Farewell, Valley of Death
As bad as I’ve been about keeping this blog blogging, last week I had the finest excuse possible: I was in Death Valley with close to no internet access. This was mostly intentional. While I won’t post my amazing (to me and my wife only) vacation pics on here, there was some astronomy stuff that happened.
First ad foremost, I was able to view totally dark, clear skies and see the milky way clearly. It’s hard to find skies that dark around here and it had been a long time since I’d enjoyed them. It was wonderful. Since the moon was 3/4-ish full, it happened pretty early too and then we were able to watch the moon rise over the mountains. It totally kicked ass. Then, the following morning, we were greeted with this:
This is all the astrophotography you're getting from me today.
The other big highlight was Venus and Uranus being right on top of each other, which made Uranus an easy target. I was actually able to see that little blue bugger with binoculars, which was wild, even with Venus shining brightly nearby. Obviously Uranus isn’t little and Venus isn’t anywhere near it, but you know what I mean.
History is made at night 