Saturday, January 3 - Sunday, January 4, 2015 - Clouded out for the Quadrantid peak

 
  By midnight as Saturday the 3rd began, the peak of the Quadrantids was less than 24 hours away (since the IMO was predicting it for 9:00 PM EST January 3, or 2:00 UT January 4). As expected, conditions in my area made observing anything impossible. There was such a thick cloud overcast that not even the bright Waxing Gibbous Moon could be seen. By 1:00 AM light rain showers moved in, and rain and drizzle continued for the next few hours. Temperatures remained just above the freezing point, so by 4:00 AM I saw no sign of freezing rain, sleet, or snow. I also noticed that the National Weather Service had removed the Winter Weather Advisory from counties just to our north, though it remained in place for the northern third of Indiana.

  By sunrise (8:06 AM) we'd climbed to 35°F, and temperatures kept climbing all day long. At the same time, bands of rain kept moving through all during the daylight hours and winds were light to moderate. At sunset (5:32 PM) we'd reached an unreal 52°F. It was a gloomy, wet, and muddy day, but at least the air felt springlike! I should also mention that the Air Pressure fell from 30.18" near the start of the day to 29.73" by 5:00 PM as the center of this low pressure system passed, then started to recover a little after dark.

  After dark on the 3rd, the back edge of this big system with the cold front started to work its way into the area. The main line of rain had moved on, but smaller bands started to enter Indianapolis by midnight. Winds also started to pick up. At midnight we were back down to 44°F with a wind chill a few degrees colder.

  The best time for me to observe the short, sharp-peaking Quadrantid Meteor Shower would have been from midnight to dawn on Sunday the 4th. The display would have been winding down by that time, but I'm sure I still could have seen several. But the weather just didn't cooperate at all. For hours after midnight we had periods of light rain and drizzle along with mist and fog, then maybe some broken clouds around 4:00 AM - 5:00 AM, but definitely overcast skies from dawn through sunrise (at 8:06 AM again). Winds became strong and gusty. By sunrise we'd dropped to 34°F but wind chills were in the low 20's°F range. The Pressure fell back to 29.73" between 3:00 AM - 5:00 AM before starting to rise again.

  After daybreak on Sunday, things didn't improve much. The sky stayed gloomy and overcast and we had some brief periods of light drizzle and light rain. Winds remained strong and gusty. By 10:00 AM we'd dropped to the freezing point, and by Noon we were down to 31°F with a wind chill of 20°F. By 1:00 PM a mix of rain, sleet, and snow pellets starting falling; the gusty winds made the ice bits "ping" against the windows. As the afternoon went on this changed to bigger flakes of snow whipped by the wind, and it fell hard enough to whiten the grass. This was the first real coating of snow I'd seen in over 2 weeks, and it was also the first measurable snow of 2015.

  Sunset on Sunday was at 5:33 PM. By dusk it was still windy with light snow falling. Roads were starting to get slick with ice patches here and there. The snow tapered off later in the evening, but it remained overcast, windy, and cold through midnight. By midnight it was 12°F with the wind out of the west at 18 mph giving us a wind chill of -5°F. (Wind gusts at midnight were still as high as 29 mph!)

  Full Moon occurred at 11:53 PM EST on Sunday the 4th (4:53 UT January 5). There may have been a few fast-moving "holes" in the overcast by midnight, but it was too cloudy to even get a decent naked-eye look at the Moon.

  And that was how this year's Quadrantid Meteor Shower went for me this year. As I've written, it would have been a difficult shower to observe anyway because of bright moonlight interference, but in the end it didn't matter since the big weather system interfered anyway! The next major annual meteor shower was over three months away; so this part of my amateur astronomy hobby was over for a while!

Catch-Up Notes - PM Sunday, December 28, 2014 - Binocular Observation of Comet Lovejoy C/2014 Q2

 
  I'd been reading about Comet Lovejoy C/2014 Q2 online since at least November 2014. This was the fifth discovery of Australian amateur Terry Lovejoy, who had found it in August in the southern constellation Puppis on wide-field images that he'd taken with an 8" telescope. At the time of discovery, the comet was at a faint 15th magnitude. However, it was expected to become a fine binocular object (and perhaps a faint naked eye object) by the end of December throughout January, and possibly beyond, as it slowly crossed into northern skies. I downloaded a couple of finder charts for it from the Sky and Telescope magazine website in early December, and thought I might be able to spot it in southern skies below Orion by Christmastime.

  My first chance to see it, with clear evening skies, and the comet placed high enough above the southern horizon, was on Sunday evening December 28th. Sunset that day took place at 5:27 PM (we'd already gained 11 minutes of daylight since the earliest sunsets that ended on December 13th). Sunrise the next day would occur at 8:05 AM (it would happen at 8:06 AM from December 31st - January 9th). The Moon was just about four hours past First Quarter at sunset, in central Pisces. (First Quarter Moon had occurred at 1:31 PM EST that afternoon.)

  During the day on Sunday, I wasn't really expecting to get a look at Comet Lovejoy or anything else. All day long we'd had a layer of thick clouds in place, left over after light rain and drizzle before dawn. We'd spent the daylight hours a few degrees below the freezing point with wind chills in the low 20's°F range. By sunset we were at 29°F and there was still no sign of clearing skies.

  By 9:00 PM (2:00 UT Dec. 29) the NWS Website was reporting broken clouds and even mostly clear skies, but every time I looked outside all I saw was the just-past-First Quarter Moon shining through a thick veil of clouds. By that time we were down to 25°F with almost no wind chill. However, when I looked outside at 10:30 PM (3:30 UT Dec. 29) I saw that the sky had cleared out a lot, with a few stray clouds that seemed to be scudding off to the south.

  By 11:00 PM (4:00 UT Dec. 29) I put on my old tennis shoes and my winter coat, and put the 16x50 binoculars around my neck. I walked out past the back yard and through the gate to the easement by Feather Run, to get a good view of the southern sky. The ground was still a little muddy but the grass in the easement, which was all bent over into piles and frost-covered, crunched under my shoes. There was still a lot of moonlight around from the Moon, which was still fairly high up in the West-Southwest.

  I was sure of the position of the comet from the charts I'd downloaded, in Lepus. I'd had some careful looks at them before going outside. I used the Moon to focus the binoculars carefully. I also got a few good looks at M-42 (the Great Orion Nebula) before lowering the binoculars to the south.

  Comet Lovejoy C/2014 Q2 was easy to find using the 16x50 binoculars! It was clearly a smudge of light; a glow maybe 10' in diameter, just a degree or so east of the 5th magnitude star HIP 25045. It was also very close to the globular cluster M-79, though I can't write for sure that I was able to spot this Messier object. After taking a lot of long looks at this comet, I went back inside the house. I printed out a chart from my Starry Nights planetarium program on the computer and drew the rough appearance and location of the comet on it. This is it below:

    Through the predawn hours it remained mostly clear outside with just a few high clouds here and there. I thought about staying up to do some meteor observing, but we were still pretty far from the peak of the Quadrantid Meteor Shower and I just wasn't prepared to sit out and freeze with little chance of reward. By 3:00 AM it was 22°F with a wind chill of 15°F. I hoped for clearer and at least slightly milder nights soon.