You are currently browsing the daily archive for August 27th, 2007.
Much to my sorrow, it looks like seeing the total lunar eclipse that is to happen early tomorrow morning is not in the cards. The eclipse will begin just after 4:51am. At that point, the moon will be 18 degrees above the western horizon, which means I’ll have a hard time getting to a place in Pittsburgh where I can view it free of buildings, mountains (hills), or trees. By 5:30am, when half of the moon is consumed by the partial eclipse, it will be a mere 12 degrees above the horizon. By the time the total eclipse starts, it will be about 6 degrees above the horizon and dawn will already be brightening the sky. If I lived in Los Angeles, the moon would be a whopping 36 degrees above the horizon when the total eclipse began.
At least I still have the Aurigids to look forward to this Saturday. We’re going to Donna’s mom’s house, in semi-rural eastern Pennsylvania. The viewing won’t be as good as my uncle’s location in Ohio, but it will certainly suffice. The Aurigids are a meteor shower caused by the passage of comet Kiess in 4 AD and later in 1911 AD. A trail of debris circles the sun in its path and the Earth occasionally passes into this trail. The great news is, it appears that this year we are poised to go straight into the heart of this debris field. The bad news is, it will again be mainly viewable on the west coast. The shower will peak around 4:30 in the morning in the west. The last Aurigid shower had mostly bright meteors that came in vivid colors. The next Aurigid shower won’t be in my lifetime.
NASA: “Strange Lights: The 2007 Aurigid Meteor Shower”
The Aurigid Meteor Shower Viewing Campaign
Update
There will be a team from the University of North Dakota travelling to Las Vegas to provide a live webcam feed of the lunar eclipse.
National Geographic has a nice graphic showing how much of the eclipse will be visible where.
Well, I’m not really into sports of any kind, but I don’t mind seeing games live. On July 4th, I got to see the Pittsburgh Pirates play the Milwaukee Brewers. And then a couple weeks ago, Donna (my wife) was offered tickets for a Steelers game from a friend at work, so we jumped on them. These tickets are very difficult to come by. Donna had no real interest in going, so I invited my friend Eric. The seats were expensive and in the nose-bleed section, but that didn’t really matter. The biggest problem was the fact that this game was pre-season. That didn’t really mean anything to me until it was explained that usually the starting players only make brief appearances and the rest of the game consists of the crappier players. Sure enough, once it was pretty much decided that Pittsburgh was going to win, the lower-ranked players jumped in and the sloppiness increased by an order of magnitude. No one was playing an especially great game. Pittsburgh made a lot of mistakes and really should’ve beaten the Eagles by another 14 points.
But it was great fun. If I get a chance to do it again, I’ll invite my dad, since he’s been a Steelers fan for as long as I’ve been alive.
