StarWatch: Moravian University Astronomy

APRIL 2025

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lunar phases

1494 APRIL 6, 2025: Sun Pillars: Driving home from Lowe's in Quakertown on March 24, after picking up supplies for my observatory, I decided to take a less stressful way via a back road to avoid the more congested Route 309. The sky was mostly clear, and the cooling air was very moist from a recent shower. * Driving northbound, I noticed a haze layer swiftly developing just a foot above the rapidly cooling ground. At the same time, I caught the sun setting behind a grove of skeletal trees, a Kodak moment for sure. I got the picture. Then, the real surprise developed as I continued homeward: a solar pillar emerged, one of the finest I have ever seen. I drove past houses, unsightly distant telephone poles, and other obstructions I did not want to have in my image's foreground until I was able to turn into a church parking lot along with hundreds of other people all staring in the wrong direction. Yes, it was a cemetery where I captured the picture below. * Solar pillars are generally formed by thin plates of hexagonally-shaped ice crystals slowly falling through the air in near horizontal positions. Think of how a broad maple leaf flutters towards the ground in calm air during autumn. That is how these thin-plated crystals are moving as they gently descend, rocking back and forth, the sun's light reflecting off the crystals' relatively smooth surfaces, sending its light back towards Sol, creating the pillar that can be observed above it. There are several iterations of sun pillars, as explained in Robert Greenler's Rainbows, Halos, and Glories, Cambridge University Press, 1980, but from my readings of his text, I think this most common explanation fits the bill for the pillar that I witnessed. Ad Astra!

1495

APRIL 13, 2025: Serendipity

While talking the other day with Dr. Keith Wood, Assistant Professor of Practice in Physics, who came to Moravian in 2022, a remarkable coincidence evolved in our discussion. Wood received his BS and MA from Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff. As a graduate student, Wood and a colleague, David Koerner, researched low-mass stars and brown dwarfs at Lowell Observatory. Wood explained, "The idea was that widely separated [low mass] binary systems would appear to have a common proper motion, so with sufficient time between observations, we could identify candidate systems. Since few low-mass stars had distances known via parallax at that time, we could potentially learn a lot about the nearby stellar neighborhood." * Historically, Lowell was the first US observatory site tested before its founder, Percival Lowell, commissioned Alvan Clark and Sons to construct a 24-inch aperture refractor in 1895. It was here that Lowell and others popularized canals and life on Mars. Clyde Tombaugh discovered the planet Pluto, now a dwarf planet, at Lowell in 1930, while the work of Vesto M. Slipher (1912-14) found the universe to be expanding. * Somehow, our conversation shifted to eclipses because it had been virtually a year since the April 8, US eclipse had transpired. Wood's two young twins prevented him from seeing it, but the chat continued something like this: Becker: Did you see the 2017 August 21 total solar eclipse?
Wood: Yeah, I did.
Becker: Where?
Wood: Wyoming... I had just completed my PhD at Auburn (Alabama) University when I received the opportunity to view it.
Becker: Where in Wyoming?
Wood: Eastern…
Becker: Me too! I volunteered with a friend, Pete Detterline, in Guernsey State Park for the Wyoming Park Service. We were up by the yurts.
Wood: Me too!
Becker: This is crazy. Were you in the yurt section of the park with the University of Hawaii group, which was right next to my group, with telescopes and cameras in a large tent-like enclosure?
Wood: That was us!
Becker: Unbelievable… We were probably no more than 250 feet apart from each other for three or four days. I probably walked right past you numerous times because I was curious about what your group was doing.
Wood's doctoral work involved a better understanding of identifying turbulence in the Earth's magnetosphere with the eventual ability to predict when a geomagnetic storm might disrupt communications and power grids and require protective protocols to be taken by satellite operations to avoid damage. Wood was not even slated to be with the University of Hawaii party except for another series of extraordinary circumstances that involved several peer recommendations that propelled him to the forefront after another individual was unable to commit to the Hawaiian group. * This type of serendipitous meeting is the fourth time in my life that the entanglements of my existence have led to these extraordinary encounters. The most complex series of circumstances was how I met my wife. Ad Astra!

Keith Wood, working with the University of Hawaii's eclipse team was less than 100 yeads from where I observed the August 21, 2017 total solar eclipse from Guernsey State Park in Guernsey, Wyoming. This picture was taken on the morning of the eclipse. Gary A. Becker image...

1496 APRIL 20, 2025:

1497 APRIL 27, 2025: