B and B

Not too late to see Comet Holmes

It's not too late to see the freak Comet Holmes.  Although if you wait too much longer, it may be.  It has gotten so big and diffuse that, as bright as it is, it can be hard to see without binoculars -- especially when the moon is up (which will be less of a problem over the next few days).  But it is still visible from my only-moderately dark location.  And with binoculars, it is incredibly obvious.

For more info on this old comet that suddenly and unexpectedly "exploded" and became immensely brighter than usual, see this Sky and Telescope article from November 15.

Up in the sky -- a bright and unusual comet!

At a family reunion Saturday night outside of Bastrop, I took a break from the festivities to step outside and spend some time with our dog, Ginger, who unfortunately was not invited inside.

It was a clear night, and where we were, the skies were relatively free of light pollution, so my eyes naturally went up to the sky.  The most open view was towards the north, so I found myself staring at the familiar stars of the constellation Perseus.  I've been intimately familiar with the star patterns of the night sky since I was a little kid, so I quickly recognized what I was looking at.  For us northern hemisphere residents, Perseus is a dramatic constellation, in the plane of the Milky Way galaxy, and thus populated with numerous relatively bright stars. 

Something was bit amiss, that night, however.  Just outside of the familiar pattern was a bright fuzzy "star" that was not familiar to me.  It was just about as bright as the stars in the main constellation, so I was puzzled why I had not noticed it before.  I've not paid nearly as much attention to the night sky and other astronomical phenomena in recent years -- perhaps my memory was playing tricks on me?  Its distinct fuzziness also made me think my contacts were not focusing properly.  But other stars seemed fairly crisp, so that couldn't be the issue.   

Could this be one of Perseus' bright clusters, thus explaining its fuzziness?  If so, it was brighter than others that I remembered well, and I would be extremely embarrassed to forget about so bright a cluster.  I'm not that old yet.

I stared at the fuzzy unfamiliar "star" for several minutes, pluging the depths of my memory, but just could not dig up anything.  I then decided to retrieve my binoculars from the car.  That would settle once and for all the question of the stars' blurred appearance. 

Sure enough, in the binoculars, the fuzzy star appeared even fuzzier, even as the uncountable number of other stars appeared as sharp as ever.  Something was up.  I knew there was no cluster in this spot, certainly not one anywhere near this bright.  That would be one of the brightest clusters in the sky and would be impossible to forget.  By process of elimination, I determined that this had to be some sort of comet.

There was no hint of a tail, but that wasn't that unusual, in my experience -- comet tails can be much fainter than the head.  Quite an exciting find, given that I had no prior clue of its presence, thanks to my lack of attention to events in our neighborhood of the Solar System.

Sure enough, after we returned home to San Antonio, when I looked up 'comet' in Google News -- figuring that any comet as bright as the one I saw would be big news -- here is an example of what came up (from New Scientist):

Dazzling comet outburst continues to mystify

The comet that suddenly became about a million times brighter nearly two weeks ago continues to "shine" with abnormal luminosity, leaving observers puzzled over what caused the outburst and whether the comet will perform an encore in the coming months.

Comet 17P/Holmes is normally an invisible runt of a comet, about 3.3 kilometres across and about 25,000 times too faint to be seen with the naked eye.

But following its sudden brightening on 23 October, the comet's coma, a surrounding shell of gas and dust, has been expanding at a rate of about 0.5 kilometres per second, making the comet appear as a fuzzy "star" that can be seen with the naked eye in the constellation Perseus (see image at right and watch a video of dust streaming off the comet's icy body, or nucleus).

The comet was actually discovered during a similar, but less spectacular, brightening event in November 1892. It faded after a few weeks, only to dramatically brighten again in January 1893.

The comet orbits the Sun every seven years on a path that takes it from the distance of Jupiter's orbit to about twice that of Earth's. Interestingly, in both the 1892 event and the recent one, the comet initially brightened about five months after reaching perihelion – its closest approach to the Sun.

"It's curious that the outburst came in the same period of orbit," says Brian Marsden, former director of the Minor Planet Center at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Massachusetts, US. "It will be interesting to see if it behaves in the same general way [this time as before]."

The common timing of the two mega-outbursts following perihelion suggests that the intensity of the Sun's radiation is a key factor in the brightening. But that alone is not enough, as the comet reaches perihelion every seven years and hasn't produced such an outburst in 115 years. There are also plenty of comets that make closer approaches to the Sun than Comet 17P/Holmes without brightening nearly as much.

So go out on a clear night soon, look to the northeast and you, too, can see the new, and very unusual, comet.  It's the brightest one we've had since Hale-Bopp back in 1997, but very different.

UPDATE:  Predictably, Sky and Telescope has an excellent account of this comet and how to see it.

WildFest San Antonio: a brand new bird and nature festival coming in May

A bird and nature festival in San Antonio?  Sounds like a great idea to me, and it's just a few weeks away -- WildFest San Antonio.  From the Express-News:

The first-ever WildFest San Antonio is scheduled for May 4 to 6, and despite the name, it has nothing to do with mass quantities of beer and gorditas.

The region is blessed with an abundance of plant and animal life and geological wonders, and the three-day event is all about getting outdoors to explore them, said Dwight Henderson, chairman of the festival planning committee.

"We wish for people to discover the wild side of San Antonio," Henderson said at a news conference Monday at the San Antonio Botanical Garden.

WildFest planners have organized 74 events, including 57 field trips to parks, preserves and natural areas where festivalgoers can see the flora and fauna of desert scrub, caves, grasslands, canyons, wetlands and spring-fed rivers.

The festival already has a working web site, where the very full schedule of activities at nearly two dozen locations all over the area is posted.  It's quite an impressive array, with programs including "Birding Along the Medina River," "Butterflies and Dragonflies at Mitchell Lake," "Landscaping for Our Arid Climate," "Explore a Cave," "Stars over Texas," "Butterflies for Kids," "Friendly Bugs in Your Backard," "Biking the Mission Trail," "Reptiles in the Hill Country," "South Texas Turtles," "Nature and Wildlife Photography," and much more. 

It looks like a fabulous opportunity to learn about the natural world all around us.  I hope it becomes a San Antonio tradition.   

April in Texas: Wildflowers, snow, and ice

Yesterday was an odd day in central Texas.  Early April, spring well-underway, yet the mid-day temperature was in the 40s and, at times, it was actually snowing!  That would be unusual here even in the depths of winter.

With my parents visiting from Chicago, we had planned to take them on an excursion to the Fredericksburg area to witness the amazing wildflower display that we had seen a portion of last weekend.  Despite the cold and sleet more reminiscent of their home than ours, we went anyway, and were not disappointed.  Even more flowers had come out in the intervening week, and they did not appear troubled by the freakish weather.

Below are some pictures.  The last one may appear to be one of our ice storm pictures from January snuck into this post, but it was taken yesterday in Gillespie county along with all the others.

Disappearing bees exposes our ignorance

This sudden, mysterious disappearance of honeybees is an unnerving reminder that, despite all our scientific and technological know-how, we can still be vastly ignorant of how the world around us works.

From the Express-News today:

Beekeepers in 24 states have reported similar mysterious losses in a national affliction that could dramatically reduce fruit and vegetable crops and decimate honey production across the nation.

"This is what we lost last winter," Park said as he drove past stacks of empty brown pallets on his 25-acre ranch in Moore. "Each of these once held a hive. These should be 1,200 hives."

"The bees are not coming back to the hives," said Randy Johnson, a Paris-area beekeeper who also has lost half his hives. "They are just dwindling away to nothing. We don't know where they are at or what is happening to them."

Beekeepers don't even know how widespread the problem is. A hastily assembled coalition of scientists and industry representatives is scrambling now to gather basic information from a small industry of about 2,000 beekeepers around the U.S.

The coalition has given the syndrome a label — colony collapse disorder — but barely has begun to study what's wrong.

That we not only could not anticipate this, but have no idea why it is happening well into the phenomenon exposes our ignorance of so much of the vast complications of natural systems.  It is this ignorance that troubles me most about our species' impact on this planet. 

For instance, our knowledge is good enough to tell that we are messing with Earth's climate system in a way that will inevitably lead to significantly more heat being retained.  And we have good ideas of some general impacts, such as rising sea level, disrupted weather patterns, and more.  But we have little clue what the detailed impacts will be, and thus little ability to head off the worst effects by planning for them.

Apparently we humans have trouble even anticipating relatively simple, small-scale effects of our impact on the land.  Blasting and bulldozing vast amounts of land, piling the rotting remnants of the trees into huge piles on top of land that feeds a critical aquifer -- the Helotes mulch fire was an accident waiting to happen.  Yet we couldn't even prevent that.

We need to get smarter in a hurry.

Wildflowers!

This area of Texas finally dried out from our recent, and long awaited, soakings over the weekend.  And after taking a trip up north to Enchanted Rock State Park, I have to say that the rumors of an excellent wildflower season appear to be more than just rumors.  The bluebonnets, in particular, are already out in force.  Here is just one small scene from our Sunday outing.

Wildflower season is starting, after taking last year off

Will this be a good wildflower year in central Texas? 

"It is definitely looking promising," said Damon Waitt, senior botanist at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center in Austin. "I'd say that based on the numbers I'm seeing and condition of the plants, it should be a really good year.

"The wet January was good for them, and the recent rains and warm weather has kept them moving along nicely," Waitt said. "We've already got a pretty good bluebonnet display here at the center."

Though the season is expected to peak in the first half of April, a scenic drive any day will turn up bluebonnets, Indian paintbrushes, mountain laurel, redbud trees and several other early bloomers.

Last year's show, coming almost a year into a drought that only ended in recent weeks, was virtually non-existent, and the previous couple were modest.  But based on what I've seen so far, this indeed could shape up as an excellent year. 

Autumn in Texas

One square inch of quiet

Silence. I know I could use more of it. I know I'm not alone.

Despite that, true quiet is getting harder and harder to find, as John Balzar writes in the Los Angeles Times:

Quiet is going extinct.

These thoughts turn over in the mind as you explore one of these few quiet places left in North America [Hoh River, Olympic National Park, Washington], perhaps the quietest of them all. Your guide is a man who has given his career to listening and recording the pure sounds of nature — and searching for meaning in what they convey.

He has become one of the few Americans to raise his voice on behalf of the vanishing quiet.

Naturally, your purpose here is to inquire about the value of this timeless thing that is slipping away without … well, without alarm, without a sense of loss, without broad public discussion. But something else occurs along the way. When you enter the realm of quiet to ponder it, the quiet awakens in you a missing bond with the natural world. The quieter the surroundings, the more — and the better — you hear. The world around you expands into a three-dimensional place.

Listen.

No need to strain. Just listen.

That is the autumn sound of yellowed maple leaves falling from the tree and settling on the forest floor 50 feet away. It is a sound you've never consciously heard. More to the point, it is a sound you didn't know you could hear.

...

At last, at a place marked by a red stone and a spruce with a hollowed-out trunk big enough to walk through, [acoustic ecologist Gordon] Hempton turns left off the trail. He picks his way over downed trees, through a squishy salamander bog and up a bank to a glen of mighty conifers. He sits.

A glass candy jar, resting on moss under a log, is the only sign that humans have ever been here.

"Welcome to One Square Inch," says a label on the jar.

Hempton chose this place to make a stand.

If he can stir up a ruckus, maybe the right people will listen and the National Park Service will officially designate just one square inch of this park as a place of absolute quiet. One square inch of quiet, of course, means miles and miles of buffer — essentially securing the natural soundscape of the entire park.

A simple idea. Turn off the generators in those RVs, reroute the airline traffic going into Seattle, forbid private planes overhead, and plaster the visitor center with posters reaffirming the mission of our national parks: to preserve nature as it was, quiet included.

Read on and you find out that, by Gordon Hempton's definition, he has found only seven or eight quiet places remaining in the United States. None in Europe. As recently as twenty years ago, when he started his work, he was able to find a lot more such places.

What is Hempton's definition? "[W]here the sounds of nature are unbroken for intervals of at least 15 minutes during daylight hours." 15 minutes is the length of the 'sounds of nature' recordings that he makes.

Qutoed in an August Seattle Times article, Hempton says, "Whenever someone tells me they know a quiet place, I figure they have an undiagnosed hearing impairment, or they weren't really listening. Most people believe they know what natural quiet is, but they have not had the experience; it is not the same thing as sitting in an empty theater, a church, a library. We spend our lives in containers. Cars. Buildings. Planes. Natural quiet is in open, living space. It's alive."

As I walked through the natural, open, living setting of Government Canyon State Natural Area last weekend, just outside of San Antonio, the silence seemed deafening. Surely there must be more than a handful of quiet places left in the U.S., even by that definition!

Yet just as the impression of profound quiet hit my brain, the drone of an aircraft miles away pierced my ears.

But Government Canyon is so close to a major urban area. It's hardly surprising that it's not truly quiet, right? Certainly there are places out in west Texas, in those wide open, empty spaces, just an afternoon's drive from here, where it is still quiet. Certainly!

Certainly?