I did a little amateur solar photography this afternoon. From SpaceWeather.com:
BIG, QUIET SUNSPOT: Ten days ago, big sunspot AR1711 was on the farside of the sun hurling CMEs at Venus. Now it is rotating over the sun’s southeastern limb where we can see it from Earth.
Click on the image to enlarge.
I haven’t been active on amateur(ham) radio for several years. But when I found out I could buy this little VHF/UHF hand held transceiver for only about $40, I ordered it from Amazon. I futzed with it today and got it programmed for a few of the local repeater channels and actually got a couple of contacts on it.
The radio is smaller than a dollar bill (excluding the antenna) and seems to work very well. It fits in the cell phone pocket of my cargo shorts! Click on the image to enlarge.
Verna took this photo of the moon and Jupiter this evening. Although the pair are not as close as last month’s Lunar/Jovian conjunction, they are within a few degrees of each other. Click on the image to enlarge.
APOD published this nice image of Helene, one of Saturn’s Trojan Moons. The moon does not orbit the planet, but rather orbits ahead of the planet at one of the Lagrange points leading Saturn in orbit. Both Jupiter and Saturn are known to have these Trojan moons.
Of course, you will need your free pair of 3D glasses to view the anaglyph image. Click on the image to enlarge.
If you don’t have a pair of 3D glasses you can see the 2D image here
A few years ago, I wrote the code for a sidebar widget that prints the solar ephemerides (daybreak, sunrise, transit, sunset, nightfall and the length of daylight hours) out on our website. Since yesterday was the shortest day of the year, I wondered how the data compare for the longest day of the year.
I took a screenshot of yesterday’s data and saved it as an image. Then, I monkeyed with my code to make the widget think it is June, 21, 2013, the longest day of the coming year. I got a screenshot of that data and merged it with the shortest day into the image above. The length of the day changes from just under ten hours to almost fourteen and a half hours – a net delta of 4 hours and 32 minutes.
We like our mild winters here but we love the summertime even more. We like the heat and the absence of the snowbird population that clogs the roads and supermarket aisles in the wintertime.
I apologize for posting this out-of-focus picture of a dead scorpion on the RV drive, but the lighting conditions weren’t too good to avoid a slight camera motion that blurred the image. At any rate, I just wanted to show how these little beasties show up if you put ultraviolet light (a.k.a. black light) on them.
Image – dead scorpion in ultraviolet light. Click on the image to enlarge.
A while back, we bought little hand held flash lights with UV LEDs just for the purpose of detecting scorpions. Cabela found this one on the patio (thank goodness it was already dead) and I found a couple in the garage the other night using the UV flashlight.
