Today's rain doesn't appear to be letting up tonight for our monthly sidewalk astronomy in Old town Pasadena, and the forecast for Saturday night has worsened. We'll make that call tomorrow, but I wouldn't plan an excursion for cloudy night moon and planet viewing. We'll post an announcement if we're going our tomorrow night. Leaning towards weathered out conditins/cancellation. So it's a weekend for armchair astronomy! Mojo and I have made weekend treks to two dark sky locations on the two past weekends. Mojo brings our Astro-Physics Traveler - a spectacular small telescope well suited to astrophotography out to the desert when we can get away, and are not doing National Park public viewing (which is most of the time). Read his last two weekend stories, and gaze at his pretty images here: http://mojo.whiteoaks.com/ I picked a few interesting visual targets to write about, and I hauled my huge 17.5 inch reflector out to the desert the last two weekends. I selected a few targets that NASA telescopes or astronomers have also studied to look at. http://jane.whiteoaks.com/ My monthly What's Up video is all about the upcoming Nov 25 launch of the Mars Science Laboratory, also known as the Curiosity rover, plus something about planetary magnetospheres. Here's the JPL Youtube link http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=JPLnews#grid/uploads There's also a good short video about the science planned for Tuesday's close flyby of Asteroid YU55 on that Youtube page, right above my video. Nasa will use Earth as a spacecraft to image this asteroid as it whizzes by, and will use the huge radio antennae out in the Mojave Desert at Goldstone to measure this thing. Usually we have to fly "to" the object to study it. This time the object comes "to" us - close enough to Earth to use our ground based telescopes, but far enough away not to worry about it any danger. Amateur astronomers wonder if YU55 can be seen in backyard telescopes. If your backyard is really dark, and you know exactly where to look, and you have charts to show where it will be, you might see it, and those lucky observers will see it move in the eyepiece view. This writer/amateur astronomer from Duluth MN has some excellent charts and a good explanation. http://astrobob.areavoices.com/2011/11/02/users-guide-to-monday-nights-aster... Jane (and the Old Town Sidewalk Astronomers) -- Jane Houston Jones Monrovia, CA What's Up Podcast-November 2011 Mars launch, Planetary magnetospheres NASA podcast: http://is.gd/bSXeAl Youtube site: http://is.gd/kPUtSx Twitter: http://twitter.com/jhjones /CassiniSaturn /otastro My Blog: http://jane.whiteoaks.com/