Upstate NY Stargazing (The Article Series, Anyway): 2016 – 2018

Above: Uranus, the one planet making all of the rounds in your favorite news feeds today, as captured by Voyager 2 in 1986. Credit: NASA/JPL.

For those wondering why the May 1st web content on syracuse.com and newyorkupstate.com looks a little brighter (get it?), I’m passing along here that the article series has been cancelled by Syracuse Media Group. After almost two years, 28 articles (having even gone weekly last summer to coax people out more often with up-to-date positioning and flyover timings), one well-attended solar eclipse, and a short-stack of Uranus potty humor and misspelled complaints about grammar and punctuation (sorry again, Kathleen), readership for the series wasn’t high enough to warrant its continuation.

The series was both enjoyable and instructive for my part – having to put together observing lists, keep record of planetary positions to know when to head outside with a pair of binoculars, make Stellarium do what I wanted it to do, and focus a few paragraphs worth of new content at top (a monthly whatever) and bottom (an easily-observable constellation) each month was a great exercise for keeping myself in the amateur astronomy loop, even when the weather conditions in CNY/UNY did not lend themselves to being outside for more than a few minutes at a time.

Obviously, it didn’t do much to shorten my sentences.

Best of all was the monthly reminder that groups of amateurs all over the state were still hosting public sessions and organizing their own events – and that there are many individuals either hosting their own observing websites or sharing their observing logs and images with their respective member organizations.

My thanks to Glenn Coin for keeping astronomy-related content still appearing in syracuse.com and newyorkupstate.com as significant events happen and to Steve Carlic for making the series happen in the first place. Space stories by "not me" always make their way to both websites as well – I am optimistic that Uranus will always coax comments, even if some readers never make it past the title.

Finally – as was the point of the article series – if you see an astronomy event in your area, go to it. If you’ve a local club, join it – membership dues keep these organizations running. Most importantly, if you see someone waaaaaay off the scientific mark, find a polite way to correct them or, at least, make it clear to those around them that the facts are out there. Google and wikipedia remain wonderful resources when used correctly.

And, with that, the entire series is PDF'ed and posted at the link below:

www.somewhereville.com/upstate-new-york-stargazing/

"Stargazing In Upstate New York" – Links To The First Two Columns At newyorkupstate.com And syracuse.com

Free press all around,

In the interest of aggregation, quick post linking the first two in a new series of astronomy articles on newyorkupstate.com and syracuse.com. There's an old adage in academia – "You don't really know something until you can teach it." To that end, these articles and their associated research prep are great fun and yet another excellent excuse to go out at night and compare the planetarium apps to the real thing (for which both Starry Night Pro and Stellarium are excellent organizational proxies. I'm currently leaning on Stellarium for the imagery because others who might get bit by the astronomy bug can download it for free and follow along. That said, Starry Night Pro is still my workhorse for fine detail as Stellarium continues to develop).

2016july1_scorpius

When the article series was first proposed, the goal for the Syracuse Media Group folks was to provide people in upstate some basic information for what was up and about in the night sky – when you step outside, what's there to find? My hope is to provide the non-observer and novice observer just enough information to whet the appetite, hopefully coaxing readers to take some quality looks and, if all goes well, to seek out their local astronomy club for some serious observing – and learning.

Night sky-gazing in Upstate NY: What to look for in July

– newyorkupstate.com article @ newyorkupstate.com…_look_for_in_july.html

– syracuse.com article @ syracuse.com…_look_for_in_july.html

Introducing the article organization, with first looks, spotting the International Space Station (ISS), moon phases, visible planets, and a constellation-a-month identifier to close it all.

Stargazing in Upstate NY in August: See the Milky Way, Perseid meteor shower

– newyorkupstate.com article @ newyorkupstate.com…_meteor_shower.html

– syracuse.com article @ syracuse.com…_meteor_shower.html

The series started just in time to highlight the Perseid Meteor Shower (and get its first linking to thanks to Glenn Coin's article as we approached the Perseid peak), then August was chock full of interesting planetary events. The August article was also a first exposure to the issues of episodic astronomy – how to be as minimally referential as possible in any single article to previous articles (which is not easy given how much the search for constellations historically has involved the finding of a bright one to orient observers to a dimmer one).

July hit 78 shares on newyorkupstate.com, August hit 4400 – at that rate, the whole world will see the October article.