Tehachapi's Online Community News & Entertainment Guide
Tehachapi's Online Community News & Entertainment Guide
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At last, it's time to gather 'round the telescopes once again at Aviator Park! On Saturday, Oct. 12, we'll be holding the Tehachapi Airport Star Party at Aviator Park. The public is welcome from 5:30-10 p.m., with dark occurring around 7 p.m. Mercury and Venus will be in the fading twilight, with Saturn high in the east. Uranus will be rising around dusk, as well. This will be an evening with a first-quarter moon, which also provides a stunning target for the young-at-heart astronomer. Humanity...
The United States Coast Guard Academy announced that Alaina Riggs from Tehachapi High School has been recognized for superior academic achievement and leadership potential. Alaina has the distinction of being the first student from Tehachapi to accept an appointment to attend the Coast Guard Academy and formally received her appointment in a ceremony at Tehachapi High School on Thursday, May 26. The United States Coast Guard Academy in New London, Connecticut, is an accredited college educating...
[Editor's note: On page 2 of The Loop newspaper's Aug. 14, 2021 issue, the incorrect date was published for this event. Please note Sept. 11 is the correct date for the star party at Aviator Park.] The COVID pandemic has shut down our community star parties for far too long. At last, it's time to gather 'round the telescopes once again! This year we have all of the planets in our evening sky; some near the setting sun, others rising as it gets dark. While Mars, Mercury and blazing Venus set...
The COVID pandemic has shut down our community star parties for far too long. At last, it's time to gather 'round the telescopes once again! This year we have all of the planets in our evening sky; some near the setting sun, others rising as it gets dark. While Mars, Mercury and blazing Venus set close to the setting sun, the other four planets pop out across the darkening evening sky. Jupiter and its four big moons will be visible early along with glorious Saturn, with its rings open a healthy...
Seeing a total solar eclipse never was on my Bucket List. Yet, when I was twelve years old, I remember visiting a travel agent to discuss the possibility of attending such an event in Nova Scotia. The brochures I came away with fired my imagination for a very long time. I was therefore happy to add an eclipse to the bottom of the List when I discovered that the Great American Solar Eclipse was to pass directly over my mother's house in Chillicothe, Missouri. And so it came to pass last Monday....
Most of you have heard about the unusual total solar eclipse that is about to cross America on August 21st. From what I've heard, there's a great deal of misunderstanding out there. Many are confusing it with a lunar eclipse, believing it will last all day and/or that it can be seen well from Tehachapi. Let me tell you what's really going to happen. First of all, let's talk about eclipses. An eclipse occurs when one celestial body passes in front of another. It can be one of Jupiter's moons pass...
Last month I focused our eyes on the many exciting manned space activities underway this year. However, there's a great deal of action in the unmanned space arena, as well. Space exploration is a primary NASA mission; and nothing has been a better return on investment than our interplanetary space probes. Working from the sun outward, Messenger ended its mission at Mercury last year after giving us high-resolution images of nearly the entire planet. Japan is exploring Venus with its Ataksuki...
This winter has been unusually brutal for Tehachapi astronomers (and less than optimal for local pilots). I was happy to seize any opportunity for a little binocular time with the Orion Nebula and the Pleiades. With the weather certain to improve, it's time to resume my monthly column on all things aerospace. Despite growing tension with Russia, all is well aboard the International Space Station. Camaraderie is high and we're still getting rides on their Soyuz rockets. Still, I'm glad that...
I'm sure most of you witnessed the brighter-than-average moon in mid-October. Many of you also heard talk of the supermoon phenomenon. I assure you that it isn't a contrivance of DC Comics; it's for real. Let's start with your basic full moon. The moon orbits the earth in nearly the same plane as the earth's orbit around the sun. Thus, once a month the moon and sun are on opposite sides of the earth. When the moon is on the far side of the earth, the side of the moon facing us will be fully...
On the Fourth of July, NASA/JPL's Juno spacecraft arrived at Jupiter. It's the first probe dedicated to the study of the planet itself: its atmosphere, its internal structure; and of particular interest to me, its magnetosphere. Our planet is surrounded by a magnetic field, called the magnetosphere, which protects us from most of the nasty charged particles from the sun and interstellar space. This field is generated by the churning of the molten iron and nickel in the earth's core. It can be...
On September 8th, the venerable TV series Star Trek will officially turn 50. While a number of old "properties" have been resurrected from the dust bins lately, Star Trek never really died. When it premiered in 1966, NBC was very proud of the show with its racially-integrated, multinational crew of men and women. It was a radical departure from shows that avoided controversy like the plague. Storylines often tackled burning social issues of the day, including race relations and even the Vietnam...
August is often called, "Meteor Month," because some of the best meteor showers of the year occur in August. But why should that be? What is it about the earth's orbit that causes a flood of meteors on an annual basis? And how can they be so predictable? Ignoring a lot of small factors, it can reasonably be said that each year the earth returns to the same point in space relative to the sun. As the earth moves around the sun, it does not move through "empty space." We may think of space as...
President Obama is a lame duck. That means that his primary focus is no longer on bold plans for the future, but on what his administration has accomplished over the last eight years – his legacy. My personal feeling is that history will judge him to have been a decent president; not stellar, but not bad. He came into office with a global economy in chaos and an America entangled in a nightmarishly complex international situation. Yet, we're now doing fairly well when viewed from a global perspe...
Launched almost five years ago, the NASA/JPL spacecraft Juno will arrive at Jupiter on July 4th to help us celebrate Independence Day. Its mission is to take a close look at the planet itself (as opposed to the entire Jovian system). We're trying to collect data that will help us understand the origin and evolution of Jupiter. This understanding is important since fully half of the planets in our system are gas giants like Jupiter (the others being Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune), and Jupiter is...
As an electronics engineer, I've always wanted to visit the fabled International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. However, since I was working in medical electronics, my company wasn't about to spend four-figures to send me there. Today I find myself a journalist and can therefore go for free! My mission: Identify consumer technologies (small bucks) that the aerospace industry (big bucks) may be overlooking as we plan to send people to Mars. Here's what we found. CES has become a...
By the time this goes to press, most of you will have seen episode VII of Star Wars. A friend offered the view that it contained many of the same plot elements that made the first film, released in 1977, such a success. I don't think George Lucas would take that as negative criticism. He has been very open about the fact that he has been retelling the 'basic hero story' that's been retold for thousands of years. Has it really been nearly forty years since we first saw a lightsaber, a droid, or...
After dazzling the world with high resolution images and high-tech data from Pluto, New Horizons is going for the extra point. Even while it continued the slow process of downloading the massive store of data it gathered at Pluto, New Horizons changed course for yet another Kuiper Belt object (KBO) called 2014 MU69. Surely there will be an initiative to give it a snazzier name! I'd like to start the bidding with "Rupert" from a fictional KBO in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Orbiting the...
8 has certainly been a year for celestial alignments! As we go to press, there will be a total lunar eclipse tomorrow (September 27th), which I told you about last month. In brief, the sun will set at 6:44 with the moon rising already in partial eclipse. Totality begins at 7:11 and ends at 8:23 p.m. This will be the fattest eclipsed moon we will ever see, because the moon will be at the closest point in its orbit (perigee). Tehachapi already enjoyed a total lunar eclipse last April, plus two...
As we look out at the night sky, one of the greatest challenges is seeing it properly in three dimensions. We are offered the illusion of depth perception by believing that the brightest objects are closer than fainter ones. This is often true; but more often it is not. For example: Celbalrai is the second-brightest star in the constellation Ophiuchus. (‘Celbalrai’ is Arabic for “shepherd dog.” The names of the stars are Arabic because the Arabs were the preeminent Western astronomers during...
The Ancient Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians called the hottest days of summer the ‘Dog Days’ of summer. To me they’re a sizable chunk of the ‘Hundred Days of Hell.’ To explain: Those of you who know me are aware of my serious aversion to heat. I respect the sun as being vital to all life on earth, but we are far from being close friends. Thus, you can well understand that summer is my least favorite season. While you’re enjoying the Mountain Festival and getting a suntan, I’m hunkered down...
When I was a kid, the best image of Pluto from Mount Palomar was a fuzzy dot. The great Hubble Space Telescope later gave us a fuzzy ball, which wasn’t much more satisfying. Something drastic had to be done about this problem. So in 2006, America vented its frustration by sending a grand-piano-sized probe called New Horizons to take a very good look at Pluto and its moons. We are a patient people. Now it is time to savor and celebrate. After over nine years in space, New Horizons will make i...
With April showers and May flowers behind us, summer nights will soon be upon us. This year Tehachapians can look forward to two community star parties where we can get together to learn about the sky, telescopes, binoculars, and especially to share our wonder of the limitless vistas. The annual Brite Lake Star-B-Que will be held on the weekend of July 11-12. The lights will be shut off around the lake, and the parking lot will be full of telescopes and stargazers until dawn. The public is...
How many of us still cling to the image of the astronomer as a stiff-moving caricature in a white lab coat and oversized spectacles, pacing around while staring at the ground, or peering through a telescope that sticks out through the dome of his observatory? Poindexter's uncle (from the Felix the Cat cartoons) was always a personal hero to me. Though abrasive and unsociable, he represented the most sublime of human endeavors – the expansion of our knowledge of the cosmos. Until recently, it has...
The warm winter we've been enjoying has also afforded us many extra nights of skies clear enough to see the Milky Way. Most consider the section of our galaxy that's in view on winter evenings to be the most beautiful. Indeed, Orion is almost universally acclaimed as the most beautiful constellation of all. Its iconic belt of three bright stars suspends a dazzling sword of new born stars set against a maelstrom of bright and dark nebulae. Four bright stars define Orion's shoulders and feet, whil...
Three-and-a-half years ago, a sophisticated NASA space probe named Dawn caught up with an asteroid named Vesta. Instead of just collecting images and data as it flew by, it fired its ion thrusters and went into orbit around it for a year of intensive study. Then in July of 2012 it did something even more unusual -- it fired up its thrusters again and flew off toward another asteroid, Ceres! Now, this may sound routine in the STAR WARS universe, but that’s quite a feat today in this galaxy. A...
