Hume Cronyn Memorial Observatory

As many of you have heard by now, Jupiter and Saturn have been converging in the skies, and will appear very close to each other today -- the closest in fact since 1623! They are close enough that you can see them together in the same field of view with binoculars and telescopes. Under normal circumstances, we would open up the Observatory for a public event, but unfortunately, the Covid-19 situation does not allow that at this point. To see it for yourself, you need clear s...kies and a good clear horizon to the southwest. While the weather forecast does not look promising, the key to success is to be prepared and keep watching the skies for clear patches. Also note that today is the closest the two planets will be at, but they will remain fairly close in the sky for another few days. Follow the link below for all the information you need to see this event, including a link to a live broadcast if you like. https://earthsky.org//great-jupiter-saturn-conjunction-dec Yesterday, a somewhat unexpected clear patch appeared in the skies around 4:30pm, and we rushed to the Observatory to see if we would be lucky enough to see both planets. We caught them for a few minutes shortly after sunset, and Henry Leparskas managed to snap this shot through our 10 inch refractor. The faint dots next to Jupiter are some of its largest moons. Unfortunately, after enjoying this spectacle for a few minutes, clouds rolled in again and ended the show.... today doesn't look good weather wise, but tomorrow there may be clear patches coming in. Keep watching those, and be ready to go out when they do arrive! If you have binoculars, use them to see the moons of Jupiter and the rings of Saturn! Good luck & clear skies!

Join us tonight for our Virtual Public Night from 8:00 pm - 9:30 pm. The theme for today is "Celestial Meeting of the Gas Giants". We will have live feeds from telescopes (weather permitting), short talks, demonstrations, and more! The weather forecast indicates clear skies for tonight. Event is free! To register for the Zoom webinar, visit: https://westernuniversity.zoom.us//WN_wNxoCviAQceytIWjLsex . Or to join the Facebook live event, Like and Follow us on our Facebook page.

Join us live tonight from the Cronyn Observatory in London, Ontario, Canada.

Don't miss our virtual public night tonight 8:00pm--9:30pm, the theme is 'Mars Opposition: The Red Planet at its Closest Approach' with live streams from telescopes (weather permitting) and short presentations about our Observatory and about astronomical topics. Astronomers will be online to answer all your questions about space! The event is free. To join the webinar on Zoom, you need to register Register in advance for the event at the link: https://westernuniversity.zoom.u...s//WN_PAHAswFxSa6zTV0HHOju You can also join the live streaming of the event here on Facebook, but you need to Like and Follow us on our Facebook, and wait for us to go live at 8 PM. The schedule for the event is as follows: 8:00 PM :: Welcome + Quick Tour of Cronyn 8:05 PM :: Cronyn 10-inch Telescope Talk 8:10 PM :: Live Feed from Cronyn 10-inch Telescope (weather permitting) 8:20 PM :: Historical displays of the Observatory 8:25 PM :: Transit Demonstration: How do we discover planets and moons in other solar systems? 8:30 PM :: Short Talk on Mars: The Geologically Rich Red Planet + Questions 8:45 PM :: Live Feed from SkyThrall Observatory (weather permitting) 8:55 PM :: Astronomical Research Stories 9:05 PM :: News Bursts 9:10 PM :: Historical displays of the Observatory (revisit) 9:15 PM :: Spectroscopy Demonstration: How does light split in different colours? 9:20 PM :: Live Feed from Cronyn 10-inch Telescope (weather permitting)

Earlier this week, Mars was only 62 million kilometers away -- the closest to the Earth the planet will be until 2035. That's what makes it so bright -- as you can see for yourself if you look to the East shortly after sunset, or more to the South later in the evening. The bright orange star, that's Mars! Because it's so close, it also shows up nice and big in our telescopes. On Monday, we took advantage of the clear skies and our newly installed camera to shoot some video of the planet through our 12 inch telescope. Of a video clip containing 71,000 images, we used the best 5,000 images to create this image shown on the left. It compares well to the 2020 MarsMapper view on the right that shows a map with the main surface features labeled. Great views from our historic observatory! Photo credit: Henry Leparskas.

We also used the same technique, but this time with a feed from the 12 inch reflector -- a slightly larger aperture typically allows one to see some more details on planetary surfaces. This was a 4 minute exposure of Mars, resulting in 36,264 individual images. Of those, we kept 1813 (5%) and combined them into this final image. Footage, processing and final image by Henry Leparskas.

Thanks to all of you who attended our virtual public night yesterday. We showed you live views of the planets taken with a camera (it's a Mallincam) through one of our telescopes. Those views are great, but they become even better with some processing as follows. First, your record the video feed into a movie clip for a few minutes. Then, you look at all the many thousands of individual images that make up the video, and you throw out the ones that look even a bit fuzzy. In f...act, you throw out most of the images like that. With those 5% of the best images, you now make sure they are all aligned, and then you combine those images -- and that brings out a lot of the details on the planets that are hard to see in the live view. Fortunately, we don't have to do this by hand, there is computer software that does much of the processing for us. Here are some examples: Jupiter, Saturn, and Mars, all observed through Cronyn's historic 10 inch refractor. For Jupiter, we recorded about 40 seconds worth of video, but combined only 13% of the individual images (still 748 images) to create the final image shown here. For Saturn, we used 16% of the footage (still 1339 images were combined) and for Mars, we used 6% (representing 2382 images). All footage, processing and final images produced by Henry Leparskas. See more