Bob Moler's Ephemeris Blog

This is Ephemeris for Friday, September 25th. Today the Sun will be up for 11 hours and 59 minutes, setting at 7:33, and it will rise tomorrow at 7:35. The Moon, 2 days past first quarter, will set at 1:51 tomorrow morning.

Tonight the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore and the Grand Traverse Astronomical Society may hold the park’s 50th anniversary online star party this evening starting around 8 pm via the Zoom app available for Android smart phones, iPhones and computers. Instructions for joining are on the society’s web site gtastro.org and the Sleeping Bear Dunes Facebook page. Images will be captured live, if it’s clear, from Northwestern Michigan College’s Joseph H Rogers Observatory. The images will be pretty much what is seen at the telescope eyepiece, and definitely not Hubble Space Telescope quality, which take days to process. Visible will be the Moon, Jupiter, Saturn and later on Mars plus some really neat objects beyond the solar system. it all begins at 9 pm.

The event times given are for the Traverse City/Interlochen area of Michigan. They may be different for your location.

Addendum

Preview of Saturn imaged by Professor Jerry Dobek at Northwestern Michigan College’s Joseph H. Rogers Observatory.

Preview of Mars imaged by Professor Jerry Dobek at Northwestern Michigan College’s Joseph H. Rogers Observatory. Notice at top the small whitish patch, it a polar cap at the south pole of Mars. There are also some darker patches on the upper half of the image.