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Árbol del Sol
Thought for the Month The SunTree Traveler
That Missing Labor Day Weekend Camping Trip Your newsletter editor was scraping frost from his windshield at Taos Ski Valley where he was manning a booth at a Restaurant Festival. That was also a fun weekend. The Swim Event in El Paso All of the “Cool” people showed up. The pool and hot tub got a good workout. There was an adequate supply of good food for the potluck. One downer is that a certain, unnamed person had gotten a “Double Devine Chocolate” Birthday Cake for the event and left it on his kitchen counter when he left to attend the event. It was not needed since an adequate supply of rum cake was available. It was, however extremely embarrassing to that unnamed person. (I was invited to a double birthday party back in Las Cruces the following week, so the cake was put to good use there. I got many undeserved thanks for my foresightedness in getting the cake)
Alamogordo Sigh! We did not get as much of a chance to visit that pool this Summer due to problems related to the Alamogordo flash floods. That makes the closing a mite sadder. As a result, I suspect that the turnout will be better than usual in order to give the swimming season a fine close-down salute. This will be another one of those great Alamogordo events with a Saturday evening potluck meal with lots of good conversation and tons of good food followed by pool and hot tub soaking. Marana Pre-Halloween Event “The Buff's are planning a big party on the weekend of Oct 21st, to avoid everybody else's 28th weekend events. We will be having the main activity on Saturday at one of our board member’s 5 acre property; where he has planted about 180 large pine trees and dug a 1.5 acre lake. The lake is stocked with catfish and the water level is up, thanks to the monsoon rains. There is plenty of room to camp in the pine forest and lots of room for trailers/motor homes; boondocks style. We can run limited electric, but no dump station. Driving in on Thursday and leaving Monday is fine. We are less than 3 miles from two casinos and associated restaurants and within a half hour drive of Mira Vista and the Arizona/Sonora Desert Museum.” Contact SunTree for specifics of this event (non-SunTree members should contact the Buffs directly). Faywood Hauntings
Incognito Planets and Moon This Month This is the year’s worse month for planets, but that is an opportunity to look for other things out there (apologies to the X-Files). As it was for the last couple of months, Mars is effectively a no-show this month. Evenings: The full Moon will be on 6 October and using the definition (which I prefer) that the Harvest Moon is that full Moon closest to the Autumnal Equinox, this is it. This full Moon is only 14 days following the Equinox and is the latest date that a Harvest Moon can fall. The Moon has been out of its “normal” area for us all of this year and this month, you will find the Moon, prior to its “full” stage, the hardest to see crescent Moons in 18 years because it is so low in the sky close to the southern horizon. Jupiter will be low in the west in the evenings this month and will get lower as the month goes on. Toward the end of the month it will totally disappear into the glare of the sunset. You will still be able to see it on the evening of 24 October just to the right of the waxing crescent of the Moon Cute little Mercury will show up later in the month, but it will be even lower than Jupiter in the evening dusk. It will be just below Jupiter on that night when the crescent Moon is to the right of Jupiter (24 October). Antares is the star just to the right of the crescent Moon on the evening of 25 October. If you took my advice last month to lie in a mud puddle to look at Vega at the zenith of the sky, you will not need to get wet this month. Vega has moved a little to the west where is it still shining brightly (magnitude -1). The place in the sky where you wetly viewed Vega last month has been taken over by a “sort of” bright star, Deneb. If you lie back into your puddle and look at Denab, point your feet in the direction of Vega. Now look at the space between the two stars and you will see a line of three stars closer to Deneb and angling off slightly toward the southeast. If you think of Deneb as the tail of a swan and those three stars in a line as the leading edge of the outstretched wings of that Swan, you can follow a line of stars crossing the wings at a right angle and going toward the southwest (sort of like a cross formation) toward the head of the swan, then you have found the constellation Cygnus (strangely enough, “The Swan”) Before I leave the evening sky, I have to point out to you that last month’s “early” evening star is still around, but it is very low on the western horizon just north of “due west”. Its name, I remind you, is Arcturus. Morning: Only Saturn is really visible this month, but it doesn’t rise until 2;30 AM in the early part of the month. Later, toward the end of the month, it will start rising closer to midnight. It is the really bright spot in the pre-sunrise sky, apparently trying out for the role of morning “Star”. If you have vacation plans this month to visit Prague or Budapest in the early month, you might want to get up early on 8 October to catch a view of the Draconid Meteor Shower. If you have no eastern European vacation plans, then you have several days (preferably in the early morning) to catch the Orionid Meteor Shower playing in a sky near you starting on 20 through 24 October. Apparently, this year, the Moon has no plans to ruin the viewing of the shower so it should be a nice show. I will not go through my tired old lecture as to the dusty trail in the sky that we, here on spaceship Earth occasionally drive through, but I did want to mention that we cross this path twice every year, but we give the two crossings a different name. In May, we cross the old dusty path of the Comet Halley and call the resulting sky show “Eta Aquarid” Meteor Shower. In October, we cross that trashy trail, but this time we call it the Orionid Meteor Shower. The show normally starts around 2 AM (yes, that is the 2:00 that is in the morning), but don’t bother getting up for the overture. The showers will get better and better until it is washed out by the rising sun. This shower is actually several “sub-showers” stretched out over several days. All of them have a radiant near the feet of those crazy twin brothers, Castor and Pollux Gemini, but the showers on each morning tend to move a little bit from day-to-day. This shower is not as bright as the Leonid shower because of the angle that Spaceship Earth crosses the trail. The Leonid (stay tuned) hit the atmosphere more directly and are, as a result, brighter and they tend to leave long burning trails. That does not mean that you should forget about the Orionids though. They are okay too.
© 2004 SunTree Travel Club - Site updated Summer 2008 |
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