Saturday: The
Southern Delta Aquarid meteor shower peaks tonight and early tomorrow morning. Meteor
showers are named after the constellation from which the meteors appear to
originate. “Hi de hi de hi de hi”, these meteors appear to come from a point in
Aquarius near the star Delta Aquarii, also known as Skat. Ho de ho de ho de ho,
this point is about one and a half fists held upright and at arm’s length above
the southeast horizon at 1 am tomorrow morning. (The singer Cab Calloway must
have had an interest in this star.) You can follow this point throughout the
night as it will remain a fist above Fomalhaut, the brightest star in that
section of the sky. The best
time to view the shower is after midnight between moonset and dawn.
Sunday: School
has been out for over a month so it is time to start reviewing your geometric
shapes. Let’s start with the right triangle that is a fist above the
west-southwest horizon at 10 p.m. The bluish star Spica is at the right angle,
in the lower left corner of the triangle. Saturn is a half a fist above Spica
and Mars a fist to the right of Spica.
Monday: Jupiter,
the bright star Aldebaran, the Hyades open star cluster, Venus, and a small
special guest are low in the eastern morning sky this week. At 5 am, Venus, the
brightest point of light in the sky, is two fists above the east horizon. Jupiter
is about a fist and a half to the upper right of Venus. The Hyades open star
cluster makes a small rightward-facing V to the lower right of Jupiter. The
bright star Aldebaran is at the lowest point of the V although it is not
actually a part of the Hyades cluster.
Tuesday: Most
stars are so far away that they look like points of light, even through a
telescope. But in 2006, Altair, one of our nearest neighbor stars, became the
first main sequence to have a picture taken of its surface features. You can’t
see those features with the naked eye. But you can see Altair nearly five fists
above the southeast horizon at 11 p.m.
Wednesday:
In Scotland, August 1 was known as Lammas, the festival of the first wheat
harvest of the year. You can remember this by looking at Spica, named after the
Latin word for “ear of wheat”, one fist held upright and at arm’s length above
the west-southwest horizon at 9:30 p.m. August 1 is known as a cross-quarter
day, a day approximately half way between an equinox and a solstice.
Thursday: Have
you ever built a house? You probably had some material left over. If scientists
studied that material, they could learn a lot about how your house was
constructed, the origin of your house. In fact, studying the building scraps
would probably teach them more about the origin of your house than if they
studied your house in its current state. After all, your house has been
repainted and remodeled. Asteroids are the leftover material from the origin of
our Solar System. Scientists study them to learn more about how the Solar
System was formed. For the past year, the NASA probe called Dawn has been
gathering data from Vesta, one of the largest asteroids in the main asteroid
belt between Mars and Jupiter. For more information about Dawn, go to http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov/. For
visual confirmation of Vesta, go outside at 4:30 am and look at the Hyades
cluster through your binoculars. Vesta will be one of the dimmest points of
light in the middle of the V, just above Theta 1 and Theta 2 Tauri, two stars
of similar brightness lined up nearly one on top of the other in the bottom leg
of the V.
Friday: Since
you got up early yesterday to look for Vesta, you might as well get up early
today to see one of the most recognizable constellations rise. Orion, with its
3-star belt and bright red shoulder star Betelgeuse, peeks up above the eastern
horizon at 5 am. In fact, Betelgeuse is exactly one fist above due east at 5
a.m.
The
positional information in this column about stars and planets is typically
accurate for the entire week.
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