New

Last Saturday night's star party and Star-B-Q at Alpha Ridge park was great! The clouds and thunderstorms that everyone was worried about before sunset all stayed to the south of us, and we had clear (if typically hazy) skies for most of the night. I never got to look through a scope, but I hear observing conditions were about average for an AR summer time star party. I think we had about 20+ cars, and there must have been 6-10 scopes setup. Did anyone get pictures?

I'm also afraid I missed most of the Star-B-Q activities, though I did have a chance to say a few words about our Radio Jove activities to the attendees, who seemed pretty interested and asked great questions.

For me, at least, the big highlight of the evening was observing Jupiter's radio emissions with the Radio Jove antenna and receiver kit. This was "second light" for the kit; we came out to AR last Friday to work to try things out and work out the bugs, and our experiences there paid off. It was relatively easy to setup the antenna, and we managed to get it hooked up correctly this time, and the software worked, and we could hear the signal on speakers, and Everything! :-)

So what did we see/hear? I put together a quick little page with some of the screenshots from the Radio SkyPipe software that is used to capture the data. You can view the page here: http://www.howardastro.org/radiojove/secondlight.html

The page is a little bare now, but I'll flesh it out a little more as I get time and the week progresses. I've also posted this link to the RadioJove mailing list, asking for their feedback on whether the signals we see in these traces are actually Jupiter emissions. I think they are, since the timestamps match pretty well with activity reported by other observers.

For anyone who's interested, there are supposed to be some good Jupiter noise storms this coming Friday (August 1st) and Saturday (August 2nd - my Birthday!) night, so if the weather cooperates, I plan on going out to Alpha Ridge to setup and observe them. The RadioJove antenna cannot be setup by one person (there are four 20 foot PVC antenna masts supported by three guy wires), but we figured out that two people can comfortably set up and take down the antenna.

Until then, clear skies,
Chris Todd