The heavens this week
Apr. 22nd, 2013 12:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alt_sinistraStudents -
It looks like tonight will be quite clear, so I’ll have the tower open as soon as it’s dark. I’ll also be available for the usual conversation and questions about astronomy and related topics. (Though, you know me. I think everything’s related to astronomy. Come ask why, if you like.) I will be out Tuesday evening for a Guild meeting, but available the rest of the week as well.
The Lyriad meteor shower is currently ongoing - I was up watching for a bit before dawn, and it was not as impressive as some years, but easier to watch after moonset.
On Thursday, there will an lunar eclipse, beginning just before 8 at night. While this particular one is not deeply interesting (being very brief and extremely partial - only about half an arc second will be occluded) it is interesting because it is the last of a saros series.
We do not normally discuss these except in my newt years, but eclipses occur in a pattern, stretching over 18 years (18 years, 11 days, 8 hours, to be precise). We can use the larger series pattern to predict both when eclipses may occur, and what form they will take, due to the interactions of three separate sequences (The synodic month, the draconic month, and the anomalistic month. For the curious, the name of the middle of those three comes from old legends about a dragon eating the moon at the eclipses.)
This is the first series I’ve had the opportunity to observe in full (given weather, of course), but I also have my notes from the last half of the previous cycle (and of course, my predecessor’s observing journals, which cover cycles long before that) for anyone interested in comparisons.
It looks like tonight will be quite clear, so I’ll have the tower open as soon as it’s dark. I’ll also be available for the usual conversation and questions about astronomy and related topics. (Though, you know me. I think everything’s related to astronomy. Come ask why, if you like.) I will be out Tuesday evening for a Guild meeting, but available the rest of the week as well.
The Lyriad meteor shower is currently ongoing - I was up watching for a bit before dawn, and it was not as impressive as some years, but easier to watch after moonset.
On Thursday, there will an lunar eclipse, beginning just before 8 at night. While this particular one is not deeply interesting (being very brief and extremely partial - only about half an arc second will be occluded) it is interesting because it is the last of a saros series.
We do not normally discuss these except in my newt years, but eclipses occur in a pattern, stretching over 18 years (18 years, 11 days, 8 hours, to be precise). We can use the larger series pattern to predict both when eclipses may occur, and what form they will take, due to the interactions of three separate sequences (The synodic month, the draconic month, and the anomalistic month. For the curious, the name of the middle of those three comes from old legends about a dragon eating the moon at the eclipses.)
This is the first series I’ve had the opportunity to observe in full (given weather, of course), but I also have my notes from the last half of the previous cycle (and of course, my predecessor’s observing journals, which cover cycles long before that) for anyone interested in comparisons.
Re: Private message to Cedric Diggory
Date: 2013-04-22 05:32 pm (UTC)Well it sounds like you are leaving just as I'm returning from the interview with Director Selwyn's department. I'll see if I can carve out more time tonight or tomorrow evening.
Re: Private message to Cedric Diggory
Date: 2013-04-22 05:44 pm (UTC)Yes, on that, sounds like. I know it's only a blind for your real goals, but good luck. A little interview practice never hurts, anyway. (And as I know Raz has told you, it's as well to have an idea about what you'd do after you did Quidditch, if they have the sense I hope they do and give you a chance.)
There's also the bit where I'm teaching tomorrow morning, and hope it will go better than today. (My first class this morning was the fifth year Gryffindors and Ravenclaws. You can guess how little we got done there, not that I blame any of them.)
I think the thing I'm having the hardest time with - in practical terms, I mean - is how one has to be careful of the HJC members. I'm sure not all of them are as ... committed as Madam Pinkness might like, but that doesn't help much in class.
Re: Private message to Cedric Diggory
Date: 2013-04-22 05:59 pm (UTC)The HJC is tricky. The number that clearly feel forced into it, those that overlap with the Prefects. My feelings on its existence make me less than logical on dealing with them. It feels so like a personal insult even though I doubt that's why she did it. I'm not sure what to feel about the fact she just created a new group and didn't try to corrupt the prefects to her purpose.
Re: Private message to Cedric Diggory
Date: 2013-04-22 06:07 pm (UTC)She's tried and tried to co-opt us, the staff, and it is no fun at all. (As you may well have guessed.) I'm just waiting for her to ask about whether I'm filling out that - what was it, F329-Q, the future absence form, about the Guild tomorrow. I am not listing 100 names, thank you, and it's none of her business anyway.
I do agree that it's complicated. That there are those who took it as the best of a bad set of choices. I'm so very glad you didn't, and at the same time, I don't blame Linus for bearing with it as long as he did.
I've been thinking a lot - this weekend, but before that - about how some people want to view the world as starkly right or wrong, and some people don't. And I was raised the first, more or less, and working through the second, well. No one makes charts for that, really. It'd be easier if they did.