fireballs

If a shooting star (meteor) is big enough, you get what is called a "fireball". While working at Pine Mountain Observatory, eyes skyward all night, every night during the summer, and on winter weekends, I have seen several. Here is a photo of one captured by a photographer in Japan.

meteor showers

As a comet orbits the sun, it leaves behind debris in its orbit, small rocks and pebbles, when the earth flies through the orbit annually, it flies into the rocks and pebbles, as they burn up in the atmosphere, the friction excites the atoms of the air, ionizing it, so as to cause it to emmit light, leaving a luminous trail, commonly called a shooting star. Shooting stars can happen anytime, but when we fly through the orbit of a comet, we have a meteor shower. If the meteor is big enough as not to burn up before hitting the earth, then we can often find the rock, called a meteorite. In August, we fly through the orbit of a particular comet, that provides for what is usually the most spectacular meteor shower, the perseids. It is called the perseid meteor shower, because the meteors tend to emmanate from the constellation persied, because that is the direction the earth is moving into, during that time of the year. This point is called "the radiant", and if you point a camera at it and leave the shutter open for an hour or so, you will get an image much as in this photo.

star parties

When I was at Pine Mountain, amateur astronomers would set up their telescopes, and shows tourists celestial bodies with their often homemade telescopes. We showed tourists celestial bodies through the observatory telescopes as well. There are amateur astronomy clubs throughout the world, that aside from holding star parties, hold workshops on making your own telescopes. Amateur Astronomy is one of the few fields where amateurs make contributions to a profesional field, discovering comets, and providing a greater observering power for an otherwise immense universe, for which not nearly enough observervatories exist to monitor everything.

cygnus x1 and epsilon aurigae

the trip

It is about a three to four hour trip from the University of Oregon to Pine Mountain Observatory. It begins along the McKenzie river, then up and over the Cascade Mountain Range, then down into the town of Sisters (which has an old west theme in its architecture) then out to Bend, the last town before reaching the mountain of the telescopes situated in the high desert. Here are pictures of these key points in the order presented above.

pine mountain circa 1986

polarimetry