I woke my son up this morning and we went outside and looked at these. We didn't stay outside very long (maybe 5 minutes). But walking him back inside he stopped and said "thanks for waking me up to see this. I really liked it". Then we both went back to sleep.
It may seem trivial but these are great moments to share with your kids/spouse/SO—there is so much in our lives that we can't see or touch nowadays and it is really meaningful to be able to point up in the sky (even without binocs/assistance) and "see" these planets we talk about but only usually see in pictures.
I agree. I woke my daughter up to see NEOWISE when she was six. We climbed a small hill at 2 am to try get a glimpse of it. It was very close to the horizon so we had trees in the way.
We took the car up to a higher point but it got too cloudy so we went back home to sleep.
Even though we never saw the comet she still remembers that time as something exciting and joyful and she often brings it up when we talk about space.
I took my motorcycle and went on a night trip to a 2000+ meter high mountain to watch Hyakutake passing by in 1996; the show was nothing short of spectacular: no other lights, no sounds, nothing else than its wonderful glowing shape.
Also watched Hale-Bopp years later, but at that time I couldn't move from the city lights pollution and missed like 90% of the show.
I have a comet chasing memory with my father. We never saw it, drove around two different nights, and had a great time. Won’t forget being up at 3 or 4 am in a little agricultural town pulling over every few minutes to take a look.
When I was maybe 8 or 9 my parents woke me up to watch a huge meteor shower. We sat in the street in camping chairs for the best view of the sky and it was magical. I remember it strongly to this day.
My parents are not scientists, and my mother is probably even science skeptical, but two of my strongest, earliest memories were going to the beach to watch a meteor shower. It was magical - I give no qualifications.
I am thankful for this experience often, especially when I see these sorts of discussions. Way to be.
You can think the earth is flat and still enjoy a meteor shower. They're so beautiful, and obviously speak deeply to us as primates or something, because we have so much imagery involving meteors.
Plus you never know your potential whereabouts in eighteen years from now, so it's always good to leave behind little seeds of wonder, as small as mustard seeds in the sky before dawn.
My kids (now 15 and 11) still talk about the time we laid out back in the yard and watched the meteor showers in the middle of the night. It’s a top memory for all of us :)
My daughter and I stayed out on the trampoline one night and played a game to see who could see the first star. She won—and spotted Regulus. It was another one of those beautiful moments. Probably the stillest she's ever been for 15+ minutes...
Just want to extend that encouragement to anyone with a friend or two in close proximity, speaking as a single, no kiddos.
You'd be surprised how many people you run into who have never seen the milky way with their naked eyes (or have completely forgotten that you see the same exact thing as in astronomy photos that you'd swear are definitely-probably digitally altered).
Living in a city buried in light pollution, it's always a treat to see the same facial expressions of amazement and wonder out of adults as you'd get from kids when I bring whatever nearby friends and a couple beers for a late night meteor gazing session during the Perseids, just an hour's drive out of town.
Of course, despite living where light pollution maps mark as a red/white zone (Sacramento, CA), we are fortunate enough to live so close to a blue zone (halfway between town and Lake Tahoe).
For best viewing, one wants to plan for clear skies and time of night during moonset and/or near the new moon. As for Perseids, unfortunately the last few seasons have been a bust for me due to California's record-breaking wildfire seasons completely drowning out the sky.
As a parent, I don't always make the right choices. I can beat myself up, but sometimes you just need to point them to something amazing and just let them experience the wonder of it all. It definitely feels like a "reset" to the relationship... even if only for a day.
Frankly even just occasionally deviating from the monotonous schedule and escorting your kids outside at an unusual hour while the world sleeps will always be a worthwhile experience.
I did the same with my son as well. He got a 76mm Funscope last month, but it has been pretty cloudy. We saw the red band across Jupiter and Saturn's ring. Images were a bit small/blurry, but it was still amazing. I just tucked him tonight for bed, and he said "Thank you for taking me outside to stargaze this morning". He is excited to look for M31/Andromeda next.
Is there any way to get alerts on your phone of these events before they happen? It always seem like by the time they make the press and get disseminated on sites like HN it is too late. Was very frustrated by the solar eclipse a while back because by the time the mainstream press picked up on it, glasses were sold out everywhere. There is too much going on to have to manually research and systematically keep track of every topic of interest. Isn't that the point of the News, and sites like Reddit/HN?
NASA puts out a new video called "What's up" at the start of every month with all the interesting, predicted events for stargazing. They post them to both Twitter [0] and YouTube [1] as well as on their Skywatching page [2], the latter of which is a great resource with daily guides. It's a fun start-of-the-month ritual for me to check out the latest events and add them to my personal calendar.
For actual notifications, most stargazing apps probably have some sort of news feed or notification system. I can't recommend a specific one but a quick Google search tells me Star Walk 2 [3] seems to support push notifications
I use an iPhone app called "Sky Guide". It sends me notifications of interesting events, and the app itself has a "Calendar" page with a list of everything upcoming.
I also recommend an iPhone app called "ISS Finder". It will notify you when the International Space Station will be making a visible flyby over you. You can then run outside and watch the ISS glide across the night sky at 17,000 mph. It takes about one minute to cross the sky. I always feel awe seeing that ISS dot, knowing humans can launch other humans into orbit 250 miles above.
I second this recommendation. Sky Guide is a wonderful app for space enthusiasts. The calendar feed does a great job of surfacing upcoming events, and even provides insights on light pollution and ideal viewing times in your area.
A surprising experience to me was seeing Saturn through a telescope. Despite working on PhD in physics at the time and being a lab demonstrator for an undergraduate astronomy course, I looked at it and thought "shit, it's real!"
Though it was a nice enthusiast-level telescope, I think it was just seeing the rings that did it. So I reckon a cheaper one would have had the same effect.
There's something about seeing a dot in the sky turn into a real picture that just hits you somewhere very primal, I know exactly the feeling although it's hard to explain. It's exactly what you expected to see except blurrier, but it's still like a punch to the gut. Jupiter and its moons are similar, easily seen with a little magnification.
I find that if I sit with it a little bit, I can actually feel the reality of the situation, that I'm in fact looking at an object in front of me that's very very far away but bigger than my entire planet. If that perspective sinks in it really just blows your mind. Maybe similar (though surely lesser) to what astronauts feel when they see the earth as a sphere.
You can see the rings with a small, cheap telescope but they will be a fuzzy blob. Good glass of large diameter is not cheap but it makes a huge difference in the experience. A Dobsonian scope is an excellent choice for good planet viewing at a reasonable price. Dobbies have a good, big mirror with no unnecessary nonsense tacked on.
I too had that reaction the first time I saw it through a telescope. I think some part of me put Saturn pictures in the same category as movies - pretty but not 'real'. When i saw the rings floating there it was pretty mind blowing.
I felt the same effect with Saturn many years ago. And also with the dazzling blue-gold double star, Albiero[1]. You can see both the blue and gold colours very clearly through the telescope.
Another excellent thing to look up is the M13 globular cluster[2].
I saw someone post this same thing on Reddit a few years ago, and the weird thing is that I had the same excitement reading the post and seeing the blurry pic of a tiny planet with an obvious ring around it.
I’ve gone out to see the planets a couple of times this week. What’s most amazing for me is that this alignment of planets makes it easy to visualize the plane of the ecliptic [1]. Ordinarily, when we look up at the night sky we see stars and planets seemingly scattered about at random. Now seeing all the planets along an arc helped me recall and visualize this plane extending out from the sun which all of the planets travel along. We might then imagine looking down on the solar system from above and seeing all the planets in their orbital paths.
I saw Mars and Jupiter up close with some cheap Celestron Binoculars on a tripod. Could see 4 Galilean moons of Jupiter lined up nicely like tiny white dots.
I lived for a year in a university apartment for faculty with my father, who was a prof. At the top of the residence building was an observatory with a 10" telescope, now upgraded to 16".
As a kid living there I was often hanging around the building and if the telescope was being operated, sometimes they would let you look, or pick out fun targets to look at. I'll never forget the first times seeing Saturn and Jupiter.
When I looked first time through telescope at the brightest "star" and saw another 4 smaller "stars" perfectly aligned with it I had a "WTF wrong with this Universe?" moment before realizing it was Jupiter :)
i discovered this by chance some time last year. being in a city those were the only things visible besides a few other stars, so that line spreading over half the sky really stood out. it was only 3 visible planets and the moon, although pluto was in there too, just not bright enough.
obviously not as impressive as the current view, but although i had an interest in watching stars already a few decades earlier it was the first time i noticed that this was happening, and it made me feel much closer to our solar system.
i was looking up there and thought: wow, this is my neighboorhood. this is home.
I got up early this morning to take a look and try to get photos. Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn were spectacular and quite visible. I never did see Mercury, we had high humidity after rain last night and maybe that combined with the brightening dawn made it difficult.
Photographing these was a challenge. My widest non fisheye lens (18mm on APS-C sensor) just doesn't capture more than a couple of planets and the moon at a time. Saturn is way off high in the sky to the south while Venus, the Moon, and Mars are all to the east. I snapped off a panorama sequence but Lightroom wasn't able to automatically combine them so I'm going to be manually picking out control points in Hugin to try to get most or all of these into one image. I should have tried at least a couple of shots with the fisheye but I don't have much experience with that and was a little sleepy.
mercury is quite close to the sun which makes it hard to see sometimes as it’s only ever visible for a short time very close to the horizon at twilight
Hate to complain but absolutely bombarded by popups on that link.. Auto play videos, adblocker warnings. My god can't we just read a cool article without getting hassled for appreciating the content.
Readit News
I woke my son up this morning and we went outside and looked at these. We didn't stay outside very long (maybe 5 minutes). But walking him back inside he stopped and said "thanks for waking me up to see this. I really liked it". Then we both went back to sleep.
It may seem trivial but these are great moments to share with your kids/spouse/SO—there is so much in our lives that we can't see or touch nowadays and it is really meaningful to be able to point up in the sky (even without binocs/assistance) and "see" these planets we talk about but only usually see in pictures.
It can be a real spiritual experience.
We took the car up to a higher point but it got too cloudy so we went back home to sleep.
Even though we never saw the comet she still remembers that time as something exciting and joyful and she often brings it up when we talk about space.
When I was maybe 8 or 9 my parents woke me up to watch a huge meteor shower. We sat in the street in camping chairs for the best view of the sky and it was magical. I remember it strongly to this day.
I am thankful for this experience often, especially when I see these sorts of discussions. Way to be.
My daughter and I stayed out on the trampoline one night and played a game to see who could see the first star. She won—and spotted Regulus. It was another one of those beautiful moments. Probably the stillest she's ever been for 15+ minutes...
You'd be surprised how many people you run into who have never seen the milky way with their naked eyes (or have completely forgotten that you see the same exact thing as in astronomy photos that you'd swear are definitely-probably digitally altered).
Living in a city buried in light pollution, it's always a treat to see the same facial expressions of amazement and wonder out of adults as you'd get from kids when I bring whatever nearby friends and a couple beers for a late night meteor gazing session during the Perseids, just an hour's drive out of town.
Of course, despite living where light pollution maps mark as a red/white zone (Sacramento, CA), we are fortunate enough to live so close to a blue zone (halfway between town and Lake Tahoe).
For best viewing, one wants to plan for clear skies and time of night during moonset and/or near the new moon. As for Perseids, unfortunately the last few seasons have been a bust for me due to California's record-breaking wildfire seasons completely drowning out the sky.
As a parent, I don't always make the right choices. I can beat myself up, but sometimes you just need to point them to something amazing and just let them experience the wonder of it all. It definitely feels like a "reset" to the relationship... even if only for a day.
No astronomical event necessary.
I distinctly remember my dad waking me up to look at lightning storms or other similar events.
This stuff is important.
For actual notifications, most stargazing apps probably have some sort of news feed or notification system. I can't recommend a specific one but a quick Google search tells me Star Walk 2 [3] seems to support push notifications
[0] https://twitter.com/NASAJPL/status/1532030924489039877 [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IpgiZJm7szg [2] https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/skywatching/home/ [3] https://starwalk.space/en/tutorials/how-can-i-get-notified-a...
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/sky-guide/id576588894
Separately, if you are a New York Times subscriber, you can also subscribe to their Space and Astronomy Events calendar feed:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/science/astronomy-s...
Though it was a nice enthusiast-level telescope, I think it was just seeing the rings that did it. So I reckon a cheaper one would have had the same effect.
I find that if I sit with it a little bit, I can actually feel the reality of the situation, that I'm in fact looking at an object in front of me that's very very far away but bigger than my entire planet. If that perspective sinks in it really just blows your mind. Maybe similar (though surely lesser) to what astronauts feel when they see the earth as a sphere.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Dqwun9mqiSo
Another excellent thing to look up is the M13 globular cluster[2].
[1] https://earthsky.org/brightest-stars/albireo-finest-double-s...
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messier_13
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecliptic
As a kid living there I was often hanging around the building and if the telescope was being operated, sometimes they would let you look, or pick out fun targets to look at. I'll never forget the first times seeing Saturn and Jupiter.
https://www.brandonu.ca/observatory/gallery/
obviously not as impressive as the current view, but although i had an interest in watching stars already a few decades earlier it was the first time i noticed that this was happening, and it made me feel much closer to our solar system.
i was looking up there and thought: wow, this is my neighboorhood. this is home.
Photographing these was a challenge. My widest non fisheye lens (18mm on APS-C sensor) just doesn't capture more than a couple of planets and the moon at a time. Saturn is way off high in the sky to the south while Venus, the Moon, and Mars are all to the east. I snapped off a panorama sequence but Lightroom wasn't able to automatically combine them so I'm going to be manually picking out control points in Hugin to try to get most or all of these into one image. I should have tried at least a couple of shots with the fisheye but I don't have much experience with that and was a little sleepy.
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock