A Marvel in the Darkness

The comet is here!

I spotted Comet Pan-STARRS Sunday night and this evening. I had photography problems last night, but this evening all was well.

Here's a shot of the comet:

Canon 3Ti, 3.2 seconds, f/5.6 ISO 1600, 200mm

For anyone looking for the comet it is essential that you have a clear view of the western horizon. Look for the comet about half an hour after sunset. The comet is on the edge of naked-eye visibility, so use binoculars to be sure that you see the comet.

Comets are truly rare gems of the night sky. While this particular one is not amazingly bright (we might get that with Comet ISON later this year), it is still a beautiful object that will only be in our skies for a short time.

On Tuesday evening the comet will be left of the thin crescent moon, so use it to be your guide. On Wednesday the Moon will be above the comet. These two nights may very well be the easiest nights to spot the comet, so head outside after dark and take a look.

Clear skies! 

Star Trek: The Conscience of the King

It's The Conscience of the King, the only Trek episode with the word "Science" in it!

When a troupe of Shakespearean actors is stranded on Planet Q, the captain of the Enterprise is only too happy to help by giving them a lift to their next destination, Benecia Colony, in exchange for a performance for the crew. There is, of course, no bigger fan of Shakespeare than the captain of the Enterprise, Jean-Luc Picard James T. Kirk.

The real heart of the story is whether or not the troupe's lead, Anton Kiridian, is really the former governor of Tarsus IV-Kodos "the Executioner". As Spock explains:

According to our library banks, it started on the Earth colony of Tarsus Four, when the food supply was attacked by an exotic fungus and largely destroyed. There were over eight thousand colonists and virtually no food. And that was when Governor Kodos seized full power and declared emergency martial law....Kodos began to separate the colonists. Some would live, he rationed whatever food was left. The remainder would be immediately put to death. Apparently he had his own theories of eugenics.... to decide arbitrarily who would survive and who would not, using his own personal standards, and then to implement his decision without mercy. Children watching their parents die. Whole families destroyed. Over four thousand people. They died quickly, without pain, but they died. Relief arrived, but too late to prevent the executions. And Kodos? There never was a positive identification of his body.

Although he was governor of a colony of 8,000 people--half of which were killed--there were strangely only nine eyewitnesses who could identify Kodos. One by one, they have all been dying off and the Kiridian Company of Players was nearby every time one of them was killed.

Kirk's friend Tom Leighton suspects that Kiridian is really Kodos. Under false pretenses calls the Enterprise to Planet Q for Kirk to see Kiridian and then arranges a cocktail party for the troupe. Kirk, not one to miss a party, delays the departure of the Enterprise to attend.

Kirk is so awesome, the music playing at the party is the theme to Star Trek.

Yet Kiridian does not show up to the party and neither does Tom as he has been murdered. One person who does attend is Kiridian's daughter, Lenore.

Lenore and Kirk hit it off and soon the Enterprise is transporting the troupe on to their next destination. This gives Kirk more time to get to know Lenore and to see if Kiridian is really Kodos.

Lenore "Creepy Eyes" Kiridian gets possibly more costume changes than any other Trek guest star.

Lenore certainly seems to like the captain:

"And this ship. All this power, surging and throbbing, yet under control. Are you like that, Captain?"

Do you think she is interested?

Are Kodos (left) and Kiridian (right) the same person? Kirk must be absolutely certain.

Now that Tom Leighton is dead there are only two eyewitnesses who can identify Kodos - Kirk and Lt. Kevin Riley.

To protect Riley, who must have been something like four years old when this is all happened, Kirk has him transferred down to Engineering. Wasn't he a bridge officer sitting at the helm the last time we saw him? So putting him in all alone on some night shift in Engineering makes him safer?

Naturally a murder attempt (poison in his milk) is made, but thanks to McCoy he pulls through.

A murder attempt is also made on Kirk with a phaser on overload.

While McCoy does save Riley, he comes across as something of a goofball in this episode. First there is the scene where Spock is concerned about the Captain's behavior and how he had Riley transferred. All McCoy wants to do is have a drink.

Then there is his medical dictation:

"Medical log. Lieutenant Riley's sufficiently recovered to be discharged, but the Captain's ordered him restricted to Sickbay to prevent contact with the passenger who calls himself Karidian and who's suspected of being Kodos the Executioner and of murdering the Lieutenant's family."

Hearing bad news from your doctor is one thing, over hearing it from your doctor's dictation is something else. Of course, Riley wasn't even under guard even though a murder attempt had been made against him and the Captain.

In the end we learn that Kiridian is indeed Kodos, but it isn't he who has been killing the eyewitnesses. It was Lenore.

She has a creepy, over-the-top meltdown and accidentally phasers her father, pretty much ending the performance for the crew.

The episode is pretty good until Lenore goes crazy. Arnold Moss, who in real life was a Shakespearean actor, did a fine job playing Karidian. Bruce Hyde also was enjoyable as Kevin Riley making his second and, unfortunately, final appearance in Trek.

Joseph Mullendore wrote almost 29 minutes of music for this episode and it is really good stuff. Unfortunately, this was the only episode that Mullendore scored for Trek. You can hear this music in all its glory in the great La-La Land Records Star Trek TOS boxed set. One track from the episode, I Know that Voice/All Ghosts Dead, is previewed there.

You can watch The Conscience of the King online from StarTrek.com. There are worse ways to spend 50 minutes.

Next up, The Galileo Seven.

16 Years Ago Tonight - Comet Hale-Bopp

If you saw my previous post, on Comet PanSTARRS, you probably realize that I am looking forward to seeing this new comet. That's because comets, while rare, are some of the finest showpieces that the night sky has to offer.

One of the comets that put on perhaps the finest show in my life was comet Hale-Bopp. Its 1997 apparition was indeed a sight to behold. It sported bright ion and dust tails making it a fine object to see from both dark skies and in most cities. Because they tend to be so large in the sky many comets look quite poor when viewed through a telescope. They often resemble a big fuzz. Not Hale-Bopp. Telescopically it looked sort of like one of those lawn sprinklers that shoots out water in a spiral pattern. While you couldn't watch the comet rotate, the spiral pattern was as amazing to behold as the tails were.

So Hale-Bopp was awesome when seen through a telescope. It was equally awesome with the naked eye and it was visible for weeks. All which added up to make it a Great Comet.

Back in 1997 when the comet made its passage through the inner solar system I was working at Lake Afton Public Observatory in Wichita, Kansas. I was going through some of the photos I took back then and noticed that some of them were shot 16 years ago tonight.

Here is how the comet looked over the Lake Afton dome:

50 mm lens, ~20 seconds on Kodak Royal Gold 1000 film

Note the blue ion tail on the left and the white dust tail on the right.

Check out the caption. Yes, this was shot with film. The print was then scanned to make it digital (The scans aren't the best, someday I need to dig up the prints and re-scan them). A lot has changed since then. 1000 speed film was pretty fast back in the 90s. Today's DSLR cameras can do a lot better. While Pan-STARRS will not be visible in a as dark a sky as Hale-Bopp was, it should be easier to capture nice pics. And if it doesn't deliver later this year Comet ISON promises to put on an even better show.

Here's the view from within the dome.

50mm lens, 20 second exposure

and finally for tonight a longer exposure:

300 mm lens, 5 minute exposure

I'll post some more Hale-Bopp photos in the coming days and hopefully some Pan-STARRS photos too.

The Comet Is Coming!

Comet PanSTARRS (C/2011 L4) will very soon be making an appearance in the Northern Hemisphere's evening skies. Catching the comet may not be easy as it will be seen low in the western sky not long after sunset. Check out this finder chart from Sky & Telescope magazine:

The comet has already put on a nice show in the Southern Hemisphere. Sky & Telescope is providing some updates here on how the comet is holding up to its brightness predictions, so be sure to check it out.

I'll be trying to get some photos of the comet and will post them here. SpaceWeather.com is a great place to look for comet photos.

Star Trek: Miri

On the surface, Miri should be a good episode, but it isn't. Not by a long shot.

The Enterprise follows an "Earth-style" distress signal that leads them to a planet that is an exact duplicate of Earth, except this Earth has no clouds.

No explanation for Earth's twin is given or even discussed after the show's early moments. The logical reason behind their finding Earth's twin is that is gave them an excuse to use available sets on the studio back lots. 

Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Rand and 2 Red Shirts beam down and learn the planet's terrible secret--it is populated by really annoying children.

They meet Miri, who tells them that all of the grownups, aka "Grups," have died off due to some disease.

Apparently the Grups had been working on life prolongation and it really worked. The kids have lived for hundreds of years, but as soon as they reach puberty they are rapidly taken by the disease, as were all the Grups before them. Kirk and the entire landing party, except for Spock, contracts the disease and the race for the cure begins.

The kids eventually steal the communicators and even Yeoman Rand. Without the communicators, there is no way to contact the ship and access its computers. McCoy thinks he may have found the cure, something based on the Nitrogen Cycle (Really?!).  Without being able to use the communicators to check the results, Spock warns that the cure could be "a beaker full of death."

Silly Vulcan, doesn't he know the difference between beaker and an Erlenmeyer flask?

Thankfully, Miri also contracts the disease. This way Kirk can use her to get to the elusive kids to rescue Janice and the communicators. Unfortunately the scenes with the kids are really painful to watch.

In the end, McCoy finds the cure & even tests it on himself (he's just that awesome). The crew returns to the ship, but wisely leaves the kids behind on the planet (Well, they will be sending teachers and stuff). 

Best part of the episode? When they fly away from this story.

Ways this episode could have been improved:

Have McCoy playing with an electric guitar, instead of a trike. (Seriously, will someone Photoshop this?)

Re purpose the episode as an anti-tobacco PSA or after-school special.

Star Wars crossover with Biggs, Luke's best friend from A New Hope. Oh, wait. It's already been done.

I would include the link so that you could watch this episode online, but trust me, you really don't want to. If you really want to watch something, Five Year Mission's song for the episode is much better than the episode itself:

Next up, is Conscience of the King.

Losing the Dark

I am happy that Losing the Dark, a short video on light pollution is now available. It recounts the numerous problems of light pollution and the simple solutions to the problem.

The show is available for free download for both flat screen and fulldome planetarium shows. If you have a planetarium or science center in your area, be sure to ask them if they will be showing it.

Losing the Dark is available on YouTube and I have it embedded below.


I have had the pleasure of playing a small part in helping this show along through my work at the International Dark-Sky Association, but the actual production was done by the good people over at Loch Ness Productions.

UFO over Tucson!

Well, not quite. It is just a blimp. Or is it?

Although, it may be that blimps are U.F.O.s. Whenever I see one I am reminded by an old Weekend Update segment on an episode of Saturday Night Live from the 70s. Father Guido Sarducci was giving the weather report, when he got around to talking about U.F.O.s:

Skies clear in Bologna tonight. A good night for spotting U.F.O.’s — “oofoes” we call them in Italy. 

I once saw a UFO near Bologna. I was driving from Assisi on this road here, and it was late at night, and from nowhere there were these two giant white lights and it just zoomed right past me real fast and it just seemed to disappear. It was about ten feet long I would say — real sleek looking — looked a lot like a Corvette. And as soon as it was gone I said to myself, did I see that or not? And you see, that’s what they do to you. They shoot you with something, some kind of ray gun — and it makes you doubt that you saw them. If you think you’ve never seen one, you probably see them all the time. 

And after what happened to me, I started carrying my camera with me at all times, just to prove to myself that I’m not hallucinating. Was just a few months ago that I spotted one again. I was in Los Angeles at the home of a friend of mine, Rainbow is her name. Fortunately, I had my camera with me. You can’t tell much from the photo, but it was kind of silvery looking. And it was in the air a long time, just kind of hovering there. And Rainbow says “Listen: all the dogs are barking.” And it was true — all the dogs were barking. 

And then it just kind of very slowly drifted away. I had this blow-up made of the UFO. I know what you’re thinking: you think it’s just the Goodyear blimp. That’s what everybody says. But I did some research and called the Goodyear Blimp people and they told me their nearest blimp was miles away from where I spotted this UFO. And that’s when it dawned on me. Don’t you think that if these aliens are smart enough to get here, they’re smart enough to disguise their spaceships as Goodyear Blimps?

Come on — they weren’t born yesterday. They’ve been spying on us like this for years and years. And my research proves that about one out of every five sightings of Goodyear Blimps is actually a flying saucer in disguise. So, don’t take any chances. If you ever see what you think is the Goodyear Blimp, call the police, call the mayor of your town, call the president, even call your senators – you can never tell.

This U.F.O. blimp was flying by our place yesterday and while Goodyear may not be the most common blimp around these days, many people do report unidentified objects in the sky. In virtually all cases these objects are just waiting more evidence and an explanation.

I know the night sky pretty well and in all my years I have seen just a handful of things that were, for a short while, "unexplained flying objects".

One evening back in the early 90s I was driving westward after sunset, coming home from teaching an astronomy class. I noticed a bright object in the western sky. It was "planet" bright, easily as bright as Jupiter--yet there were no planets in that position. In time I noticed that it was gradually changing position. Thankfully it did not take me too long to get to a telescope. I was amazed to see what it was - a beautiful tear-drop shaped weather balloon with a gleaming instrument package hanging below. I was standing in darkness, yet it was high enough in altitude to be in sunlight. It was an amazing thing to behold.

I few years later I was working at Lake Afton Public Observatory in Wichita, Kansas.  I was in the observing room showing Saturn to a small number of people. I was explaining about its rings and the moons that were visible. A boy was looking through the eyepiece and said that he could see one of them moving. I replied that, yes, they are all moving but they are so far away that you can't actually see them move. He insisted that one of them was moving.

So I took a look and, sure enough, one of them was moving slowly across the field of view. I had no idea what it was, but grabbed the telescope's hand paddle controller and moved the telescope a bit so that the U.F.O. would drift across the field of view.

I gave others a chance to look and for a while I had no idea what this was, that is until I realized that to keep the mystery object in the field of view I had to move the telescope so as to counter its clock drive. The clock drive slowly moves the telescope to counteract Earth's rotation. If I turned off the clock drive the U.F.O. should stay stationary and the stars should slowly drift pass.

That's exactly what I did and what we saw. I had correctly identified the "U.F.O." as a geostationary satellite. We just happened to be looking at the right moment when it was in the same field of view as Saturn - an amazing, but wonderful, coincidence.

There are amazing things to see in the skies, they are sometimes natural phenomena and sometimes created by humans. There is no evidence that aliens are disguising their spaceships as blimps or that they are visiting Earth at all. The recent small asteroid that broke up over Russia demonstrates that when something amazing happens in the sky, there's lots of credible evidence to back up. As Carl Sagan once said: "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."

I provided some proof above of my recent blimp passage, but you'll have to take my word about the U.F.O.s I described.