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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.
The annual Quadrantid meteor shower peaked on the morning of January 4. The weather was clear and the Moon provided only moderate interference. I recorded 68 Quadrantid meteors on the allsky camera between sunset on January 3 and sunrise on January 4. A report is available here.
The annual Geminid meteor shower has peaked. The Moon produced heavy interference this year, and we had snow on the peak night. Nevertheless, I recorded 166 Geminid meteors on the allsky camera between December 12 and December 16. A report is available here.
There was a total lunar eclipse on 10 December. From central Colorado, the Moon was just entering totality at sunrise, providing an interesting photo opportunity. A report and some images are available here.
The annual Orionid meteor shower has peaked. Although the Moon produced some interference this year, it was still well worth observing. I recorded 292 Orionid meteors on the allsky camera between October 17 and October 25. The activity pattern was unusual this year, actually showing a drop on the morning of the predicted peak, and a steady increase after that. A report is available here.
On September 2 the Cloudbait allsky camera captured three sets of sprites. Sprites are poorly understood electrical atmospheric phenomena that occur very high (50-100 km) above thunderstorms, and which are triggered by lightning below. Images of the captured sprites can be seen here.
On the morning of March 18, 2007, 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 has been 1 fireball 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, 4 Feb 2012
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 mainly cosmetic purposes; if you have scripting disabled, you will find that most pages still work fine. 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, 7, and 8, Mozilla Firefox 3, Safari 3, Google Chrome 1, 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.
