On the evening of July 3^rd, 2020, Richmond Hill resident Ian Shelton captured this image while watching the setting Sun beautifully illuminate the top of a huge distant storm cloud. When sunlight needs to travel horizontally through many additional thicknesses of our atmosphere to reach our eyes or a distant object like the cloud shown here, air molecules can scatter most of the blue sunlight out of the beam, leaving just the yellows, oranges and reds of sunlight to illuminate us or a distant cloud. Contrast this with the unfiltered white sunlight traveling directly through space to reach the Waxing Gibbous Moon seen above and ten thousand times further away than the terrestrial cloud top.

Two days later, Dr. Shelton was joined by several other member of the DDO Defenders to watch the now Full Moon pass into Earth’s shadow. Unlike a more familiar umbral lunar eclipse where a dark circular shadow makes part or all of a Full Moon seem to disappear, a penumbral eclipse is a much more subtle event that is easily missed. Encircling the cone-shaped dark inner “umbral” shadow cast by the Earth is the “penumbra”, a larger outer cone where only partial darkness occurs. On July 5^th, the Moon passed 30% of the way into the penumbral cone, causing only about 20% darkening towards the north edge of the Moon.
  By eye, the event went unnoticed. But it was captured photographically, as shown in the image here. A photograph taken just before the eclipse began was subtracted from a photograph taken at mid-eclipse.

-DDO Defenders 🙂

Hi Everyone,

Here is what Comet NEOWISE looked like this morning, July 8th, 2020 (via a camera, not by eye). The image was processed to increase the contrast and darken the sky, which was already getting pretty bright when the comet finally came out from behind the clouds at 4:30 am. The comet is likely going to remain an easy target for cameras on a tripod for the next week or two, as it moves further away from the Sun and closer to Earth. If the sky is clear, it should be visible by eye if you observe between ~4:00 and 4:30 am. Binoculars should reveal its stubby tail. The animation below shows where to look for the comet. And at 4:30 am on July 9th, 2020, the ISS will be seen passing through the same part of the sky (weather permitting). 

-DDO Defenders

This snap-shot of Venus was taken using a telescope in full daylight on June 7th, 2020, just a few days after Venus appeared to pass just below the Sun*. The planet was just a whisper-thin crescent on this date, with just 0.3% of its illuminated hemisphere visible. It’s during these “inferior conjunctions” that Venus looks biggest to us, because this is when Earth is passing closest to Venus. But Venus still appears at least 30 times smaller than the Full Moon.

One clear difference between seeing a thin crescent Venus through a telescope and seeing a thin (“young”) crescent Moon by eye is that Venus remains very bright, whereas the crescent Moon is much fainter compared to when it is a Full Moon. That’s because we never get to see the surface of Venus, only its very reflective white clouds. In fact, at the time of conjunction, we can catch a glimpse of Venus’ cloudy atmosphere faintly glowing all the way around the planet’s silhouet, making its crescent extend beyond just a half circle like for the Moon. The picture here shows a tiny bit of that extension.

If you want to see Venus for yourself, you will now need to get up just before Sunrise, as Venus has become the Morning Star.

Wishing everyone Clear Skies!

— Dr. Ian Shelton

* Venus was still travelling along its almost circular orbit 50 million km closer than Earth orbits the Sun; but as seen from Earth, Venus was almost perfectly lined up with the Sun 100 million km beyond Venus.

We hope you all are safe and well! We miss having programs at the DDO and we know you miss them too!

Restorations have begun on the Administration Building of the observatory and they are planned to continue for about 6 months. These restorations will focus on the outer facade (including stonework and paint). We will continue to update you about the work being done as information comes our way.

Hopefully, not too far in the future, we will be back doing our programs at the DDO. When this time comes, the  restoration efforts will not affect our programming.

We look forward to seeing you all again! Until then, please enjoy our online content via YouTube!

-DDO Defenders