Jupiter and its moon Io as seen by the Cassini spacecraft. Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

All summer long, the planetary activity has been focused on the western sky just after sunset. Even now, Venus is still beaming brightly in the twilight glow, with Saturn sinking nearby and Mars and Spica moving in for a close encounter over the next week. But those of you who have good views to the east may have noticed a new point of light dominating the sky opposite Venus. Jupiter, the King of the Planets, has returned to the evening.

During September, Jupiter will reach its peak of brightness at magnitude -2.94. The planet becomes this bright as it reaches opposition (opposite the sun in our sky) and nears as close to us as it will for the next 12 years, at 368 million miles from Earth.

With binoculars or a telescope, you can spot the four largest moons that orbit Jupiter and the Great Red Spot. As a bonus, Uranus is less than two degrees from Jupiter all September, coming within 0.8 degrees on September 18. Read The Night Sky for September 2010 for more precise information on how to spot Uranus.

September also brings the first day of fall on the 22nd at 8:09 p.m. PDT, followed by the Full Harvest Moon a few hours later at 2:17 a.m. PDT on September 23. As the daylight hours shrink and the evening lengthens, the night sky will reassert itself into the lives of those of us in the Northern Hemisphere and the sparkling stars will shine us home from work.

+ + + + + + + + + +

It’s been a great summer outside. Like most people who visit this blog, I’ve been going hiking, backpacking, and generally getting outside as much as I can. And after so many great trips that have recharged and inspired me, I’m excited to give back a little.



This upcoming September 11th is a National Day of Service, and the Sierra Club is joining with groups across the country to give back. I’m taking part and I hope you will too.

The Club’s Serve Outdoors initiative makes it easy for you to find events or host your own. Just visit the website and see what’s happening near you. In Oakland, California, there’s going to be a trail work at Joaquin Miller Park. In Hartford, Connecticut, a group will be cleaning up a local river. And in Austin, Texas, there’s an underwater cleanup at Lake Travis.

If you don’t see an event in your area, this is a great time to sign up to host your own. What better time than early September to get outside and give back?

And if you can’t make it on September 11th, be sure to add your name to the list of year-round volunteers on the site. Show your support for the National Day of Service and let us all know how you give back on a regular basis.

The unpredictable sea worked on me, too, while I was up in Boston. I had a plan to paint postcards, pastels, landscapes, but it drifted away under the influence of the crab claw.

You can see my first claw over to the far right. When I start a drawing, I often go too fast. As I turned the tiny claw in my fingers, I realized the exoskeleton was made of triangles and trapezoids coming together at acute angles. For my second drawing, I forced myself to slow down and record these odd shapes. These angles made the claw (and the legs) fun and creepy to draw; aren't crabs the spiders of the sea?

I was using my 9 x 12 inch sketchbook and decided to fill the page with drawings. In the lower left, you can see a granite cliff and house facing southeast over the Atlantic Ocean. I was drawing from the "beach" of granite cobbles at the foot of the cliff, trying to stay out of reach of the 58 degree sea. I finished the cliffs and found an entire crab washed up at my feet, claws intact. I drew it three times, and the lowest crab drawing on the page was the first I drew: a pure contour drawing. I painted the second one, but the third is my favorite. In very few lines, it caught the exact angle of the crab's shell as it rested on the rocks, a minimalist crab drawing.

I still had room on the page, so I added the view of Tinker's Island at the very top of the sheet. The fog was coming in. I tucked in the cloudy blue headland under the legs of the crab and called it a day.

If you like looking at sketchbooks about the sea, the Peabody Essex Museum has a lovely collection of sailors' sketchbooks dating from the mid-1700s to early 1900s. If you are in Salem, Massachusetts, you can stop in and see them, but for those of you a bit further away, here is the link to the exhibit and to one of the sketchbooks.

+ + + + + + + + + +

Sue Fierston paints and teaches just outside of Washington, D.C. in the Chesapeake Bay watershed. As a painter, she works in acrylics and watercolor and is in the middle of a series called "100 Flowers." As a teaching artist, she works with teachers to bring art into their classrooms in grades 4-8. Her posts focus on her nature-themed art collaborations. For a look at her paintings or more about her teaching, check out her website at suzannefierston.com.

The Milky Way above the Chilean desert with the two brightest stars in the sky, Sirius and Canopus. Credit: ESO, Y. Beletsky

Stargazing doesn’t always have to have an agenda. Sure, there are a lot of great targets up every night, whether they are planets, galaxies, nebulae, globular clusters, or more, but sometimes it’s nice to just look up at the sky and see what grabs your attention.

I’ve been out doing some “all-sky” gazing this month, first looking for the northern lights (didn’t see them) and then watching for Perseid meteors (they were incredible!). As I first stepped outside and let my eyes get accustomed to the dark, I scanned the sky from horizon to horizon, north to south and east to west, just noticing the variety above me.

Light pollution is always one of the first things I notice. The subtle and not-so-subtle gradations of light and dark indicate what lies in that direction. When I look east, the entire horizon is washed out with the creamy glow of the major metropolitan area nearby. The other directions of sky by my house are less light-polluted, except to the northwest where lights from a community baseball field blaze upward in streaks.

I also have a couple, much closer, sources of light pollution, namely my neighbors’ lights. Like many Americans, I live in the suburbs in a subdivision where we are all required to have matching light posts in our front lawn. Fortunately, our homeowners’ association only requires the lamppost, but does not specify anywhere that it be lit. While every other house on my street has their lamppost lit from sunset till dawn, I had mine set on a light switch instead of a timer, and the only time it is on is if we are expecting company.

Once I get over moaning about all the sources of light pollution around me, I start to notice the stars themselves. And summer time is the best time to lie back on a deck chair or on the trampoline in the backyard and stare up at the Milky Way. Overhead where the sky is darkest, the Milky Way shows up the best, which is currently the area of sky that runs through the Summer Triangle. I try to trace the Milky Way from one end to the other, but it generally gets lost as I look near the horizons.

We watch to see which stars seem to twinkle the most at us and which stars mark their individuality by displaying more colorful hues. The Big Dipper this month is standing prominently in the northwest, its seven bright stars defying you to find any other starry shape in this area. If the full moon is up, as it will be on August 24, it always gets a look, even if it does tamper with our night vision and wash out the stars around it. Some sources of light “pollution” I’m more accepting of than others.

+ + + + + + + + + +

Mind set free in the Dharma-realm,
I sit at the moon-filled window
Watching the mountains with my ears,
Hearing the stream with open eyes.
Each molecule preaches perfect law,
Each moment chants true sutra:
The most fleeting thought is timeless,
A single hair’s enough to stir the sea.

-- SHUTAKU

From The Penguin Book of Zen Poetry, Poems of the Japanese Zen Masters

Up in the John Muir Wilderness—at 12,000 feet. With nothing to do but rest my aching legs and watch a hailstorm roll in over the glacier divide.

I missed my last blog post and took this picture. Sat in the tent and read the one dog-eared book that made the weight cut for my pack.

Luckily, having little to say back at sea level, it would miss the point to say anything else about this poem. Next week, Haiku.

++++++++++

J Gould has been exploring wild places and writing about them since age 6. He was one of the first "beach-watchers" and newsletter editors for NOAA out at Point Reyes National Seashore. He reads sporadically across the spectrum of poetry and poetics, without any discernible pattern, and toils in virtual anonymity as a poet with annual chapbooks and publications in obscure journals -- the first being Toyon at Humboldt State, where he taught and earned an MA in English. Friend J Gould here, and join the Poetry and Nature group to meet others who share your interest.

The Sun "merges" with Sirius at the height of summer heat. Credit: Yawer/Stock Xchng

The first half of 2010 has been the hottest on record, with places such as Russia sweating through their hottest summer ever and even normally sultry places such as Pakistan reaching new all-time highs. The peak of the year’s heat should now be upon us as we are in the dog days of summer.

The nickname of "the dog days of summer" comes from the brightest star in the sky, Sirius. The name Sirius comes from an ancient Greek word that means “scorching”. Sirius is in the constellation Canis Major, or the Great Dog, thus bringing in the canine theme.

For those of you familiar with which stars are visible during different parts of the year, you'll know that Sirius is considered a winter star. The ancients believed that when Sirius disappeared in the summer as it approached too close to the sun’s glow, some of its heat added to the sun's heat to produce the sweltering conditions of mid-summer. By mid-September, Sirius will begin to reemerge in the morning sky in the east, and with any luck some of the deadly summer heat will have begun to abate.

If the brightest star in the sky is not visible in the summer, what is the brightest summer star? The second and third brightest stars in the sky are visible to southern hemisphere observers, so the fourth brightest star, Arcturus, could be considered the brightest summer star. It can be found in the west after sunset using the guide of the Big Dipper’s handle - arc to Arcturus. But a summer star even more popular than Arcturus is the fifth brightest star in the heavens - Vega. Vega is nearly overhead throughout the summer and is a member of the Summer Triangle.

+ + + + + + + + + +

The aurora will become more active over the coming years. Credit: Dave Dyet

Hope for clear skies for the next several days, because a three ring circus is at play overhead. Planetary conjunctions, a meteor shower, and the possibility of the northern lights will keep us all gazing skyward.

The planets begin the show this weekend, with a trio of lights in the west just after sunset. Venus, Mars, and Saturn are only five degrees apart on August 7 and 8. Venus is the brightest point of light, closest to the horizon; above Venus is Mars to the left and Saturn to the right.

The new moon on August 9 means that the first sighting of the young crescent moon on the evening of August 10 marks the beginning of Ramadan. The new moon also means that the meteor shower three days later will occur under dark skies.

On August 12, the crescent moon shines beside the cluster of planets near the horizon. A few hours later, the sky will darken completely and the constellation Perseus will rise in the northeast, setting the stage for the best meteor shower of the summer. Away from light pollution, up to 80 meteors an hour can be seen at peak.

Last weekend a coronal mass ejection burst from the sun and headed straight toward Earth. The solar plasma lit our skies on August 3 and 4, creating beautiful aurorae for northern regions. Where I live, the aurora was surging overhead at sunset, when it was still too bright out to see. By the time the skies darkened, the aurora had eased up and retreated too far north. Because we are heading into solar maximum, the more active sun will produce earth-directed bursts and give us more opportunities to see the aurora over the coming years.

+ + + + + + + + + +

This is a postcard of Children's Island, an island a mile out in Marblehead harbor. In the early 1900s, the island was used as a summer hospital for children with tuberculosis. Doctors hoped that the brisk sea air would restore the kids to health. Now it is a day camp for the YMCA, and kids get there by ferry. Here you are looking out at the island from Marblehead's lighthouse:

To prepare for this trip, I cut smooth, hard-press watercolor paper into 4 x 6 inch rectangles. Last year, I ended up keeping a sketchbook of these postcards and I stored them in a berry box from the farmers' market. If you would like to paint on homemade postcards, choose paper at least 90 lbs. in weight (it will be labeled at the store or on the cover of the pad) because lighter paper will buckle when you moisten it with paint.

I also packed a 1" flat paintbrush and a #8 round. I took along a mechanical pencil and a pencil made of water-soluble graphite -- the pencil marks dissolve into paint if you brush them with water. Finally, I tucked in two folding things: a tiny three-legged folding stool and my watercolor palette. I paint some postcards and just draw on others. I send some of them back home to friends; it still amazes me, but the post office takes homemade postcards with just a stamp.

I drew this from the deck of the Childrens' Island ferry looking back at Marblehead.

+ + + + + + + + + +

Sue Fierston paints and teaches just outside of Washington, D.C. in the Chesapeake Bay watershed. As a painter, she works in acrylics and watercolor and is in the middle of a series called "100 Flowers." As a teaching artist, she works with teachers to bring art into their classrooms in grades 4-8. Her posts focus on her nature-themed art collaborations. For a look at her paintings or more about her teaching, check out her website at suzannefierston.com.

In 1907, President Teddy Roosevelt boldly said, "The conservation of our natural resources and their proper use constitute the fundamental problem which underlies almost every other problem of our national life." When he proceeded to create the national park system, the U. S. seemed set on a new path toward real conservation. Well, as we all know, progress on that path since then has been uneven at best.

Have you heard of the America's Great Outdoors Initiative? Despite being reasonably well tapped into conservation-oriented news outlets, I hadn't.

As someone who cares deeply about such things as air and water pollution, environmental justice, the intertwined fates of the environment and territorial conflicts, wolf killing, and habitat destruction, I worry a great deal about the status quo. So in early July I was excited to receive an e-invitation to a listening session to be hosted by my institution (Occidental College, Los Angeles) and attended by Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson, and other high-level federal officials. The sessions are part of President Obama's America's Great Outdoors Initiative, by which he aims to create new policy with substantial on-the-ground impacts as profound as Teddy Roosevelt's were 100 years ago. On rolling out this ambitious initiative on April 16, 2010, Obama said, "Even in times of crisis, we're called to take the long view to preserve our national heritage -- because in doing so we fulfill one of the responsibilities that falls to all of us as Americans, and as inhabitants of this same small planet."

Have you heard of the America's Great Outdoors Initiative? Despite being reasonably well tapped into conservation-oriented news outlets, I hadn't. I'm not sure I would have, either, if I didn't happen to be a professor at an institution hosting a Listening Session. Chalk it up to the disastrous oil spill in the Gulf a few days after the announcement, the recession, two wars, or all of the above. For whatever reason, it seems to have quickly fallen off the national radar.

The good news is that President Obama (an alumnus of Occidental, by the way) took this bold move at a time when it would have been easier politically to backburner grand conservation plans. I attended the listening session, and the officials in attendance seemed quite serious about something coming of it. The bad news is that the public segments holding sway on the e-forum -- which, the plan goes, will inform policy -- are anything but "long view" environment-friendly.

This "Ideas" forum is a site where people can post ideas and others can vote to "Promote" or "Demote" them, yielding a positive or negative score that reflects net feedback. I posted what I thought was a modest idea, informed by emerging empirical research on various health, cognitive, and social benefits of the outdoors; it concerned collaboration among federal agencies (for instance, Interior with the National Institute of Mental Health and the Department of Education, etc.) and scholarly organizations (American Psychological Association, American Sociological Association, National Communication Association, etc.).

After a few early encouraging votes, my idea quickly fell into the red, with "Demotes" outnumbering "Promotes." No comments, just negative votes. I was prepared to take the plunge into the minus side personally until I checked out the "What's Hot" list along the right side of the Ideas page. That's when I realized that every "hot" idea running positive had to do with increasing off-road access in public lands, eliminating regulations, limiting wilderness designations, "wise use" -- you get the idea. Every idea running heavily in negative territory actually would serve to protect and/or foster appreciation for the environment. If federal officials really do use the voting on this public forum to make policy, the environment is in for a rough ride.

It doesn't have to be this way. There's still time to turn the tide. The truly bad ideas are only a few hundred votes ahead. From urban green spaces to peace parks to helping grass-roots groups be more effective, plenty of ideas worthy of Sierra Club members' support have been posted, and you can make a difference. Please visit the site, post an idea, and vote today!


Nancy K. Dess is a Professor of Psychology at Occidental College in Los Angeles.