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The International Space Station in our Sky

Three nights ago (2009 May 11), I decided to go out to experience a lovely spring night. The stars were out and I could recognize the constellations - Gemini, Leo (with Saturn), Ursa Major and the Big Dipper. I then saw a point of light as bright as Jupiter move steadily across the sky from west to east. Its speed and brightness were steady, and I did not see any other lights near it, which would identify it as an airplane. I watched it cross the southern sky and disappear in the east. The Hubble-saving Shuttle had just launched, and I wonder if it was that. I went back inside and went to Heavens Above, at www.heavens-above.com . (You must use a hyphen. If you use any other punctuation, a space, or nothing, you get a nuisance site of some sort instead.) I found that it was the International Space Station. It is the first time I walked outside without knowing about the next ISS pass and found the station in the sky.

The Nests of Spring

It is spring. Birds are mating and they are coming and going. About a month ago, the dark-eyed juncos (snowbirds) left. The white-throated sparrows (chipmunk birds) actually increased in number, then at the beginning of May, they also disappeared, although I keep seeing singleton stragglers. The yellow-rumped warblers and ruby-crowned kingbirds are also gone.

Other birds have come in from the south. The catbirds are here. They are all over the place. Starlings and cowbirds maraud our lawn. Brown thrashers come by our feeders and stand up high in trees singing their doublet songs. An indigo bunting showed up briefly in our yard. The most prominent summer birds in our lawn are a pair of great crested flycatchers which have set up a nest in our martin house. I put out the hummingbird feeder, and in a few days, a hummingbird appeared. He now is a regular visitor.

I still have yet to see grackles, but I suppose sooner or later they will come.

The Great Backyard Bird Count

Every year at this time comes the Great Backyard Bird Count (GBBC). For four days in February, birders are called upon to go to all sorts of locations and observe the birds. Count them for each day and then submit them to a site http://www.birdsource.org/gbbc/ , with the web site implying that all birds come from it. So I decided to observe and count the birds at my house.

In doing so I have found some unusual things this year. A brown thrasher has shown up at our feeder area, and I thought it did not come until later in the spring. For the first time in years, a mockingbird has shown up at our feeder. We get a few of them here but I have not recorded any at our feeder for the past couple of years. The most unusual birds this year are a song sparrow, which does not normally show up at our feeder, a yellow-rumped warbler, and most of all, a ruby-crowned kinglet. I thought the kinglet at first was a goldfinch, but then when it produced red on its forehead, I looked at the bird books again. We also saw three bluebirds at once.

I have been recording the numbers of the birds, using GBBC rules. Here is a table showing the top ten birds at my house:

SPECIES	AVERAGE
Dark-eyed Junco	6.0
White-Throated Sparrow	3.5
Mourning Dove	3.0
Carolina Chickadee	1.6
Tufted Titmouse	1.3
Northern Cardinal	1.3
American Robin	1.1
Nuthatch	1.1
Blue Jay	1.0
European Starling	1.0

This differs from the GBBC list in that there are fewer cardinals at my house and perhaps more mourning doves. I think over a year that the mourning doves will top the list. Juncos and White-Throated Sparrows are higher but they are winter birds here in Virginia; they vanish in the summer.

So now I have done my part in helping us determine which bird species are common and which are rare.

They Finally Named Santa

Well it looks like there will be no Santa this Christmas. Children will still get their gifts, but the Kuiper Belt Object that up to now has been called Santa has just received a permanent name.

The object is 2003 EL₆₁, discovered in 2005 along with Eris and Makemake, which was officially named a few months ago. It took nearly three years to name Santa, and the International Astronomical Union (IAU) finally did so on 2008 September 22 or so. They named it Haumea, a Hawaiian goddess of childbirth and of stone. I had heard it was going to be named after a Hawaiian creation god. So I figured it was going to be named Kane, a Hawaiian god of creation. Childbirth can be thought of as a creation, so "Haumea" still fits the pattern. Haumea has two satellites, and I thought they were going to be named Hi'iaka and Pele.

The object is weirdly shaped, like an American football with rounded corners, because of its rapid rotational spin of 4 hours. It has two small satellites, which were named Hi'iaka and Namaka, so I got one of them right. Haumea is 50 astronomical units (AU) away, and gets as close as 35 AU at times. It takes 285 years to revolve around the Sun. It is thought to consist mostly of rock, with a thick ice crust.

The IAU also said that it was a plutoid. I do not like the concept of plutoid, because the name is biased to one particular instance of the concept. Similar terminologies would call globular clusters such as M13, M92, and Omega Centauri galaxioids, and stars such as Vega and Arcturus sunoids. Further, it is inconsistent. Ceres is a plutoid, but Orcus is not; it is almost as large, and neither are Sedna, Quaoar, Ixion, or Varuna. In my opinion all of these should be called plutoids if Ceres is one. But I think the whole concept should be dropped altogether.

Makemake

I see now that astronomers have named 2005 FY₉, temporarily known as the Easterbunny, since it was discovered shortly after Easter in 2005, after 3 years without an official name. They have named it Makemake. No, that is not a makefile in Unix that creates makefiles. That is mock kay mock kay. It is the Rapanui deity god of creation, and Rapa Nui is Easter Island, so the name still relates to Easter. Cool. The name is also good because it is a reminder of what we could all become if we keep producing human beings and consuming resources. Makemake is a large Kuiper Belt object discovered at about the same time as Eris, the larges of the objects. I still don't like the name "plutoid" to describe Makemake, Eris, and Pluto. Why not call Antares and Regulus sunoids?

They still have not named 2003 EL₆₁ yet. It has the temporary name of Santa, as it was discovered near Christmas day. In an earlier post I note that they are going to name it after a Hawaiian creation god. To me this gives it the name of Kane (pronounced con-neigh, not like the Citizen), as Kane was the Hawaiian creation god. Its two satellites then are Pele and Hiiaka. They should hurry up and name it. It has been 5 years now. In an earlier post, I named the object Kane, and I will still call it Kane.

Plutoid?

Now I hear the International Astronomical Union (IAU) has come up with a name for objects like Pluto and Eris that are much bigger than Mars-Jupiter asteroids but not large enough to call planets. If they are in the Kuiper Belt, then they will be called "plutoids". Plutoids??? They tried "pluton" earlier, but that makes it sound like an elementary particle, and it is the word for Pluto in some languages, including Spanish. So that fizzled.

Now I know that the small objects mostly between Mars and Jupiter were called "asteroids"; or "aster" meaning star and "oid", means like but not quite. The name implies that they are some kind of near star, however, like a brown dwarf. Since they are a near planet instead, they are also called planetoids. And while writing this, with brown dwarfs, plutoids, and KBOs, I began to think that this is getting curiouser and curiouser, like Alice going down the Rabbit Black Hole and finding all these strange creatures running around.

But can we apply this type of terminology all over the place? A while ago, asteroids in video games were called "roids", taking just the last symbol. That name can also apply to planetoids, steroids, and a number of other oids; it is quite ambiguous. So I should think that astronomers should get out of the oid game, instead of calling big KBOs "plutoids". What's next? Are other stars in the universe going to be called "sunoids"?

I think the IAU would be better off finding names for Easterbunny (2005 FY₉) and Santa (2003 EL₆₁), two objects that have been discovered years ago but not received any official name. It's been three years now. I read that both need to be named after creation deities, and that Santa was going to be named after a Hawaiian one. So I looked up Hawaiian creation myths and found that Kane created the world, according to Hawaiian legend. That's pronounced Con-Neigh and has nothing to do with the Citizen by that name. I've waited long enough. I am going to call Santa from now on Kane, and its two moons Pele and Hiiaka. If more time passes, I am also going to give Easterbunny a name.

Nuthatchlings

We have a birdhouse in our back yard that we bought from Ukrops a number of years ago. I put it up in our back yard before the spring of 2006. Since then a different species of bird has made that house its nest and has raised baby birds in it. In 2006 it was chickadees, and in 2007 it was titmice (or titmouses? - the bird does not seem to have anything to do with the small mammal).

This year, in 2008, it is nuthatches. I have seen nuthatches go in and out from that house, so I felt there were nuthatchlings in that box. I went out there today and took a picture. Sure enough, there were nuthatchlings there - six of them. They are almost fully grown, so any day now I can expect to see about half a dozen nuthatches in our back yard. Here they are: .

What will it be next year? I originally bought it advertised as a bluebird house, but bluebirds have rejected it.