Comet 17P/Holmes

A normally inconspicuous short-period comet (it completes one orbit around the sun every 6.9 years) brightened amazingly over a few hours a couple days ago, going from magnitude 18 (visible only in very large amateur telescopes) to magnitude 2.8 (naked-eye visibility). After getting home this evening from a Yolo Audubon fundraising letter stuffing party (not to mention watching the ballgame), I had a look from out in the driveway. It was easy to spot in binoculars once I figured out I had to look up higher than I was, it appearing as a little round fuzzball against the star field in Perseus.
With the 7” telescope I could see a bright central spot in the middle of the circular fuzzball.

In mid-northern latitudes the comet is now visible in the northeast portion of the sky in the evening, around 35° high at 9 PM local time. There is a finder page linked from this page about the comet.

Alert To Campus Pigeons

One of my colleagues this afternoon came in the office and said he had just seen a female peregrine falcon flying overhead south of Wickson Hall where I work. He had never seen a peregrine before on campus. He later checked with Marcel upstairs who confirmed that the perry has been around campus for several weeks, and frequently roosts on top of one of the water towers on the south side of campus.

Butterfly Deity

Yesterday we went on a butterfly walk in the Arboretum led by the illustrious Art Shapiro. Professor Shapiro is a cult figure here; he is probably the best naturalist on campus, and traipses around his 11 butterfly study sites in central California every two weeks his only means of transport being graduate students who have been recruited as chauffeurs.

It was a gentle walk through the Arb and the family student housing garden plots to the southeast. He sees a tiny thing flitting at eight paces. “Acmon blue”. No binoculars, no net or anything. We also were introduced to the butterfly-lord technique of catching butterflies — hand goes slowly out, middle fingers scissored, and snag! — butterfly gets pinned between two fingers. My favorite butterfly learned on the walk — the pygmy blue, which is indeed tiny. And who knew that perennial pepperweed (Lepidium latifolium), which is a noxious invasive weed in California, is an excellent butterfly host and is in fact edible, in an arrugula sort of way.

White-crowns Return

Odd weather yesterday and today, the first rains of the season, with a thunderstorm late yesterday afternoon and a shower early in the morning here. The kitties were looking at something through the screen door to the back, and I heard a ‘slihp’ call note — it was the first white-crowned sparrow to return for the fall and winter here.

Turning Ecoblogging Into Data

Today was a good day for fall migrants. In the walnut tree north of the house we saw a couple of Wilson’s warblers and two Pacific-slope flycatchers.

This is the sort of natural history observation that is common for us ecobloggers to post about. My Spire project colleagues have just released a Firefox plugin called Spotter to help turn the observation into formally-described data. The plugin lets one quickly open up an observation form in Firefox. If you fill the form out, the data gets submitted to the Spire server and in return you get a link to the marked-up data together with a fun little spotted owl icon which you can put into your blog post (see below).

For more information about Spotter see this announcement, and the plugin may be downloaded from here.

Spotter is still a research prototype, and we would love to get feedback about how usable the tool is and how it may be improved. So if you are so inclined, give it a whirl!

Announcing The Semantic Naturalist

Pica is not the only one to start a new blog here. I have just launched a technical blog together with my colleagues at work on the Spire project entitled The Semantic Naturalist. It is subtitled “Musings on natural history, geography, and the semantic web”, and the idea is to explore developments in computer science that may lead to a more integrated Web for natural history information. (The introductory post is here.) Though the content is technical, I hope some of it will be of interest to Feathers of Hope readers as well.

Remembering Alex

By now it has been widely reported that Alex, the gifted African Grey parrot from whom we learned so much about avian cognition and communication, died suddenly a week ago at the age of 31. He was the friend and research subject of comparative psychologist Dr. Irene Pepperberg, who started working with him in 1977. Using a novel technique that emphasized social aspects of learning, Pepperberg was able to teach him categorization, shapes, colors, small numbers, the names of 50 different objects and express all this in English speech. One of my deep beliefs is that there is a great deal going on in the thoughts and feelings of our vertebrate friends; Alex was a fine teacher to all of us in that regard.

Paths Marked In Green

I rode into town via campus this afternoon, eventually headed to Community Park to see the San Francisco Mime Troupe perform here on their annual visit to Davis (especially noteworthy this time were the portrayals of Dick Cheney and Condelezza Rice), and saw markings on the campus paths that were definitely not here on Friday. A green stripe, the words “Davis Bike Loop”, and another green stripe. I didn’t follow them — I am too immersed in a book on Faerie to trust where such signposts might lead.

Rock-Flip Bust

A visit from Numenius’ sister and her boyfriend was wonderful — we unloaded about a kilo of beans, two butternut squashes, a slew of tomatoes, and untold herbs, not to mention what we fed them at lunch — and got in a showing of Ratatouille up in Woodland. None of which took us anywhere near a rock to turn over. Sorry Dave.

The evening was complicated by finding a black kitten under a car which refused, quite sensibly, to come out and wound itself around the wheel of a Mercedes. I’m going to try and trap it tomorrow — we don’t need any more cats in the Arboretum.

Eclipse

I need to find a good astronomical event RSS feed and stop relying upon my officemate to give me notice of such things — what if I were to miss an intragalactic supernova (the last such one was in 1604) or something like that? He did however let me know about yesterday morning’s total lunar eclipse, and thanks to Charlie-cat wanting his breakfast as usual at 3:10 in the morning, we were able to see it. Pica and I went out on the tarmac in front and had a brief gaze; I reminded her that the last lunar eclipse we saw was on October 27, 2004, the night the Red Sox won the World Series.

It looks like the next exciting astronomical event will be the Aurigid meteor shower, coming up on September 1st. This is predicted to be an especially strong outburst, due to the Earth passing right through the dust cloud of the long-period comet C/1911 N1 (Kiess). It is estimated that the peak of the shower will occur at 11:36 UTC plus or minus 20 minutes (this is 4:36 AM PDT).