Friday, May 1, 2020

The Ellensburg, WA Sky for the week of May 2, 2020

Saturday:  The CWU campus is closed. But astronomy learning lives on! The Physics Department and the College of the Sciences is hosting a First Saturday VIRTUAL planetarium show today from noon to 1:00 p.m. CWU professor Bruce Palmquist will give a tour of interesting objects to observe with binoculars using the browser-based Worldwide Telescope program found at http://worldwidetelescope.org/webclient/. There will be a virtual planetarium show on the first Saturday of every month for the rest of the school year. Stay at home, practice good physical distancing, and  visit https://cwu.zoom.us/s/94923725113 using the password 092888 to participate in the Virtual tour.

Sunday: The Eta Aquarid meteor shower peaks just before dawn on May 5. But since the Moon will be close to full then and since this meteor shower has a fairly broad peak range, you should start looking before dawn this morning. Meteor showers are named after the constellation from which the meteors appear to originate. The meteors appear to come from a point in the constellation Aquarius near the star Eta. This point is about one fist held upright and at arm’s length above the east horizon at 4:00 a.m. The Eta Aquarid meteors slam into the Earth at about 40 miles per second. They often leave a long trail. The Eta Aquarid meteors are small rocks that have broken off Halley’s Comet. For more information about the Eta Aquarids, go to http://earthsky.org/?p=158833

Monday: Mother’s Day is about a week away. What are you going to get her? Get her a Gem(ma). The star Gemma, also known as Alphekka, is the brightest star in the constellation Corona Borealis, the Northern Crown. Gemma, Latin for jewel, is the central gemstone for the crown. It is four fists above due east at 10:00 p.m.

Tuesday: Read carefully now. The daytime is bright and the nighttime is dark. Place the Earth and its atmosphere in fairly close orbit around any star and the daytime rule would still apply. But put the Earth and its atmosphere in orbit around a star at the center of a globular cluster and the night sky would never be dark. Astronomers estimate that the sky would be 10 to 20 times brighter than Earth’s sky when our Moon is full. One of the brightest globular clusters, M3, is seven fists above due south at 11:30 p.m. It is nearly one and a half fists to the upper right of the bright orangeish star Arcturus. It will look like a fuzzy patch in your binoculars. For a hypothetical view of what the night sky would look like at the center of this or a similar globular cluster, go to https://tinyurl.com/yyp88w7x.

Wednesday: Tonight’s Full Moon completes a three month cycle of Supermoons. Each of these Full Moons correspond to perigee, the smallest Earth-Moon distance, meaning the Moon appears extra large in the sky. Read all about Supermoon-mania at https://earthsky.org/human-world/what-is-a-supermoon?. 

Thursday: At 4:30 a.m., bright Jupiter is two fists above the south-southeastern horizon. Saturn is a half a fist to the left of Jupiter. If you want a binocular or small telescope challenge, look for M 75. It is a globular cluster of about 100,000 stars just below the midpoint of a line connecting Jupiter and Saturn. Much easier to spot will be Mars, a fist and a half above the southeastern horizon.

Friday: This weekend, celebrate Mother’s Day with the big mom of the sky, Virgo. Ancient Greeks and Romans associated this portion of the sky with their own goddess of the harvest, either Demeter (Greeks) or Ceres (Roman). Demeter was the mother of Persephone and Ceres was the mother of Proserpina. According to myth, each of these daughters was abducted causing their mothers great grief. The first star in Virgo rises in the afternoon. Spica, the bright bluish star in the constellation rises at 7:00 p.m. and is three fists above the south-southeastern horizon at 10:00 p.m.

The positional information in this column about stars and planets is typically accurate for the entire week. For up to date information about the night sky, go to https://nightsky.jpl.nasa.gov/planner.cfm

No comments: