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Chalk Art 2024

Twenty screevers gathered in Northampton last Friday for the town’s 14th annual Chalk Art Festival. Click the Halloween cat above (by Gabriela Sepulveda Ortiz) to see the artists at work and their finished creations.

Comet Tsuchinshan–ATLAS

I caught a brief glimpse of comet Tsuchinshan–ATLAS (pronounced "Choo-cheen-SHAHN") setting between trees on Saturday, but it was overcast all day Sunday and Monday. However, by Monday evening the clouds blew away and I got a great view of the comet from up the hill at Valley View Farm. The photo above is from Tuesday night, the comet setting among greenish streaks of airglow. Click the picture for more shots. The comet's long tail can be seen with the naked eye, though not as spectacularly as in photos. Tsuchinshan will be visible all this week and beyond, getting fainter but rising up higher in the sky. Just look to the west as it gets dark after sunset. You don't need a telescope, but binoculars will help you see the comet more clearly.

Juvenile Hooded Mergansers

Out on a walk, I spotted a Great Egret in the river below the Brassworks dam. I hurried home and returned with a camera, but alas the egret was gone. I looked for it in the pond above the dam and noticed two ducks that didn't seem to be the usual (Common) Mergansers or Mallards. As I photographed them, I realized they were probably young Hooded Mergansers, judging by the early bulges on the back of their heads. Back home, an internet search confirmed this. These two may well be offspring from the two adult Hooded Mergansers I photographed in the same place back in February (see below). Click the picture above for more shots.

Comet Pons-Brooks

Comet 12P/Pons-Brooks and (on the right) M33, the Triangulum Galaxy, from March 21. Through binoculars, the comet was a barely-visible fuzzy blob; the photo above, with 27 minutes of exposure time, reveals a lot more than the eye could see. Pons-Brooks will be in the sky for a couple of months to come but will be invisible from North America, setting before it gets dark, after mid-April. It's expected to reach peak brightness around April 21 and will be closest to the Earth on June 2, but visible then only from the Southern hemisphere. Click the picture above to see more portraits of this celestial visitor.

Pons-Brooks, which comes around every 71 years, is named after the two most prolific comet-hunters of the 1800s, Jean-Louis Pons and William Robert Brooks, who independently spotted the comet on successive visitations in 1812 and 1883. Once its orbit was calculated, it was recognized as an unnamed comet that had also been observed in the 1300s and 1400s.

The arrangement of objects painted on the sky here gives little hint of the depth involved. Pons-Brooks was 150 million miles away when this picture was taken, 50% farther away than the Sun. It takes light 13 minutes to travel this distance, so the comet was 13 light-minutes away—which, in more familiar terms, is 0.000026 light years. The bright star on the left, 91 Piscium, is 350 light years away, and faint stars in the photo might be a few thousand light years away. M33, in contrast, is 2.7 million light years away. Pons-Brooks is pretty far away in this picture, but M33 is 100 billion times farther away than the comet. It's kind of like the galaxy is the Moon, the stars are bugs on your windshield . . . and the comet is a smear on your contact lens.

Hooded Mergansers

The Mill River regularly hosts loads of Common Mergansers, but every once in a while I'll spot a pair of Hooded Mergansers on the water. The Common variety have gotten used to me photographing them, but Hooded Mergansers are a lot more skittish. Usually I can get only one or two shots before they take off, fleeing the obnoxious paparazzo. This week, though, I managed to photograph a Hooded couple at length in the Mill Pond above the Brassworks dam. Click the picture above for more photos.

For reference, here's what female and male Common Mergansers look like:

Chalk Art 2023

Oh boy, another bumper crop of sidewalk art: 26 entries in the 13th annual Chalk Art Festival in Northampton. (Dodging rain by being postponed a month, the 13th festival found perfect weather for outdoor art on a Friday the 13th!) Click the picture above to see the artists at work and their final creations.