astronomy – David Kotz

Comet (Tsuchinshan-ATLAS)

A new comet!

September treated us to a lunar eclipse, which I had the opportunity to photograph, and now October has brought us a good view of celestial visitor C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan-ATLAS). The evening sky was clear last night, but it took quite a while for me to find this new comet – still far above the western horizon more than an hour and twenty minutes after sunset. My first glimpse appeared in my peripheral vision – it was easier to see what I was not looking directly at it. I finally lined up my camera for a couple of decent shots.

Comet C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan-ATLAS)
(cropped from the photo below)

Comet C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan-ATLAS) on 2024-10-18 at 1922 EDT
2.0 seconds at f/4, ISO 2500, cleaned with Lightroom Denoise

Solar eclipse 2024

Mud-season eclipse…

We were fortunate to be able to spend the afternoon today visiting some colleagues at a lakeside home in northeastern Vermont – where the skies were clear, the sun was warm, and last week’s snow was quickly thinning. Shortly after 2pm we settled into lawn chairs, pulled out our solar-eclipse safety glasses, and enjoyed watching the moon take over the sun… read on!

Our group gets ready for the solar eclipse in northeastern Vermont.

Sun overhead

The sun was directly overhead Bangalore.

Thanks to Prof. John Thorstensen’s excellent JSkyCalc software, I was able to calculate that the sun was directly overhead Bangalore today.

I think this is really cool. As I live in the north, the sun is always to the south of us. Each year the sun processes further north in summer, and south in winter, but never passes overhead. Here in the tropics, by definition, the sun passes overhead Bangalore (13° 01′ 23″ north, which I can read from Google Maps) on its way northward to the Tropic of Cancer (23° 26′ 22″ north), and then again on its way southward to the Equator and then the Tropic of Capricorn. I missed the opportunity, unfortunately, to run outside at noon (local solar noon, of course, not noon IST) to see that my shadow was directly underneath me. But now it’s kinda cool to think that the sun is north of me!

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