Saturday: Jupiter
is three and a half fists held upright and at arm’s length above the west
horizon at 9 p.m.
Sunday: Next
Saturday, about 500 people will be in town to run a marathon. If you have not trained,
you’re not ready. Instead, satisfy that marathon craving by attending a virtual
Messier Marathon. Charles Messier (pronounced messy a) was an 18th century
French astronomer best known for his catalog of 110 nebulae and star clusters. Amateur
astronomers love to find as many of these as they can in one night. During the
online Messier Marathon, you’ll see the images broadcast on the Internet. The
fun starts at 11 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time when astronomers on the nighttime
side of Earth point their telescopes towards interesting celestial objects. For
more information, go to http://goo.gl/rDpyl.
Monday: After
a long journey through space, there is nothing will quench your thirst better
than a few drops of refreshing Mars water. Wait! Is this an April Fool’s Day
joke? No. In 2010, after analyzing photos taken by the Mars Phoenix Lander, a
group of astronomers discovered what they interpreted as drops of very salty
liquid water on one of the Lander’s legs. But we are not going to travel 18
months to Mars just to lick a few drops of water off a metal leg. We want waterfront property if we are
going all that way. The
high-resolution camera aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has taken images
of dark rivulets form, grow, and fade in the Martian southern hemisphere. Even though Mars is very cold, this
liquid could contain enough salt to lower its freezing point by more than 100
degrees Fahrenheit. Mars is too close to the Sun in the evening sky to be
visible. So you’ll have to be content reading about it at http://goo.gl/HEGxe.
Tuesday: Orion
is getting lower and lower in the nighttime sky. Its second brightest star
Betelgeuse is only one and a half fists above the west-southwest horizon at 11
p.m.
Wednesday: Typically
there are no cheers when spacecraft crash. Except for the Death Star. But when
the twin lunar satellites from the Gravity Recovery And Interior Laboratory
(GRAIL) ended their mission on December 17, 2012, astronomers hailed it as a
job well done. The twin spacecraft spent a year orbiting the moon and mapping
subtle differences in its gravitational pull to help astronomers better
determine the structure and history of the moon. The best summary of the GRAIL
data is this Astronomy Picture of the day, which would fit right in on a
t-shirt at a Grateful Dead concert (http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap130319.html).
If you didn’t stay up late “Driving that train, high on… life”, look for the
moon in the southern sky this morning.
Thursday: The
bright star Arcturus is three fists above the east horizon at 10 p.m.
Friday: Saturn
is about one fist above the east-southeast horizon at 10:30 p.m. You shouldn’t
stay up too late watching it. You need to get up early to cheer on your
favorite runners at the Yakima River Canyon Marathon tomorrow at 8 a.m. on
Canyon Road just south of Berry Road.
The
positional information in this column about stars and planets is typically
accurate for the entire week.
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