Saturday: CWU encourages physical distancing. But astronomy learning lives on! The Physics Department and STEM Teaching Program is hosting a First Saturday VIRTUAL planetarium show today from noon to 1:00 p.m. CWU STEM Teaching planetarium interns Grace Warren and Kendra Gardner will be presenting their project called Kepler Space Program: Mission to Mars, a multi-media astronomy lesson. In addition, they will also present a mission-simulation curriculum that Kendra and others developed last summer. Finally, CWU physics professor Bruce Palmquist will give a general overview of Mars and the May sky. There is a virtual planetarium show on the first Saturday of nearly every month of the school year. Register at http://tiny.cc/oohwtz.
Sunday: The Eta Aquarid meteor shower peaks just before dawn on May 5. Since this meteor shower has a fairly broad peak range, you should start looking before dawn this morning. Light from the last quarter to waning crescent Moon phase will obscure some of the dimmer meteors. 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: 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 six and a half fists above due southeast at 10:45 p.m. It is a little more than one fist above 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.
Tuesday: Mother’s Day is this Sunday. 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 the eastern horizon at 10:00 p.m.
Wednesday: Mars is three and a half fists above due west at 9:00 p.m. For more of a challenge, look for Mercury a little less than a fist above the west-northwestern and Venus just above the west-northwestern horizon.
Thursday: At 5:00 a.m., Jupiter is about one and a half fists above the southeast horizon. Saturn is one and a half fists to the upper right of Jupiter. You’ll need binoculars for any chance to see Neptune, less than a fist to the upper left of the crescent Moon. First get the Moon in the lower right portion of your binocular field of view. Then move the binoculars up and to the left until you see a sideways “L” made up of three stars of similar brightness. Neptune is just to the left of that “L”.
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.
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