff, and it’s a good ramp up, it’ll get your property should go out and try it a little bit, you’ll probably see a couple of fun, you know, meteors that are shooting stars that come through, you might see a couple of really good ones too. But now there’s a thing that’s interesting is just after that, and what we talked about before is the perceived meteor shower that’s going to be coming through. And that peaks, that’s at its its best on. I think it’s August 11. And 12th. I think that’s the evening on the 11th in the morning of the 12th. That’s going to be the period that it peaks. And I think you start making your observations toward the constellation of Perseus after around 11pm I’d really say like after midnight, so that it entirely be on the on the date of the 12th. But it’s the evening of the 11th 12th. Right. And yeah, so after midnight, into 1am 2am. And then really getting the strongest between three, four and 5am is going to be Yeah, the proceed meteor shower. And that’s they’re saying this year, back to the predictions that we were talking about earlier. They’re saying it’s gonna peak this year, it’s gonna pop this
Yes, here and that too. Yeah. It’s supposed to be like double the usual expected amount, which is like 200 200
per hour. Yeah. Which I’m, I’m suspicious of that. I’ve never got one a minute. I’ve never seen one a minute. And I’ve tried to I’ve tried to go out and make observations of this for the last 10 years. Yeah, I’m doubtful that it’ll be that you might see a few little sprites. That’s probably what they account for just some some real tiny little insignificant sprite that Yeah, kind of cut through, but but the big ones are the perceivable ones. Okay, well, that seems like less than 60 an hour?
I’m sure it is. I bet if you’re out in a really, really nice dark spot, you probably are gonna get to see more of them.
Yeah, you probably see more. But man, there’s a lot of cool ones. And what we get a good chance to see are the fireballs, there’s a little difference between like, between a shooting star and a fireball. Have you heard Have you heard about that? Tell me Tell me about that a little. So the shooting star comes through with a little little chunk of rock in it. The thing that we see light that we see is really not the rock or the object, it’s it’s the pressure that it puts on the air in front of the rock. And that turns it radiates light because it’s really hot. And it’s like a little plasma tube. It’s sort of like, it’s like a vacuum behind the shooting stars that comes in out from outer space and into the Earth’s atmosphere. It kind of pokes a hole into the atmosphere. And that pushes a lot of energy into it. And that kind of illuminates the tube. That is a vacuum ionizes the tube it is a vacuum to show a lot of light. That’s what we see in a shooting star. And a little piece is like you know, a small chunk and it just burns up. Now a fireball is bigger than that. That’s the one that we see that that looks like it’s a it’s a real thing that’s kind of crumbling up in the sky. And when I see it, can I pull into a part or two and I’ve only seen a couple of those in my life but those are like the bigger the bigger meteor showers are the bigger, you know, shooting stars that we would see in the evening. There’s really significant ones that look that look stronger. And don’t look just like a little little ship. Yeah. But yeah, those pieces are the ones that are called fireballs.
That’s cool. How? And do we see mostly? Not fireball mostly shooting stars?
Yeah, you’re mostly gonna see shooting stars. In fact, it would be. It’s kind of rare almost to see a fireball. So you’re only gonna see a couple of those. If they come through. And there’s there’s certain characteristics to the colors that they show as the ionize in the atmosphere. And that is an indicator of what their makeup is. It’s great. Yeah, like type of like metal that there? Yeah, if it’s iron, it’ll ionize a certain color. If it’s copper, it’ll ionize a certain color. It’s really cool. So you can kind of tell by the way that it that it ionizes or that it burns up in the atmosphere, what the material was made of. So you can look at and you see I think copper is green, I believe. Yeah, I think if copper is burned, it turns like a little green flash of a fireball as it falls. And then I think I think iron is red. Yeah, but I could be wrong about that, too. But yeah, it’s it’s kind of cool. Yeah, you’ll see like, you know, I’ve seen I think maybe one or two really good ones. Those have also been at periods that there was no meteor shower going on.
Yeah, that’s what I was gonna ask too. Are the fireballs ever associated with Meteor showers? Or is that more often something that you I think
that it’s, it’s really probably separate. I think I’ve seen maybe four or five. When I’ve been out looking. There’s been a handful that I missed. There was one that like everybody saw I was like a huge one that went kind of over over the Northwest here is a lot of people in Oregon and on the coast that saw it and they say like it went out and went into the ocean or something, but it probably like hit in the ocean. I’m not sure if that’s true or not though. It would seem like speculation by people that were smart, but it still seemed like speculation. But it was really cool. I think that’s back like 2005 or something like that. The store is is really big media that whenever it’s cool. There’s like UFO warnings on the news is really funny. I happen to like 745 or something in the evening. It was kind of like evening Twilight sometime in July probably. And then we were watching a movie on TV on ABC and I remember this really clearly. And it had this like little ticker pop up on channel 12. And it was like boo boo boo boo. And I said like bright light scene over town. Not a UFO. This is war the world. I seen this before. Yeah, I remember. I remember the first 15 minutes of war on the world’s saying it’s not a UFO. And then the next thing is gonna cut to some live scene of Trenton New Jersey where there’s little tripods popping up out of the ground. Little Martians. Yikes. Yeah. So we didn’t we didn’t see any of that. But yeah, I remember that that fireball happen. I remember I saw another one kind of like cruise past it was like going north to south over my grandparents house, you know where I’d make an observation. I sign that actually green. I think it kind of broke up into two pieces are like kind of small, real close to each other, you know, sort of all flares out at the same time. So really, she would see like a firework or something like that. It almost looks like a firework. Sometimes you’re like, hey, so like, just like a big sparkler that they launched here is that like a shooting star. And there’s another time I remember being at a football game. It was like a Hidden Valley High School football game. And I remember looking at it, and I saw like this orange one break up over in the Northwest. It’s pretty cool. It’s cool. You get to see him. And they’re a little bit more rare. But you might be able to spot when it’s really just kind of the bigger chunk of material. That’s that’s actually kind of disintegrating in the atmosphere. That’s what we’re talking about. We talk about a fireball. And the others, like we’re saying like that, ionized look to the light that we see. Yeah. And it’s really cool to see that there’s all of these other ones. Have you seen it? For a shooting star? When it goes through? it’ll, it’ll cut the atmosphere like we’re talking about make that tube ionizes with light and then it’ll stay lit for a little bit of time. Yeah, I’ve only seen that like once or twice, but I saw the shooting started go through and the tube stayed there for less than a second. But a perceivably longer amount of time than the other bits that were just kind of shoot through.
Yeah, what is that mean? I’ve seen? I’ve seen that before. I haven’t seen fireballs before. Yeah, but I’ve seen some shooting stars that had the trail stick behind.
Yeah, it’s really cool. It is Yeah. holds for a bit. I think it’s really interesting. I want to try and do some photos of the Percy meteor shower. I was thinking the same thing. Yeah, really. Oh, and the best thing. So like we were talking about the new moon is on August 3, second or third sort of in that area. And then it’s gonna start you know, getting brighter and brighter again, the great thing is, is that the 11th and 12th and I was worried about this, that we’d get a full moon or you know, big moon, there’s going to be bright. We’re not going to get the best observations that evening. But the great thing is, is that it’s only up to a first quarter moon and that time in the evening. So if you’re getting a good hours of observation in between one and two 3am and 4am. And you’re looking at toward toward Perseus in the northeast, the great thing is, is that that first quarter moon is already going to be set in the evening sky. So we’re not gonna have to worry about it causing a lot of light pollution in those really dark, late hours of the sky.
That’d be great. Yeah, I was wondering about that, too, since we were having the new moon
I was worried about. It’s happened for a few years, or there’s there’s been, you know, good years on yours and off years. But man, there’s been a handful where it’s like, oh, it’s just like, almost a full moon. Yeah, just a little bit before after, and you’re just you’re just screwed all night, where you just really can’t, can’t make out the darker parts of the sky, you can still see shooting stars, but I think it really works best. And the best effect is in that really dark, crisp black sky with no mood. And that’d be great for the photos, too. If we try and do that, you’ve seen a handful of those photos where you kind of pick the camera will pick up the shooting star. Yeah, streak almost similar, it almost looks like when we catch a satellite. In a photograph, when we shoot it. When we take a picture of the next guy that there’s a little satellite that’s tracking, it looks like just a little streak. It looks like that’s same kind of effect that we get when a shooting star goes through. But you get that the tube is illuminated when it goes through. It’s really cool. That’d be fun to try and make some some observations of but we got a couple more weeks. But for the persons we’re probably talking about again, in preparation for I think we should find try and find like a really cool dark spot for it this year.
Yeah, I think we should too, especially since it’s supposedly going to be an extra
100 an hour. Whoa, that’s, that’s like three a minute. That’s what is that? Let’s wait. A bit of you. Great. It’d be fantastic. If it’s the case that I think it’d be really fun. So I want to I want to work really hard to try and get somewhere that’s that’s extra dark, or you know, that’s a good observation spot for that sort of stuff that we just hang out at all may take some cool photo. Yeah, make a little bit. Yeah, I think it’d be really cool. So that’s what I look forward to doing is working on some more Astro photography. So I’ve had a lot of fun with you doing that the summer trying to make more photographs of the stars and stuff. Yeah, so we’re gonna try and keep keep pushing on more of this. We should try some star trail photos to like when we leave it.
Oh, yeah. That’d be really fun. I’ve been opposed to that was starting out because I’ve been so set on not having any blur. Oh, yeah. He hit those nice sharp stars where I can make out the constellations and stuff still, but I think it’d be really cool to get some of those trailing ones.
I like to I like the effect. We should do a couple. Yeah, it’s hard. You really have to have a go for like four hours. It’s a long commitment for one frame. And if anything goes wrong, as well as four hours. Yeah, it’s really tough. It works really well over to the northern hemisphere here. And you know where we’re at, because we just look at the pole star, we can see the circumpolar stars. And you really get a you see the twist? Yeah, otherwise, you just kind of get lines, which is cool, too. But it’s it’s
really cool, though. Yeah, shooting, shooting tall towards Polaris and getting to see that shape that this that the stars me then
yeah, it’s really neat. I think it would work really well, especially in like a light sky, when we’re getting Cassiopeia you know, rising up further. And then really, if you stay up late, and I probably stay up till like 1am 2am, you’re going to see Capella coming out, that’s going to be really bright star over there. And a lot of that stuff in that section in the Milky Way that starts rising up as we get further in the fall. So I think like trying to catch some of that stuff in and like a star trail photo would be really cool. If we got that really riding lens, we could try and just, you know, a whole bunch of stuff. So it’d be a lot of fun. I’m looking forward to trying some some more types of photos with you some more a late night, early morning photos.
Yeah, I’ve really been enjoying it. I’m excited to do some more.
Yeah, it’ll be really fun. I guess that’ll wrap up most of the stuff that we have to talk about some news and events that are going on in the night sky above us. For the fourth week of July 4. He says over, over summer’s over. No, we can’t be over yet. But we have a lot more summer stuff to go and a lot of cool observations stuff coming up in this next week. All the personal stuff we’re going to be really busy for for the next bit of summer. And it seems like it’s just really kicking in.
So it’s been weird this year. It really does feel like it’s sort of just starting. It’s ramping up and we’ll have a lot of fun too. It’ll be cool. Yeah, it’ll be great. I’m looking forward to school observations. Yeah, we got to do a bunch. We got to go camping this weekend. Yeah. Cool.
Let’s get some cool photos.
I’m looking forward to on behalf of Marina Hanson. My name is Billy Newman LSA. Thank you all very much for listening to this episode of the night sky podcast.