Category: Environment & Weather

In the latest move, New York City’s Rockefeller Center Christmas tree, illuminated last night, shines not with old-style incandescent bulbs but with 30,000 electricity-sipping light-emitting diodes, or L.E.D.’s, powered in part with solar panels. (And the tree was even cut with a hand saw, the city says.)

Dot Earth

And you, what type of lights are you putting up this year? A 100-light string of multi-colored LED bulbs uses just 8 watts, compared to 36 watts for mini lamps and 500 for incandescent Christmas lights (C-7 bulbs).

We’re now beginning several very special months for seeing Mars. This planet appears bright in our sky only about every two years, and that best time to see Mars is here. Mars is bright now, and it’ll be even brighter by December. That’s when Earth – in its smaller, faster orbit – will be quickly gaining on the red planet in the race of the planets around the sun.

In just a few more weeks – December 18, to be exact – Earth will swing closest to Mars for this two-year period. Mars, in turn, will shine at its brightest in our sky. In fact, December will bring Earth’s closest encounter with Mars, and Mars’ brightest appearance in our sky, until the year 2016.

Earth & Sky

Right now Mars rises in the east 2-3 hours after sunset and, of course, will be on the western horizon near dawn.

Wild bears so habituated to the presence of people that the biologists who have come here to study them say they’ve never seen anything like it — bears that lift the door handles of trucks to take possession of the cabs; bears that manage to snag the bait from a trap with one foot while holding the steel gate open with the other; bears that stroll munificently through the crowds at the Canada Day parade; bears in the pubs, the hotels, the day-care centers, the landfills, meat lockers, grease vents, underground parking garages. In Whistler, if a bear doesn’t get into something humans are guarding, it’s usually because too many other bears got there first.

The New York Times Magazine writes about The Bears Among Us. Another excerpt:

Bear managers and park wardens have tried aversive conditioning before: in Banff, for instance, they used to drive up to bears eating roadside vegetation and blast them with water cannons. But as St. Clair points out, that kind of hazing not only violates several principles of animal learning theory (among them, that punishment should be immediate, consistent and not signaled in advance); all it ultimately teaches a bear is that, through a series of our bylaws, the only humans who will hurt it are humans in uniforms arriving in trucks between the hours of 9 and 5.

As NewMexiKen has written before, bears are so intelligent that in another generation or two they’ll be ordering food over the internet.

Click image for larger version and to learn more.

The Pleiades cluster is visible in the evening sky to the east this month. Check the Pleiades out now while the moon is still in the first quarter (rising early and not so bright).

This is the Pleiades star cluster, also called the Seven Sisters, though most people can only see six stars with the eye alone. These six little stars form a dipper pattern that distinguishes the Pleiades from any other stars. The pattern is more dipper-like than the actual Little Dipper asterism in the northern sky.
. . .

November is sometimes said to be the month of the Pleiades, because that’s when this beautiful cluster shines from dusk until dawn. That’s because the Pleiades stand opposite the sun each year in November.

Earth & Sky

As always, click image for larger version and to learn more.

Today only half the water of the Niagara River passes over Niagara Falls. And at night it’s just one-quarter. The water is diverted to produce hydro-electric power.

So, when we go to Niagara Falls we see only half what our ancestors could have seen. Bummer.

You can find Comet Holmes by using the “W” of Cassiopeia as your guide [map].  The five stars in a conspicuous zigzag pattern are high in the northeast sky during the mid-evening hours.

Draw an imaginary line from the star Gamma Cass down to Delta Cass (known also as Ruchbah).  Extend the line downward about five times the distance between these two stars and you’ll come very close to where Comet Holmes is. The comet itself forms a triangle with Alpha Persei (known also as “Mirfak”) and Delta Persei. 

If you have binoculars, you’ll know the comet immediately when you see it: a small, albeit distinct, circular lemon-yellow cloud of light. A small telescope will help bring out the fuzzy details.

The moon, which was full on Oct. 26 and whose brilliant light hindered comet viewing to a degree, is now diminishing in phase and rising later in the night, allowing viewers an increasing window of dark sky before the moon interferes. 

SPACE.com

NewMexiKen continues to feed the professional birds that flock to my backyard, keeping watch from the computer desk. A few different species have shown up as the weather has cooled.

By the way, if you’re interested in partridge or squab as a variation for this year’s Thanksgiving — just two-and-a-half weeks from now! — let me know. I could be your supplier.

Click image for larger version and to learn more.

It’s very bright. Look for it east of the north star.

Click image to learn why tonight’s is the biggest full moon of the year.

Click image for larger version and to learn more.

As a two-time resident of California (two years in the Bay Area, 10 years in Orange County), NewMexiKen is familiar with its cycles of rain, mudslides, brush growth, fire, erosion. The worst of these is always fire. I’m certain whatever news source you follow will provide you with a surfeit of video and pointless interviews. I just thought this photo taken in Irvine in Orange County was striking. Click for larger version.

The photo is from the Los Angeles Times, which has many.

Update: I thought this announcement from the San Diego Wild Animal Park was interesting.

No Atlantic hurricanes and it’s two-thirds through October!

Just as I’ve thought all along, this global warming nonsense is just a Democratic hoax.

At the age of eighty-eight, after four children and a long and respected career as one of the twentieth century’s most influential scientists, James Lovelock has come to an unsettling conclusion: The human race is doomed. “I wish I could be more hopeful,” he tells me one sunny morning as we walk through a park in Oslo, where he is giving a talk at a university. Lovelock is a small man, unfailingly polite, with white hair and round, owlish glasses. His step is jaunty, his mind lively, his manner anything but gloomy. In fact, the coming of the Four Horsemen — war, famine, pestilence and death — seems to perk him up. “It will be a dark time,” Lovelock admits. “But for those who survive, I suspect it will be rather exciting.”

In Lovelock’s view, the scale of the catastrophe that awaits us will soon become obvious. By 2020, droughts and other extreme weather will be commonplace. By 2040, the Sahara will be moving into Europe, and Berlin will be as hot as Baghdad. Atlanta will end up a kudzu jungle. Phoenix will become uninhabitable, as will parts of Beijing (desert), Miami (rising seas) and London (floods). Food shortages will drive millions of people north, raising political tensions. “The Chinese have nowhere to go but up into Siberia,” Lovelock says. “How will the Russians feel about that? I fear that war between Russia and China is probably inevitable.” With hardship and mass migrations will come epidemics, which are likely to kill millions. By 2100, Lovelock believes, the Earth’s population will be culled from today’s 6.6 billion to as few as 500 million, with most of the survivors living in the far latitudes — Canada, Iceland, Scandinavia, the Arctic Basin.

That’s the first two paragraphs of “The Prophet of Climate Change: James Lovelock” in the new issue of Rolling Stone.

Moral of the story: The planet will recover. Civilization won’t.

But on the good side, Phoenix is already uninhabitable, so no change there.

USGS map of real-time streamflow compared to historical streamflow for the day of the year. More interesting than it sounds — check out the drought in the southeast.

Link via jfleck at inkstain.

This is a very poor photo I’m sorry to say; I’ll have to work on my wildlife photo taking skills. It was taken from my computer desk through a window because its subjects fly away at the least movement and sound (the velcro on the camera case, for instance).

Anyway, it’s a sample of what the bird seed has brought me. Click the photo, of course, for the larger version. Note the “lookouts” on the corners.

Autumn began in the northern hemisphere at 3:15 am Mountain Daylight Time.

This evening, just as the sun sets, take note of its direction in relation to neighborhood landmarks — trees, other houses, water towers, what have you. Write it down, make a diagram, or take a photo. Share the moment with your kids.

Then compare it with the solstice in three months. Pretend you lived in a simpler time when people found entertainment in noticing their sky.

It felt like fall for real here in Albuquerque last evening at the end of a spectacularly beautiful day.

If you’d like to synchronize your calendars, the equinox is Sunday the 23rd at 9:51 Universal Time. That’s the fall equinox in the northern hemisphere; spring in the southern.

Subtract 4 hours for Eastern Daylight Time, 5 for Central, 6 for Mountain and 7 for Pacific.

Or, in other words, fall begins at 3:51 a.m. Mountain Daylight Time on Sunday.

Satellite photo showing the open passage.

Link via kottke.

Click the image for larger version and to learn more.