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Welcome to Cloudbait Observatory, located under the dark skies of the central Colorado Rocky Mountains.
Here
you will find details about the observatory
itself, its history (and my own as an amateur
astronomer), the science I conduct here, and
a collection of images I've made. Details of
the instrumentation I use
and some of the tricks I've developed to make it work well are given.
I am very interested in instrumentation, and much of what I design is freely available to anyone interested. Details about some of these projects are posted on this site.
I also enjoy both history and travel, and seek out places of special astronomical significance. The section on archaeoastronomy details some of the places I've been, and the historical astronomical sites I've explored.
A bright fireball was recorded near Montrose, Colorado, on April 24. Only one witness report has been received, but it was caught on two cameras. If you saw this fireball please let me know. A preliminary report is available here.
There was a bright fireball over southwest Colorado on March 20. So far it was only caught on one camera that I'm aware of, but combined with witness reports it is possible to estimate its location. If you saw this fireball please let me know. A preliminary report is available here.
The world experienced a total lunar eclipse on February 20. Although the weather in Colorado made this event somewhat less impressive than the eclipse last August, it was still very pretty, and happened comfortably early in the evening, beginning at sunset. More information.
The peak of the annual Quadrantid meteor shower occurred on the evening of January 3/4. The Cloudbait camera caught 46 Quadrantids and 22 sporadics that evening. Images and videos are available here.
The annual Geminid shower has just passed. Conditions were poor for recording meteors, with winter storms and ice buildup on the cameras. I recorded 65 Geminids over three nights, which is less than I've had in previous years. Images and videos are available here.
Comet 17P/Holmes remains visible all night. The comet increased in brightness a million times over just a few hours on October 24. This comet is currently well outside the orbit of Mars, and is a naked eye object in the constellation of Perseus, although as it grows larger and dimmer it is best seen in binoculars. See my page about this curious object.
On September 1 the annual Aurigid meteor shower displayed a rare burst of activity. Read my report, with several fireball videos and frequency and radiant calculations.
On the morning of March 18, Pluto passed in front of a dim star, casting the shadow of the planet across North America. Examine the data collected from Cloudbait.
Looking for Colorado meteors? Check the new online
database of events recorded by the allsky camera network since late
2001.
There have been 2 fireballs recorded in the last seven days:
Meteor and fireball activity is high during the second half of the year. See how activity changes over the year.
If you live in Colorado or the surrounding states, and have recently seen a very bright meteor, please report it here. We continue to investigate bright fireballs, and now have an extensive network of allsky cameras in place to supplement witness reports. If you just witnessed a meteor and are curious if it was recorded from central Colorado, try the new real-time meteor log which lists all events captured by the Cloudbait camera as they occur. These events are normally processed into the main database each morning.
Read my discussion about an image by an Australian photographer purporting to show a meteorite impact.
Today's Sun and Moon, 9 May 2008
My first priority in designing these pages has been the conveyance of the information they contain. I don't use unnecessary extensions that might limit certain browsers. There is a tiny bit of javascript that serves only cosmetic purposes; if you have scripting disabled it won't interfere with your visit here. As a matter of principle, you will find no Java on this site. The only use of Flash is for viewing some videos. I test all pages with the Windows versions of Internet Explorer 6, Mozilla Firefox 1.5, and Opera 9. If you are using another browser, and something looks wrong, I'd appreciate hearing about it.
The material here is necessarily graphics intensive, but I've done my best to optimize the images so that download times should be reasonable even with slow network connections.
I'm happy to respond to emails with questions or comments. To avoid your mail being misidentified as spam, please make sure it has a subject line and no html content. If you are an AOL customer, I may not be able to respond. AOL regularly blocks vast amounts of legitimate email, including mine. I can't determine why, because the organization foolishly blocks mail to its own postmaster! My best advice is to dump AOL and sign up with a real Internet provider. You won't regret it. If your email server implements SPF filtering, I may not be able to respond. SPF is a protocol designed to control spam, but it also blocks a lot of legitimate email. I would suggest you contact your ISP or mail administrator and have SPF disabled. In spite of its good intentions, it is a badly flawed system.
