Tangled Branches: Cultivated
happenings in and around my zone 6b gardens in northern Virginia and in central Virginia
Friday, October 12, 2007
Great World Wide Star Count
Have you heard about the Great World Wide Star Count? Neither had I until last evening. There are only a few more days left to participate, but if you can find Cygnus then you can help. You don't really have to count stars, just match what you see in the sky to one of the images online.
If you don't think you can find Cygnus, I say you can (unless it's cloudy). For the first 35 or so years of my life, the only constellation I could find was the Big Dipper (and that's really an asterism, not a constellation). Then one morning, standing at the kitchen sink looking out the window, I noticed a bright star in the sky and thought I'd try to look it up. To my surprise, I was able to identify it as Sirius. I downloaded a shareware program to print sky maps, and began to learn the names of even more stars and constellations. And all this from my home in the light-polluted suburbs of northern Virginia. Stargazing is now one of my favorite fall activities; the weather isn't yet frigid, the skies are generally clear, the summer stars are still visible in the evening and the winter stars in the morning.
Anyway, nowadays there are many websites that will generate a sky map for your exact location and time. This is so much easier than trying to orient yourself with star maps in a book. Some suggestions:
Another source of really nice free charts, not as precise as the ones above but in nice printable PDF format, is skymaps.com.
And I just learned this morning of a neat Google maps application which provides geographic coordinates to 14 decimal places.
Now you're all set to get out this evening, or any evening through October 16, and be a citizen scientist.
Oops, forgot that some people reading this may be in the Southern Hemisphere. If you are, you get to look for Sagittarius instead of Cygnus. Sagittarius is even more fun, because it truly does look like a teapot. We can still see it low in the sky in the evenings here in Virginia.
Update, October 13: We had mostly clear skies last night, and I learned that our limiting magnitude here in the country is 5. I'll post the suburban value later.
Update, October 21: Using Your Sky at John Walker's site, I determined that the limiting magnitude at home in the northern Virginia suburbs is between 4 and 5, although closer to 4. For the Great World Wide Star Count, I reported it as 4.
Labels: astronomy
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