Saturday: An
astronomy version of The Music Man might go something like this: “Oh, we got
trouble, in the river constellation. With a capital “T” and that rhymes with
“B”, and that stands for bright.” And bright does NOT describe the river
constellation called Eridanus, at least as seen from the northern United
States. Eridanus is a river of dim stars that winds beneath the feet of Orion
and off to the lower right. Orion is four fists held upright and at arm’s
length above the south-southwest horizon at 8 p.m.
Sunday:
It’s getting dark. The last remnant of twilight has disappeared. Suddenly, you
notice a large softly radiant pyramid of light in the western sky. The base of
this ghostly triangle is along the west horizon and the peak stretches two or
three fists above the horizon. It is not really a ghost. It is an effect called
the zodiacal light. This light comes from sunlight reflecting off dust grains
in our solar system. The effect is the most visible when the band of
constellations called the zodiac makes a steep angle with the horizon. You need
a clear dark sky with no haze or light pollution to see the zodiacal light. At
its brightest, the zodiacal light rivals the light of the central Milky Way.
Look for the ghostly patch after twilight for the next few weeks.
Monday: Tonight’s
full moon is in the constellation Sextans the sextant. Sextans is a faint
constellation below Leo the lion. Its most noticeable feature is a triangle
just to the right of the moon at 10 p.m. Sextans is one of seven constellations
proposed by Polish astronomer Johannes Hevelius in the 1600s. He used a sextant
to measure star positions and decided to honor the tool with a constellation.
Tuesday: Avast
ye matey. Swab the poop deck. Pirates love astronomy. In fact, the term “poop”
in poop deck comes from the French word for stern (poupe) which comes for the
Latin word Puppis. Puppis is a constellation that represents the raised stern
deck of Argo Navis, the ship used by Jason and the Argonauts in Greek mythology.
Argo Nevis was an ancient constellation that is now divided between the
constellations Puppis, Vela and Carina. The top of Puppis is about a fist and a
half to the left of the bright star Sirius in the south-southwest sky at 10
p.m. Zeta Puppis, the hottest, and thus the bluest, naked eye star in the sky
at 40,000 degrees Celsius is near the uppermost point in Puppis.
Wednesday:
If the National Enquirer was around in Galileo’s day, it may have featured the
headline: “Saturn has love handles; Opis leaves him for a much thinner Mars”.
When Galileo first observed Saturn through a telescope, he reported objects
that looked like bulges on either side of Saturn’s midsection. He was actually
seeing Saturn’s rings through less than ideal optics. Look one fist above the
east-southeast horizon at midnight to see Saturn.
Thursday: By
now you have probably heard or read about the meteor that exploded over Russia
on February 15. If not, you no longer have to pour over dozens of articles.
Just go to Wikipedia like thousands of students do every day: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_Russian_meteor_event.
Friday: The
space shuttles have been retired. But that does not mean NASA is not thinking
about the future of space flight. Here is a small NASA poster summarizing the
future of American Human spaceflight: http://goo.gl/D8KWj. While
NASA is not planning on sending people to Jupiter, you may visit it with your
eyes, five and a half fists above the southwest horizon at 8 p.m.
The
positional information in this column about stars and planets is typically
accurate for the entire week.
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