Astronomy

I know we did Fridays last time. The weather was bad, so I kinda forgot about it. The transparency tonight is looking suboptimal, and, given my options, I might just settle for hitting some binary stars. My best view is of the eastern sky, and most everything there right now is faint fuzzies, so I don't have especially high hopes.

Tonight's itenerary:

• Going to hit the Leo triplet again
• Going to hit Bode's Galaxy again
• M94 -M48 -M44 -M67
• M3 if it's high enough
• Gamma Leo
• Zeta Ursa Majoris

Probably off itenerary:

• Going to save the owl nebula and cigar Galaxy for a night with better transparency.
• I'm considering M84, M86, and M87 if they're high enough, but given the conditions and relatively low altitude, probably not.

Anyone else getting their scopes out? What are you going to look at?

Hi, I thought I'd share this here since it isn't being covered by any news sources. It's mostly my own research and calculations, so it could be completely wrong, but I'm fairly confident it's correct.

Most of you probably heard about the asteroid 2024 YR4, which briefly reached a 3.1% chance of Earth impact before its orbit was further constrained and the chance dropped to zero. What you may not have heard is that the chance of lunar impact has actually been steadily rising. No organization is currently reporting lunar impact statistics, so I've been calculating the probability myself. I've created a Desmos calculator that you can easily plug the approach data from NASA into. As of now it's sitting at 1.94%, with the nominal approach being less than one lunar radius from the surface of the Moon (just 0.058 sigma from the closest approach).

This is the impact corridor for the Moon, as viewed from Earth. An impact on the near side (very likely) would be visible for an entire hemisphere of the Earth, including North and Central America, the eastern half of Asia, and Australia. Map of locations where the Moon will be visible at the time of impact. I'm not sure exactly how bright an impact would be, but a 45 kg asteroid caused a flash clearly visible to telescopes during a lunar eclipse back in 2019, so I expect an asteroid about 5 million times larger would be quite the show.

A 1.94% chance is still very small, but I'll be keeping my eyes on the data and crossing my fingers for a lunar impact!

Hi, I thought I'd share this here since it isn't being covered by any news sources. It's mostly my own research and calculations, so it could be completely wrong, but I'm fairly confident it's correct.

Most of you probably heard about the asteroid 2024 YR4, which briefly reached a 3.1% chance of Earth impact before its orbit was further constrained and the chance dropped to zero. What you may not have heard is that the chance of lunar impact has actually been steadily rising. No organization is currently reporting lunar impact statistics, so I've been calculating the probability myself. I've created a Desmos calculator that you can easily plug the approach data from NASA into. As of now it's sitting at 1.94%, with the nominal approach being less than one lunar radius from the surface of the Moon (just 0.058 sigma from the closest approach).

This is the impact corridor for the Moon, as viewed from Earth. An impact on the near side (very likely) would be visible for an entire hemisphere of the Earth, including North and Central America, the eastern half of Asia, and Australia. Map of locations where the Moon will be visible at the time of impact. I'm not sure exactly how bright an impact would be, but a 45 kg asteroid caused a flash clearly visible to telescopes during a lunar eclipse back in 2019, so I expect an asteroid about 5 million times larger would be quite the show.

A 1.94% chance is still very small, but I'll be keeping my eyes on the data and crossing my fingers for a lunar impact!

I'm planning to go to a rural spot that has a Bortle class 3 night sky around Southern California. Can anyone recommend a beginner friendly telescope with decent magnification for around $200? I'm not interested in using an accompanying smart phone app to go with it either. I'd like to see nebulae and galaxies the most. Thank you.