Category Archives: Astronomy

The Power and the Beauty

The sky was a canvas of science and magic. 

For 53 years, I have dreamt of this sight: the night dancing in ribbons of light. And, finally, there I was, barely dressed, cold, and in tears on my deck, letting it consume me.  

The forecast had been promising, but it’s been promising so many times before. We’re just too far from the North Pole, and too thoughtless with our use of electricity. There’s little chance of seeing an aurora borealis in Connecticut.  

It had been a great day in many ways, an island of life’s simple joys. Basking in it, I was both sleepy and restless, and thought I’d calm my brain by checking the night sky. I was braced for disappointment, but Luna’s beautiful crescent was visible through the window, teasing clear skies overhead.  

I stepped out onto the cold, wet deck, regretted not wearing slippers, and let myself be annoyed at bright light low to the northeast. A high school athletic field there normally blots out the darkness.  

Then the light moved. 

Green, then orange. Then pink. Then purple. I struggled to make sense of why, though I knew. 

I tilted my head to look straight up, and lines of light shifted and twisted. 

Magic. Pure, breathtaking magic. 

But not. A tiny shield of gas and magnetism, smothering our tiny rock, in a dangerous neighborhood around a tiny star, was afire, protecting our irrelevant species from destruction on a scale we’ve never experienced in modernity. 

A collective joy rose online, as tens of millions of us shared photos. We stood together in the church of nature, awestruck by the mighty God that is the universe, so much more powerful than our missiles, bombs, and technology. So much greater than our petty squabbles, our endless discontent, our vain belief in our own influence. Or, as I write this, so much greater than meager words can or should even describe. But in vain we write about it, think about it, share our joy, and try to understand what we saw on May 10, 2024. We stood united in awe at the power and the beauty.  

Beauty in the science of the colors and movement that our eyes have adapted to see. 

Power that, with an inadvertent whim, would end modern civilization if just a tiny bit stronger. One of my favorite sayings about nature is, “The mountain doesn’t care about you.” Nor does the ocean. Or the sun. 

This morning, the storm on our star is visible to us as a massive rip, so much larger than our planet. In days, it will be gone, replaced by more turmoil on the sun’s surface, and all that will remain of it will be the memories created by fuses in our simple brains, which we’ll reconnect for the rest of our lives to share the story of this night. 

A moment so rare and precious that many of us will take our last breath never seeing something like it again.  

But while we could, we took in the night sky together, and we reveled in the majesty of it all. 

Photo source: http://obstacleracingmedia.com

Together: An Essay of Tough Mudder, the Eclipse and a Tragedy

Image credit: Obstacleracingmedia.com

It started, quite honestly, with an off-the-wall idea, not the first one I’ve had with this longtime friend.

“We should do a Tough Mudder.”

Neither of us was in peak, or even great, physical shape, but one of us had done a few similar events, and the other had completed a half triathalon.

We both decided the Tough Mudder was a little bit scary, which, true to form, made it more appealing. We opted for the five-mile version, which seemed reasonable and still challenging.

Six months later, after countless runs, workouts, and videos watched, we joined thousands of others at a sprawling racetrack in central New Hampshire to test ourselves.

Neither of us knew what to expect.

I, certainly, never expected how much it would affect me.

TOUGH MUDDER

What transpired over the next several hours left a mark. Not only on my body, but on my outlook toward life and the challenges I face.

Some disclosure first.

It needs to be said upfront that Tough Mudder isn’t some benign social movement but, rather, a business and a marketing success story. It’s a physical manifestation of countless approaches to self-care that drive home the point that we have wildly untapped power within us.

I think it’s also fair to say it’s an escapist event for those with the privilege to indulge in it. The entry and assorted fees are not insignificant, more than a full day of work if you make minimum wage, and it’s well worth noting that within living memory, there was a time when something like it could not happen in our society. Countless people suffered—truly suffered, not the kind of suffering we experienced on the course—to allow all of us the privilege to participate together as one group. I don’t intend to make it seem, and it should not be implied, that the event is some social panacea, an afternoon of sweat that undoes everything else around us in this day and age. It isn’t.

And while Tough Mudder doesn’t particularly play up this particular angle, many other similar runs do focus on the military nature of their obstacles, implying subtly that it’s like going through the rigors of a warrior’s life. It isn’t that, either.

What it is, though, is truly amazing.

I cannot think of another lived experience that featured so much communal work and reward, with so many different types of people. Rarely in my daily life have I experienced so many slices of society as in the mud. It wasn’t a representative cross section of America by any means, but the Mudders I saw were a pretty eclectic group: young, old, all body types and abilities, and I presume a wide range of backgrounds, religions, political views and ideologies, working together toward a common goal of taking another step forward on the course, then another, to completion.

I expected pride in finishing. I didn’t expect pride in simply being there. The Mudder Oath, which we all took as a group, was a touchstone for a life well-lived: Help those who need it. Put others’ needs before your own. Don’t whine. Tackle the things you believe you can’t. Life is not a race toward the end, but a challenge to overcome your fears. Those fears will appear daunting and insurmountable and, often, when you have nothing left in you. No one can do it alone.

In the mud, like in life, little else matters but these ideas.

The course was painful, like life itself. Over obstacles higher than we thought we could scale, in disgusting muddy water up to our necks, with legs, lungs, hearts and muscle straining, we pulled each other through. No one asked who you voted for before lending a hand. No one pondered if the person next to them was worth their trouble; they were. No one forced or shamed us to help each other. Arms, legs, shoulders, bodies and words were freely offered to each other for support. My proudest moments were not when I overcame an obstacle—and I overcame every one with the group’s help—but when I helped others do the same.

It was a fantasy world, for sure. When we finished, we got our finisher t-shirt, headband, and beer, deservedly patted each other on the back, took some pictures, made some social posts, then got in our cars and drove back into our realities.

But if it’s a fantasy, it’s one I’d happily live in. It’s one I’m extremely proud to have finished. It’s one I will certainly indulge again. It’s one of the few moments in my adult life when I looked across a diverse crowd and felt…together.

In this vulgar, contentious day and age, it felt charmingly right.

A TRAGEDY

After a celebratory lunch outside of Boston, we returned to the parking lot where I’d left my car that morning, said goodbye, and made our respective ways home.

As I got on the highway, traffic stalled and then stopped almost immediately. A wall of lights flashed ahead. For a generally impatient person, traffic is frustrating. Add in mud, soreness and a long drive, and it’s over the top. I thought back to the Mudder Oath, and its “I will not whine. Kids whine.” provision.

The helicopter swooped down onto the blocked highway so quickly that it took a moment for the brain to process what was happening just yards ahead. This clearly wasn’t just a minor accident—the highway was now closed, in both directions. Car engines were turned off, windows rolled down, and slowly people opened their doors and got out onto the pavement.

We had nothing in common other than being stuck here, in a random spot on a random highway in a random town. Some left. A junky sedan and a luxury SUV were the first I saw to hit the grass and try to backtrack against stopped traffic to reach the previous exit. Perhaps someone was in labor. Perhaps someone just didn’t want to wait.

The rest of us talked and watched and, if they’re like me, pondered the costs of having one more bite at lunch, or one fewer joke with a friend, and being that person loaded onto the helicopter instead of a spectator, just by a sheer luck of timing.

The driver to my right railed on about aggressive drivers and did everything short of blaming the accident victim for society’s ills. To my left, a guy whom I learned worked in Manhattan talked weather with a young person with a Red Sox shirt and a neck tattoo. We marveled at how polite most people were…clearly those before us had let many emergency vehicles through, and there were now dirty looks given to the cars who set off on their own. Mostly, we looked on in awe at the fast and fluid motions of brave life-savers as they went about their business. The chopper loaded up, lifted off and soared over our heads. The conversations stopped, everyone returned to their cars, and we all set out on our myriad ways, rolling by a tangled heap of metal that had inadvertently and tragically brought together strangers.

THE ECLIPSE

If the Tough Mudder was togetherness by choice, and the tragedy was togetherness by random happenstance, the 2017 eclipse was togetherness in the context of our insignificance.

Astronomy is a humbling hobby. The vastness of the cosmos exceeds our tiny brains’ ability to ponder it. However, it can sometimes seem so removed from our life as to be disconnected. A supernova, for instance, one of the most powerful forces in nature, is merely a new and temporary dot in the sky. We can’t even see black holes. For most people, most of the time, astronomy is just something scientists study, nothing easily accessible to them in any dramatic fashion.

What I loved about the eclipse was that it was a stark reminder of the forces so much larger than ourselves or our species. We are, to quote Sagan, a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. A small moon momentarily moved in front of a small star, and the most powerful nation that’s ever existed was darkened, humbled and awestruck.

Together, we looked up at forces that we couldn’t control if we tried.

Together, we saw our source of life blotted out.

Together, we shared our experiences and our awe.

And, if we chose to think about it, together we could see with very little effort how completely fleeting and meaningless our existence is, and incongruently, how important our choices are in the brief journey of life.

THE CHOICE

My point to these three stories is that, ultimately, we all have choices every time we act. We choose to be helpful, divisive or inward-focused. We choose our tribe, our actions and our fates. We can choose to acknowledge differences, brought about by our respective lived experiences that no one else can understand, or we can imagine others are governed purely by irrational thought. We can choose to be humbled by life, or not.

We all have different frameworks around our choices, those frameworks limit our choices, we don’t have an equal set of choices or frameworks, and sometimes there are no good choices. But there’s always a choice. Always.

You can choose to help or you can walk by. You can choose to wait for others or you can believe you are more important. You can choose to understand your own cosmic insignificance or you can think you are bigger than it all. You can choose to tackle your obstacles or you can not.

And we can choose to be together, with all the good and bad it brings. Or not.

In the lexicon of Tough Mudder, there are “No Excuses.” That day on the course, every step, every hurdle, I had to examine the excuses that popped into my mind and mentally move beyond them.

I’ve since been struck by how often I think about my excuses elsewhere, at work, in life, as I go about my day. Excuses are easy. They can easily drive my choices if I let them.

What are yours? And why?

And what’s our role together?

On Daring, Winning, and Losing

Originally posted on LinkedIn (February 5, 2015).

I did not know of Henry Worsley before last week, but it’s been difficult to get him out of my mind since. He died on January 24, just 30 miles short of his goal but after traversing more than 900 miles of Antarctica on foot, seeking to honor his inspiration, famed explorer Ernest Shackleton. Worsley was much more than an explorer, it turns out. He was a philanthropist, raising money for wounded soldiers. He was also himself a combat-decorated warrior, rising to the elite of the British special forces and spending a career on the knife’s edge.

Days after his passing, NASA observed a day of remembrance for their own explorers, the astronauts lost in the 1967 Apollo launchpad fire and on shuttles Columbia and Challenger. As someone who has always looked up, I was moved and impacted by the memories. I was there when Challenger launched on an earlier mission in 1983, carrying another explorer, Sally Ride, the first American woman in space.

A few weeks before Worsley’s passing, musician, actor and artist David Bowie left us.  It’s hard to define where my love of space—and my love of words—ends and where Bowie’s music begins. It’s equally hard to imagine that in a lifetime of writing, I’ll ever be able to create something that sums up living as well as the final verse of my favorite Bowie song:

And love dares you to care for the people on the edge of the night /
And love dares you to change our way of caring about ourselves /
This is our last dance. This is ourselves. Under pressure.

There is not much logically tying Worsley, the astronauts and Bowie together. There is no peer comparison to them, and I’m not trying to equate a rock star, astronauts and a warrior. They each can stand on their own merits. We are poorer for the loss of all.

However, while there’s not an equality between them, I think there actually is a connection of sorts, and it’s from the motto of Worsley’s unit, the Special Air Service.

Qui audet adipiscitur. Latin for “Who Dares Wins.”

I first heard the expression in college, coming out of a shell, finding myself. I thought it was fascinating and true. It fit where I was in my life, and over the decades, not a week goes by when I don’t think it. I’ve passed it along to friends who have asked me for advice on everything from coming out to dating to careers to life decisions. Some of them have passed it on to others. I have tried to apply it to my professional life wherever possible.  I’ve been blessed to work in environments that encouraged daring.

Life—actual experiences, not the day-to-day drudgery that makes days turn into weeks turn into months turn into years turn into decades while you blink—is about daring, isn’t it? Daring to cross that mountain, sail beyond the horizon, try something new when other things have failed, take that leap. Life is dangerous, scary. It’s easier to rest, take it easy, copy others, be part of the crowd, and we all have to do some of that some of the time. Daring is hard work. No one can do it ceaselessly or should do it thoughtlessly.

The astronauts dared, volunteering to place themselves in danger to launch into the heavens above, taking humanity’s dreams with them.

David Bowie dared, never taking the safe route in his art, always being just a little different, willing to reinvent himself, not often taking the easy path his fame and wealth could have allowed.

Clearly, Worsley dared. His whole life was “leaning forward,” running to the sound of the guns, sacrificing all for others.

Who dares wins.

Except, of course, sometimes you don’t. Sometimes, the daring causes you to be blind, short-sighted, stupid, and arrogant (or is it the other way around?). Sometimes you make that leap you shouldn’t. And people—at the very least, you—get hurt by your actions. Or worse.

Defining “wins” in terms of “accomplishing what you set out to do,” actually, you quite often don’t win. You quite often lose. But that isn’t the point, nor does it mean that you stop daring. It means you reevaluate your actions and goals, what you did, what drove it, how you can fix the harm done, and how or if you can move ahead. You are in debt to the experience and everything that got you to where you were and are, and thankful that you can even have those thoughts. You win through the learning, if you choose to.

And you move on. One ski ahead of the other, because the alternative sounds much worse.

You dare yourself. As Bowie said, you are then, in turn, dared to care about everything.

This is our last dance. Who dares wins.

 

Space and time on Isle au Haut

Astronomy is, among other things, the study of history. The light from the stars of the Big Dipper, that most ordinary of formations, take most of a human lifetime to reach us. The Andromeda Galaxy’s glow we see tonight left 2.5 million years ago, when man’s distant cousins were barely using stone tools on Earth. As we look up at the heavens, we watch history arrive at our small outpost.

The stars tell a human history, too. Mankind has used them for practical, spiritual and recreational purposes since our earliest days.

All of this history is easier to see in some places than others.

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Six miles off the coast of Maine is Isle au Haut, a rocky, forested, 12-square-mile piece of heaven. Sparsely occupied in the peak of summer, and even emptier through the brutal Maine winter, it is mostly land that is part of Acadia National Park.

For at least ten thousand years, locals have plied its waters for fish, oysters, crab, bird, lobster and seal. Its prominent hills have likely always been something of a sanctuary from the mainland, providing a lookout that scans dozens of miles and hinting at the origin of its European name: high island.

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Today, that sanctuary is from tourists. The mainland portion of Acadia taxes the patience of even the most nature-minded with its summertime crowds and congestion. Isle au Haut is empty by comparison. There are only five campsites, reserved months in advance. A small number of day hikers join campers on the daily mailboat from Stonington, Maine.

It remains an ideal lookout, of sorts. Isle au Haut, an isolated island off of one of the east coast’s least light-polluted spots, is an exceptional place to observe the heavens. I was thrilled to learn in April that my reservation request for the 2015 season was approved and my preferred dates were available, coinciding with a new moon, the darkest sky and the annual Perseid meteor shower.

My son and I spent our first day on the island hiking and savoring the persistent smell of spruce and ocean. Every trail led to incredible vistas. A nearly cloudless sky gave way to a spectacular sunset just yards from our campsite and promised exceptional astronomical viewing overnight.

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We used the day’s last light to gather, cut and split more firewood and watched the stars appear overhead, one by one. Vega was first, then Altair and Deneb, forming the classic summer triangle. We sat and talked by the fire until light turned to dark. From a passing glance up only an hour after sunset, the heavens  revealed more stars than I’d see on the darkest night at my suburban Connecticut home.

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My son turned in early, so I knocked back the logs in the fire, grabbed a blanket and my binoculars, and sought a flat spot away from the embers’ glow. I rolled up a sweatshirt for a pillow and prepared for nature’s showtime in a near-total darkness unlike any I’d ever experienced.

At home, the quest for dark observing spots leads to absurd machinations, like finding a tree or bush to visually block a streetlight, or shielding the view of the road with a trifold school project board. On Isle au Haut, it involved walking ten steps away from the campsite. My prime observing location was rewarded nearly instantly with an Earth-grazer…an almost horizon-to-horizon Perseid meteor burning up in a long trail of fire and smoke. Then another Perseid. And another.

The sky was glorious. The Milky Way cloud band, stretching up from the south, peaked overhead in Cygnus and extended across the sky. Every passing minute revealed more detail as my eyes acclimated and sky grew darker.

You can see the cloud band in Connecticut when conditions are right; I have faintly observed it along the shoreline, and brighter in the extreme northwest and northeast corners. During the great power outage of October 2011, I saw it from my normally light-polluted front yard. However, it had never looked like this. I could easily discern the Great Rift in Cygnus and the shape and structure of the band. Through binoculars, it showed pinpoints from a sea of stars, so close together it looked like a quilt of light.

Over the course of the next hour, I saw a dozen or more bright Perseids, dozens of satellites, and countless astronomical objects from my mental checklist. The North America nebula? Visible to the naked eye; I had never been able to observe it at home. Messier 101, which I’d only observed in my best telescope as a faint spiral arm? It was a clear fuzzy circle through my binoculars. Andromeda? Larger than I’d ever think I could see it, and vaguely oval-shaped even to my unaided eye.

Typically, I am task-focused when observing; I go out to find specific things. Here, the pure joy was how much I could see when I was looking for nothing.

I had, more than once, considered leaving the binoculars at home for this trip. They are image-stabilized Canons; wonderful optics, but heavy. When you carry on your back all you need to live for a few days, extra weight is judiciously chosen. The binoculars were the perfect tools, allowing for wide, sweeping scans.

Trees to the south blocked my view of the horizon and our galaxy’s dense core, so I put on my red headlamp, grabbed my phone and binoculars and headed off for a short stroll to the rocky waterfront. The tide had rolled in considerably since sunset, and what had been a fairly easy walk in the day was a cautious, slow, slippery, rock-by-rock journey once I cleared the treeline. I hugged the narrow band of shore as it curved to the west, and after climbing over one large rock formation, there it was: Scorpius, Sagittarius and the cloudlike center of our Milky Way, stretching down to the horizon.

I had only dreamed of seeing the summer Milky Way from a truly dark sky sight, and it was every bit as spectacular as I’d hoped. Now horizon-to-horizon, the cloud divided the sky in a glowing, white path.

Credit: Christopher Georgia. More information at: http://www.space.com/21146-milky-way-national-park-photo.html

Credit: Christopher Georgia. More information at: http://www.space.com/21146-milky-way-national-park-photo.html

The Milky Way is pivotal in the heritage of cultures worldwide. It’s often described as the path to the gods, and understandably so once seen in its full glory. On the rocks, with waves crashing near me and our galaxy stretched above, it was easy to imagine our ancestors in this same spot, a hundred generations prior to the Europeans, looking up with the same sense of awe as they pulled their boats up high, cooked oysters on the rocky coast and made shelter for the night.

The miles of ocean to the mainland shielded me from any nearby light pollution but also showed its threat. A small glow, probably the town of Rockland, Maine, cluttered one small part of the western horizon. It detracted from the sky only in the sense that I knew what it was.

Photo credit: Jessica Hendelman photography (http://www.jesshendelman.com)

This is NOT Isle au Haut, but IS Acadia, and very representative of the views I had. Photo credit: Jessica Hendelman photography (http://www.jesshendelman.com)

I made my way back to the campsite and returned to my blanket. There was no noise, no light, just near total-darkness and the expanse of heaven overhead. A jet or two passed by on their way to Europe, and satellites crisscrossed the night, mixed in with Perseids, none quite at spectacular as the first I witnessed. Minutes turned to half hours and then hours, and after the third startled awakening from a buzzing insect, I realized it was time for bed. I made my way to my sleeping pad and kept looking to the sky. One last look. No, another. Ok, next satellite, and then I’m done, until one particularly bright satellite caught my attention, flared up a bit and then disappeared. I took it as a sign.

I stretched my hand out to the heavens, outlining it against the cloud band in what must have looked like a feeble attempt to connect, and went to bed.

I slept soundly, a rare thing for me when camping.

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On our last morning on Isle au Haut, we took a short hike over a low ridge, surrounded by wild blueberry bushes that visitors had missed all summer. I asked my son, “If you take your kids here in 30 years, what do you think it will look like?” He thought about it for a few seconds and said, “Well, I think it will look about the same, because it’s a national park.”

That’s the right answer, for all intents and purposes. The trails across this gorgeous island will probably be about the same…maybe rerouted around erosion, or shifted by the crashing of the remorseless ocean.

The fundamentals will remain. The night sky will not.

There will never be another night quite as dark as August 13 and 14, 2015. Stonington and Rockland will always get a little brighter in the distance, one light bulb, grocery and mini golf at a time. Other towns will grow. The spread of humanity, as unwavering as the ocean, will eventually blot out the night. It may never spread fully to Isle au Haut, and it may not even change much in my son’s lifetime, but it will advance. At some point, certainly within a handful of generations, we will cover the sky nearly in full with our light.

We will call it progress, and who can argue with the spread of light, of technology, and of electricity.

That progress does not come without a cost. For all but the last 200 years, what I witnessed on Isle au Haut was all mankind understood the night sky to be. A two-million year shared experience, across cultures and continents, gone in the comparative blink of an eye.

We’ve changed the balance of nature and with it, disconnected ourselves from the glory and magnitude of the heavens. It’s only when you see the night sky in its full expanse that you realize what a tragedy it is that we can—and so thoughtlessly—erase our own history.

The good news is that the history is still plainly visible in the most humble of places if you look, including a small rocky outpost on the surface of another one, both tiny specks in a mighty sea.

campfire

 

 

 

 

Critical Thought and Astronomy

Had such a great time talking about astronomy to the 5th grade class at Plantsville Elementary School today.

Kids get the wonder of the universe easier than adults, I think, because they haven’t yet been trained to spend 90% of their days worrying about car payments, jobs, stress and all of the things that keep adults from stopping, looking up and saying, “Woooowwwww.”

I have done these presentations for three years in the Southington schools, and also have done stargazing nights at the local YMCA camp for about that same length of time.

There’s something amazing about watching a kid just GET the massive concepts that are involved with astronomy. There’s something amazing about having a kid look through your telescope, see the rings of Saturn and realize that it’s REAL. Not a video game screen, not something you see on TV, but real. That dot up there…it’s got rings when you look at it closely.

To me, the highlight of today was one particular student, an otherwise quiet girl, who raised her hand when I asked the class why Galileo’s observation of Jupiter was so important.

She said, “He saw the moons.” I told her that was right, and then asked her why that was so important. She said she didn’t know, and I said, “I think you do, if you know that he saw the moons. Why was it important that he saw moons?”

You could see she was really puzzled. I went to another kid with his hand up, who didn’t know. Finally, the girl literally jumped up and said, “I remember! It’s because if Jupiter has moons, Earth isn’t in the center of everything.” Gave her a big thumbs up and she was beaming. Truly, it was incredible.

A 5th grader comprehended something that complex so easily. It’s not amazing until you realize that thought was the basis for massive, societal understanding, just a few hundred years ago.

I got my telescope for free from a friend, who told me that the price for it was that I use it to show the heavens to kids. Every time I do one of these presentations, I think how much I truly owe him myself.

An Explosion in M82

A star just exploded nearby, in one of the galaxies in our “Local Group.” It’s all relative, of course. The galaxy, M82, is about 11.5 million light years away, so the tiny dot that is the supernova is light that left M82 right around the time the Amazon River was forming, and long before people existed.

It’s humbling to think about, which is one of the reasons I love astronomy so much. Your own life is so fantastically insignificant in the big picture that it staggers the imagination we care so much about it.

Many people think that the reason we’ve never encountered intelligent life from other planets is that supernovae like this one have wiped them all out over time. Possible, I suppose. It’s as good a guess as any I’d have. Another reason for humility at our plight here on this little rock orbiting the sun.

Big questions, but right now the biggest question for me is how many cold nights I can take looking at the supernova. I saw it tonight, and it’s clearly visible, lighting up the little blur that is M82, far brighter than all the billions of other stars in that galaxy…combined.

It’s an amazing universe, and all we need to do to see that is look up.

Comets and Change

Up at 5 AM to attempt a rare feat, seeing three comets in one observation.

Two of the three were easy: Comet ISON was definitely brighter than even a few days before and had a noticeable tail. Comet Lovejoy was incredibly bright but had no tail that I could make out.  As Mercury and Saturn rose above the horizon, racing with the sun, I was hoping to see Comet Encke down near Mercury and make it 3-for-3, but couldn’t make it out. Still, it was my first time seeing two comets in one day, so that was noteworthy and quite cool.

The ancients thought comets were the bearer of news from the gods and brought major changes with them. Life’s been so crazy lately…maybe the ancients were right!

Messier 76

Check off the Little Dumbbell Nebula (Messier 76) from the observation list! Using my Orion UltraBlock NarrowBand filter, I caught a good glimpse of what is often considered one of the hardest Messier objects to spot.

To my eyes, it wasn’t as glorious as this photo, but it had a distinctive shape to it, and, per usual, the facts behind it made the fuzzy blur all the more exciting.

Astronomy Merit Badge

What’s better than astronomy? To me, sharing the hobby with others and teaching them to appreciate the heavens above.

On the 25th, Troop 45 held an astronomy observation session for those working on their merit badges. Scouts got to see Venus and its amazing partial phase, the International Space Station soar overhead, the Pleiades, Polaris, the Summer Triangle and much more.

The requirement was a “three-hour observation session,” and we got it done, down to the minute, but only thanks to some hot cocoa, a fire and a portable heater. Everything frosted over by the end, including the people!