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Seattle in the summertime, I how I love it.  Today, the temperatures breached the 80°F mark, and there hasn’t been a cloud in the sky.  A sign of things to come.

As has become common practice for me now, anytime there hasn’t been clouds, I’ve been out at night with the telescope.  Last night was no exception.  I decided to take Friday morning off from work, so I could stay out late on Thursday.  I headed out to Rattlesnake Lake and setup my telescope around 9pm, and arrived back home at 4am.  The moon was nearly full last night, which put a damper on finding a lot of things – faint fuzzies are hard to spot in moon glow.  I did manage to knock a good deal of objects off my Messier list, and was shown some phenomenal views in Barry’s brand-new 11” Celestron.  Consider me jealous of telescopes with goto capabilities: I’m tired of manual setting circles. :)  I’m also exceptionally jealous of his 41mm Tele Vue Panoptic.

A few awesome things from last night, before I get into the technical nitty-gritty of my viewing.  The moon set at about 3am.  Simultaneously, we noticed three things: coyotes starting howling, the milk way suddenly showed up overhead, and Jupiter came up from over the hill and tree line.  Awesome stuff.

Last nights viewing was primarily spent hunting open clusters and globulars, as they were the most visible.  I did manage a few nebulas and galaxies too:

• Globular clusters: M5, M10, M12, M13, M14, M56, M71, M92
• Open clusters: M39, M52, M103
• Planetary Nebulas: M27, M57
• Galaxies: M31, M32, M63, M64, M110
• Asterisms: M40 (how did this become a Messier object?  It’s just one of millions (billions?) of double stars)
• Planets: Jupiter (along with 4 of its moons, Callisto, Europa, Io, and Ganymede):
  

Not a bad night of viewing: 19 Messier objects I hadn’t seen before.  I was particularly impressed that I was able to star-hop to M63 and M64, as they were buried in moon glow by the time I got to them.  M64, in particular, was tough: I could just barely make out a slightly brighter spot in the moon glow than the surroundings.  I’ll definitely need to go back to it on a darker night.

The atmospheric conditions weren’t all that great, and this was obvious when Jupiter came up.  If I slightly defocused the telescope, I could see major air currents over Jupiter, and even when in focus, I couldn’t make out any of the cloud bands.  I can’t wait to get better views of it later in the year when it’s higher in the sky.

I’m now up to 54 Messier objects viewed, with 56 to go until completion of all Messier objects.  Only 16 more until I’ve completed basic work required for the Astronomical League’s Messier Club.  A good portion of the 56 remaining are winter-only items, and I hope to wrap up the rest of the summertime items at various star parties this year.

I’ve got my process for stargazing pretty well locked down now.  I create a list of the Messiers (or whatever I want to look at that night) in AstroPlanner, and print out the list.  I also take with me a list of alignment star coordinates (so I can set my manual setting circles), and a pencil.  As I’m running through the printed list, I check off things I find and make any relevant notes or quick sketches.  I’d like to supplant this with a digital recorder at some point so I can talk through observations rather than writing them down – it would be nice to be able to document things without leaving the eyepiece.  The next day, I log my observations in AstroPlanner, and write up a blog post with lots of Wikipedia links.  I’ll also often compare what I saw to imagery in the WorldWide Telescope to make sure I saw what I think I saw.  I’ll probably put together a post in the near future about what all I bring onsite to aid others that are learning this stuff as I am.

I was reading the article by Mark Evans that laid out how Flickr could have an independent valuation of $4 billion dollars.  He used a multiplier defined by Henry Blodgett in determining the value of Facebook: 25 times a company’s annual revenue is their valuation.

Wow.

I decided to apply this to a few other companies that have been in the news lately: Yahoo!, Microsoft, and Google.

Based on 2007 10K filings for each company:

This gives between 2.5 and 4.5 of over-estimate in independent publicly traded companies.  I’m not a finance guy, but it seems like that 25 times number is quite a stretch, to me.

I looked at the Clear Sky Chart for my local viewing area a few days back, and I noticed a wonderful combination of things: Friday night was scheduled to be clear and the moon wasn’t going to rise until 2am.  Friday night being a weekend meant I didn’t have to get up early the next day.  I quickly sent out a few e-mails to the local astronomy group to see if anyone else was planning on showing up at Rattlesnake Lake.  Sure enough, a bunch of people said they’d be there:  I needed no more reasons.

Boaz tagged along, and we headed out there at about 8pm, just around the time of sunset.  Starbucks coffees in hand, and covered in several layers of wool, we waited.  Other people started showing up around 8:30pm as it was getting dark, and by 9:30pm we probably had a half-dozen telescopes setup.  Around 11pm, most people left, but a guy named Jim, Boaz, and I stayed out until 2am.  It was well worth it!

Last night’s bounty included:

• Globular clusters: M53
• Open clusters: M29 and M44
• Galaxy clusters: Abell 1656 (the Coma Cluster)
• Double stars: Regulus (? Leo), Mizar (? UMa), and Albireo (? Cyg)
• Planets: Saturn (including Titan) and Mars
• Boatloads of Galaxies: M49, M58, M59, M65, M66, M84, M85, M86, M87, M88, M89, M90, M91, M98, M99, M100, M109, NGC3628, NGC4340, NGC4350, NGC4394, NGC4417, NGC4435, NGC4438, NGC4442, NGC4459, NGC4596, and NGC4608.

And that’s just the stuff that I saw through my telescope.

Items I found new appreciation for last night:

• Sky & Telescope’s Pocket Sky Atlas.  My observing still is maturing: I started off looking at only things I know (i.e., Orion nebula, Pleiades); I moved up to understanding celestial coordinates and using R.A. and declination to locate items; and now I’m star hopping with the Sky Atlas.  I found that a few times, I would like at something (using R.A. and dec) and then move on to the next object on my list — only to find that there were other objects just barely out of the viewfinder.  Using the Sky Atlas last night was great — we got every Messier object in the Virgo Cluster by starting with Vindemiatrix (? Vir) and ? Vir and then jumped from galaxy to galaxy.
• Green laser pointers.  I’ve got to get me one of these; two people out there last night had them, and they make it amazingly easy to point out things.
• Hand/Toe warmers.  Those little chemical packets you stick under your socks and in your gloves.  They’re very handy at 1am when it’s literally freezing outside.
• Double stars.  You might think looking at two stars very close to one another is boring, but it’s pretty cool when the two stars are of vastly different color spectrum, like Albireo.
• We’re tiny, and life is short.  All the stars you see in the sky that are so far away?  They’re all in our galaxy.  I saw other galaxies that are over 60 million light-years away.  The light from those has been traveling for 60 million years before it reached my eyes.  That’s astounding.

I was driving home yesterday, and had a brilliant idea about a project I’m doing at work. It was so good, I knew I’d remember it later.

Problem is, I remember having a great idea – but don’t recall what the idea was.  *sigh*

I should start e-mailing myself ideas from my phone.  Or recording them.

Like Jeremyah, I’m a big fan of random personal statistics.  Here’s one for today:  number of Amazon purchases I’ve made over time.

First Amazon purchase for me?  September 17, 1999.

(ps: does this graph remind anyone else of an obscene hand gesture?)

Last time I checked, “wsaezxsq” is not a word, contrary to what the prompt would make you think.

A few weeks back, I had a cryptic e-mail message from my friend Karl:

From: [redacted]
Date: Fri, 11 Apr 2008 23:00:16 +0000
To: marius@marius.org
Subject: April 27

I sent y’all an unbirthday present. I think I got the date right, though
I’m not too good at math and it is a leap year … 

Apparently April 27th is the half-way point between my birthday and Diann’s birthday in a leap-year.  Yesterday, I got home and there was a … large … box on my doorstep:

Yes, that says 29 pounds.  I hoisted it upstairs (the return address was actually obscured by a UPS shipping sticker, so that increased the intrigue) and opened it up:

Yep, a 24-pack of Dr. Pepper from the Dublin, Texas factory (no, you’re not crazy: Diann had already pulled four of them out of the box before I was able to snap a picture).  What’s special about this?  Well, you see, the Dublin Dr. Pepper factory is the one of four in the world that makes their Dr. Pepper the old-fashioned way: with pure cane sugar instead of high fructose corn syrup.  You can definitely taste the difference, and having this only a 1-hour drive away is one of the few things I miss about Texas.  Mmmm, Dublin Dr. Pepper.

Karl: well played, sir.  Well played.  Hope you don’t mind that we’ve already opened it up before our unbirthday!

Let me start by saying I can’t believe it’s snowing.  In Seattle.  In April.  It was 80° and sunny last Saturday.  I guess that was summer, and we’ve already moved into next winter. Grr.

A few days ago I posted a picture of what we had just cooked for dinner, and a few of you have asked (via comments and e-mail) what we cooked.  I’m here to answer your question:  Sake Steamed Salmon with Shiitake-Leek Noodles.  Good stuff: lots of sake, lemon grass, leeks, star anise, and many other things.  It’s from the April 2008 edition of Cuisine at Home magazine, and they’ve unfortunately not made this recipe available with their on-line listing of recipes.

But, those of you that are interested know how to get in touch with me. :)  Heather, I don’t imagine you can find local salmon at your farmer’s market, though.

I guess the answer to that is, “it depends”.  And, it depends a lot on who you ask.

If you ask my new office-mate, the answer is likely yes.  You see, a new person joined our group at work about 3 weeks ago, and due to an office space crunch, I’m sharing an office with him. Today, as he was wearing his headphone, I decided to crank up some music and get some work done.

I plugged in my headphone and proceeded to crank up the music.  About 20 minutes later, he tapped me on my shoulder to ask me a question.  As I pulled the headphones out of my ears, I noticed the music was still going … loud. 

Yep, when you plug headphones into a Lenovo T61p laptop, it doesn’t kill the audio going to the external speakers from the docking station.  So, for the last 20 minutes, I’ve been listening to headphones, and apparently everyone within about 20 feet of my office has been listening to my speakers.  Epic fail.