Anyone for an astronomy thread?

[Sits]

Yes it does, more or less. Threw me when I first got here.

[Rogin the Armchair fan]

I was on the tropic of cancer last week and reminded of that slight odd feeling you get looking up at a waxing moon at say 11pm and noticing that it looks like it's been rolled onto its side compared to the view you'd get at home. In Australia I assume it looks (compared to the northern hemisphere view) upside down? It's one of those ones that's quite hard to conceptualize why.

[hobbes]

Particularly poor timing given that Space X just passed the crew escape abort test with flying colours...

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

It's difficult to know which thread to put this on, but Boeing's efforts to make a crew capsule to launch people to the ISS are going disastrously badly.

They launched their capsule to the ISS in December, to do their unmanned test, and the whole thing was a bit of a disaster. There was a fuck up with the programming, and apparently the clock time was wrong, so it pissed away a load of its fuel doing stuff it wasn't supposed to. So it didn't get anywhere near the ISS, and didn't get to show that it could dock with it. It did seem however that other than this everything was fine. Except it wasn't. A lot of the little engines it uses to fly around were fucked, and now it seems as though they had to update the software at the last minute so it didn't burn up on re-entry.

This is not good. And it comes shortly after the house passed an appropriations bill basically saying that NASA's plans to go to the moon should basically all happen on boeing stuff, and they should forget about all that stuff involving other companies that aren't boeing. It's nice to see both sides of the american political divide coming together to help a great american company in their time of need. This isn't going to get anywhere, but at least they tried.

[Sits]

Yeah Jupiter is always a decent candidate, especially if it's a big bright blob, as opposed to Venus' smaller piercing brilliance.

[hobbes]

There will be good conjunctions this month and next month around the same time.
A few years ago, there was one of these that included Jupiter too. Now that was spectacular.

[ursus arctos]

Always a good default guess

[Nocturnal Submission]

No, no; he wanted British astronomy enthusiasts...

Heh. I did think about widening the franchise to Northern Hemisphere astronomers but wasn't sure where said celestial body would be in the North American/Western European skies at the present time.

Many thanks, UA. When there's a bright point in the night skies that isn't the moon or a plane (or firework, or helicopter, or drone...) it usually seems to be Venus.

[Gangster Octopus]

No, no; he wanted British astronomy enthusiasts...

[ursus arctos]

Venus

[Nocturnal Submission]

Right, British astronomy enthusiasts, what's the bright star/planet currently just to the right of the moon?

[ursus arctos]

Too cloudy here

The stream from the Canaries was good

Guy started a thread

I like to think about how mind blowing that phenomenon was to 17th century astronomers

[hobbes]

Anyone else get a look at the Mercury transit yesterday?
I got a couple of quick views between the clouds.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

I think it was early morning. and loads of people were out in their cars.

[ursus arctos]

Yes, though my recollection is that that was during daylight

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

It reminds me of all the footage of the Chelyabinsk meteor that was filmed on car dash cams.

[Nocturnal Submission]

Not a biggie, but noticed these photos of the Milky Way from the Florida Keys on Wiki and thought that they were rather lovely:

[Sits]

Amazing

[ursus arctos]

[URL="https://twitter.com/robertdedwards/status/1194097714209968129?s=21"]https://twitter.com/robertdedwards/status/1194097714209968129[/URL]

[Nocturnal Submission]

This is quite neat: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-49648746

Bit of a schlep though.

[Ginger Yellow]

Long-read on SolarCity's under-delivery.

The company once controlled two-thirds of the residential market; now, according to the consulting firm Wood Mackenzie, its share is less than 7 percent. In the second quarter of this year, SolarCity installed only 29 megawatts of solar panels—far below the 10,000 megawatts in annual installations that Musk had promised. “Total implosion” is how one SolarCity insider describes it.

[Rogin the Armchair fan]

Peak night for the Perseids meteor shower tonight. Total cloud cover here at the moment but fingers crossed...

[Sits]

Incredible.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

This video of the interplay of the rising sun with an Atlas V launch is just beautiful.

[ursus arctos]

By the standard of this administration, that was a rousing success