The purpose of this feature is to give scout leaders, educators and naturalists an idea of some of the natural events coming up each month.  We will try to cover a variety of natural events ranging from sky events to calling periods of amphibians, bird and mammal watching tips,  prominent wildflowers and anything else that comes to mind.  We will also note prominent constellations appearing over the eastern horizon at mid-evening each month for our area for those who would like to learn the constellations.  If you have suggestions for other types of natural information you would like to see added to this calendar, let us know!

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Notes From October 2020

I spent some pleasant evenings in early October taking images of Mars as Earth drew close to it. I took this image of Mars and the Moon rising over my pond on October 3rd. Mars was a fiery red as it cleared the treetops.

Unfortunately, the hurricanes that kept pounding the gulf coast made nights with clear and steady skies pretty rare. It wasn't until October 15th that I found a night where the atmosphere allowed sharp images to be made through my observatory telescope. Tree cricket and katydid songs drifted up to the observatory, the calls slowed by the cooler fall temperatures. Barred Owls called back and forth from the woods to the south and west.

When I take planetary images I'm not looking through the scope but at the screen of my laptop. The video feed from the telescope plays in a small rectangle on the laptop screen. The image of Mars moves around and is distorted by the atmosphere even on nights when the atmosphere is fairly steady. Since I use a monochrome camera, the image in each recording is in black and white. It's also quite noisy. If the turbulence is severe, it may be hard to focus.

With lucky imaging I typically take thousands, or even tens of thousands of images using a sensitive high-speed video camera. The short exposures minimize the image movement caused by atmospheric turbulence, and the large number of exposures allow you to use only the sharpest images. It's not hard to collect quite a few images in a short time. On the Mars image at right, it took me just over a minute to gather each 5,000-frame set of images.

The fifteen images are sharpened in a program called Registax and then opened in a program called WinJupos. Each image is carefully positioned and measured with a time-dependent reference frame. When that is done WinJupos performs some pretty amazing transformations. For the five images made through each color filter, it compensates for the rotation of the planet between each image, then stacks and combines the images. We are now down to three images, one for the red channel, one for the green channel and one for the blue channel. In the final step, WinJupos compensates for the planet's rotation between each color channel and combines them into one color image. The final color image is then post processed in Adobe Photoshop.

Although these techniques can provide very remarkable results, the most important aspects of imaging the planets have been known for a long time. The telescope must be in near perfect optical alignment, the astronomical seeing must be very good and you need to be spot on in focusing. Otherwise no amount of processing will produce an good image.

Morning Sky:

Venus is slowly moving closer to the horizon each day, but it continues to be bright and beautiful in the dawn sky this month, now rising about 3 hours before the Sun. As the month progresses its apparent size diminishes and it gets more gibbous. It is the brightest star-like object in the eastern sky before dawn so you won't have any problem picking it out. Look for Mercury below and to the left of it. Mercury reaches greatest elongation from the Sun on November 10th. Early in the month you can see it telescopically as a tiny crescent.

Evening Sky:

In fact, even a good quality 60mm refractor will give a better view of the ringed planet than Galileo was ever able to see. Saturn was a puzzle to him. In his low-resolution telescope the planet appeared as three separate discs - one large disc with a smaller disc on each side of it. A few years later, he returned to look at the planet when the rings presented edge-on. His two attendant discs had disappeared! He never solved the riddle. He would have loved to see the view available to just about any amateur astronomer today. Be sure and look for Saturn's moons. Titan is easily visible in most small telescopes, and in larger telescopes you can usually see several.

Details can be seen well in larger telescopes in good seeing conditions. If you are not used to viewing Mars it will appear quite small through the eyepiece. After all, its diameter is only a little over half that of Earth. Picking out the subtle details on Mars takes patience. Plan on spending some time viewing it and wait for moments when the atmosphere steadies.

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