Well, sort of.  I got out briefly tonight with my wife's Canon 12x36 IS binoculars (that's Image Stabilized).  The position of Lulin is easy enough to find with Saturn less that 6º away and two reasonably bright star nearby to help zero in on its location - Leo 59 at mag 5 and Leo X-63A at mag 4.6.  Leo 59 is only half a degree away.

Yet another study has found a connection between cancer and night-time lighting.  Last time it was breast cancer, this time is it prostate cancer.  In Darkness, Melatonin may Suppress Breast and Prostate Cancers, Science News reports on another study that shows a link between burning the midnight oil and human health.

For his science fair project, Jonathan investigated pendulums.  His hypothesis was that how fast the pendulum swings, its period, should depend on how heavy it was.  So I arranged to have 1-inch diameter pendulum bobs made of copper, steel, and wood.  We suspended each from a horizontal beam, carefully measured so they were all the same length, then swung them back in synch.

A few months ago, I read an article in The Physics Teacher (published by the American Association of Physics Teachers) on measuring the speed of sound using a couple of microphones hooked up to a computer's line-in jack.  Apart from having to make a trip to Radio Shack to buy some parts to convert two standard unpowered microphones into a pair of powered microphones for stereo input, the process was amazingly straightforward.  I did a quick proof-of-concept in the dining room one evening and go

I just read this in Astronomy Beat #15, a publication of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific,

The Globe-at-Night program is an annual program where you (yes, you) can help by providing data on the visibility of stars in the night sky. Your role as an amateur scientist is to make some observations (details on their web site), record the results, and submit them to the Globe-at-Night program. Your observations, along with those of thousands of others around the planet, will be combined to provide information on the impact of night-time lighting on the sky.