Best personally witnessed astronomical events?

cartrite · Post #1by **cartrite** » 03.05.2006, 21:45

Long ago someone gave me a 60mm refractor for my birthday. It came with an azimuth mount and I quickly found out how quick this world was moving. Nothing stayed in view for long. So I salvaged parts from a grinder, cassette player, and many clocks to name a few, Found some metal rods, and built a german type equatorial mount with clockmotor.

One day in the early morning I zoomed in on Venus and left the motor run. A few hours after sunrise I went out to watch Venus occulted by the moon. It was the coolest thing I ever saw. Another nite I set up to watch Jupiter get clobberd by that comet. All I noticed was a new dark band forming though. On another night I was watching Jupiter and a meteor exploded in the atmosphere directly overhead. For a second everything around me turned bright green.

The best was without a telescope. At a place called High Nob in central PA I watched a meteor STORM in November of 2001. Just before dawn there was at least 5 (AT TIMES MORE) meteors blazing across the sky in any direction and at any moment. Something I'll never forget.

cartrite

Dollan · Post #2by **Dollan** » 03.05.2006, 22:42

There were two very cool things that I saw, and both of them ingrained into me a love of astronomy. The first was a meteor.

Doesn't sound too spectacular, right? Well, *this* meteor was quite bright and was shaped like a tadpole. What I called at the time "sparks" were flying off of the head of the thing as it descended to the tree line. What was more, the metoer was falling into the eastern horizon just at sunset, and it appeared blood-red. It was by the purest chance that I even saw it, and it caused me to run inside and look up everything that I could about astronomy, in our hopelessly ancient encyclopedias. This was probably sometime in 1979 or 1980, in southeastern New Mexico.

The second item was probably a couple years later. I was outside with my Dad, and he was showing me things through the new telescope that I had gotten. It wasn't much of an instrument, just a simple tube, about what you'd expect a novice 10 or 12 year old to have. The thing was, Dad didn't know the first thing about astronomy, and so he was trying to tell me about stars and planets and such, and quite likely filling my head with the wrong information.

I was looking for a star, not bothering to use the sighter scope, when a great curved mass of *nothing* swung into view. On one side there were stars, on the otherside blackness. I now know that I was looking at the Moon (and to be completely dark it *couldn't* have been after dark by much, so I know I must be remembering part of this wrong), but Dad patiently tried to explain it to me that I was probably seeing Mars! :lol:

Well, at the time, I didn't know better. But the impression of that great blackness still lingers.

So there you have it... heh. Not much, but they were two of the most defining moments and two of the coolest astronomical events that I've seen. Heck, I probbaly consider them the coolest *because* they were the most defining events for me.

...John...

Malenfant · Post #3by **Malenfant** » 04.05.2006, 01:05

Dollan wrote:Doesn't sound too spectacular, right? Well, *this* meteor was quite bright and was shaped like a tadpole. What I called at the time "sparks" were flying off of the head of the thing as it descended to the tree line. What was more, the metoer was falling into the eastern horizon just at sunset, and it appeared blood-red. It was by the purest chance that I even saw it, and it caused me to run inside and look up everything that I could about astronomy, in our hopelessly ancient encyclopedias. This was probably sometime in 1979 or 1980, in southeastern New Mexico.

Hm, that sounds suspiciously like one I saw one November from the UK around that time. IIRC it turned out to be a falling Soviet satellite... wonder if that could be the same sighting?

Dollan · Post #4by **Dollan** » 04.05.2006, 01:47

Wouldn't that be interesting?! I wish I could come up with a more specific time, though. Much of that period of my life is nothing but a bunched up jumble of memories, though....

...John...

Malenfant · Post #5by **Malenfant** » 04.05.2006, 06:23

I remember the one I saw was in November because I saw it near Guy Fawkes Night (which is on Nov 5, when us Brits shoot off our fireworks). But no way was this a firework, it was a full-on fiery-blazing movie-style meteor, moving fairly slowly across the sky (not zippy like a proper meteor) with bits breaking off it and everything. Looked dead cool.

IIRC, there was a news report of a satellite crashing somewhere in the UK countryside next day, think it was a russian Cosmos satellite or something...

Raccoon · Post #6by **Raccoon** » 23.05.2006, 07:13

That is interesting. Ahh,Sweet memories when I got my first telescope. It was a small simple one,When I was 6 or 7 I am guessing. It was quite a new experience for me. But my most beatiful experience ever was when I visited my Dad's friend in tennessee. It was the first time I had ever had the chance to experience the beauty of a TRULLY dark sky away from the suburbs. It was so dark that when the porch light went out, it was too dark to see your own hands. But I got my binoculars out and looked at the milky way which I had never seen with my own eyes before. And it was mind blowing to see all those millions upon millions of stars! I wish I lived in a place with the amount of darkness needed to see that again. But now I have a 6 inch reflector. And hope to go there with it again.

Cormoran · Post #7by **Cormoran** » 23.05.2006, 18:10

A few months back I saw a meteor that split as it burned up... musta been a big one, but the spray of sub-meteors was very cool...

The best though by far was just after I bought my 10cm reflector... managed to find Saturn and Jupiter by hand (no motors or anything!), and seeing the rings of Saturn, and a hint of the banding on Jupiter (as well as the extremely obvious Galilean satellites) honestly took my breath away in a much more personal and immediate way than any picture from Voyager, Galileo or Cassini (love them though I do).

Those 360 degree panoramas of Mars and Titan gave me chills too, though thats not exactly the same thing...

cheers,

Cormie

Post #8by **t00fri** » 23.05.2006, 18:47

Oh yes, I do remember a really thrilling event, many years ago...

We still lived in Geneva/Switzerland, I was stargazing with my 8 inch Celestron telescope on a nice dark balconee of our house and my wife already was asleep...

Then I saw it: a ghostly, pale illuminated V-shaped formation of fuzzy dish shaped objects majestetically moving across the sky with a rather high angular velocity.

I was shocked! NO, a guy like me doesn't believe in UFO's, of course ;-)

But, there was simply NOTHING to which this appearance fitted. There was NO noise to be heard. From the high angular velocity it was clear that planes were out of question. Also no chance for meteors etc.

I rushed in and woke up my wife to have a witness at least ;-)

! But alas, by the time she made it outside, the whole stuff had vanished below the horizon....

Since it all was soooo spooky, next morning, I communicated a precise description of my observation to the Swiss astronomical society of which I was a member. And indeed, ...after some weeks the solution came (by mail). But before that, my physicist colleagues at work looked at me with an expression of pity: now he's going overboard, UFO's and all that ;-)

...

In fact: other amateur astronomers had also witnessed the same phenomenon. It soon turned out what it was: some satellite had entered the atmosphere, and broken into a number of fragments that still moved with a common center of mass across the sky...The spooky glow was due to the heat just like in case of meteors...

This was a really memorable event.

Bye Fridger