Saturday: Take
a two and a half hour walk. Too long, you say? Forty-four years ago today, Neil
Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin took the first ever walk by humans on another world.
They spend two and a half hours setting up scientific instruments and
collecting rocks for study back on Earth. Michael Collins orbited the Moon in
the spacecraft the astronauts would use to return to Earth.
Sunday: It’s
another bird. No, it’s another plane. No, it’s another super moon. The moon has
been very close to perigee for the past two full moons and is again this full
moon. At perigee, the moon is at its closest to the earth. (After all, that’s
what perigee means.) And when items are closer to us, they appear larger. So a
super moon is really a close moon. Maybe the close talker on the show
“Seinfeld” should have been called the super talker.
Monday: The
Southern Delta Aquarid meteor shower peaks for the next few nights and early
mornings with the greatest concentration of meteors being visible next weekend.
Meteor showers are named after the constellation from which the meteors appear
to originate. These meteors appear to come from a point in Aquarius near the
star Delta Aquarii, also known as Skat. This point is about one and a half
fists held upright and at arm’s length above the southeast horizon at 1 am tonight.
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. You’ll have to look closely because the
moonlight will obscure the dimmer meteors. As you Mother might say, dress warm
and sit in a comfortable chair for maximum enjoyment. Meteors are tiny rocks
that hit the Earth and burn up in the atmosphere.
Tuesday: Saturn
is two fists above due southwest at 10 p.m.
Wednesday:
Altair, at one corner of the Summer Triangle, is four fists above the southeast
horizon at 11 p.m. Altair is one of the closest bright stars, so close that
fictional astronauts visited a planet orbiting Altair in the 1956 movie
“Forbidden Planet”.
Thursday: Do
you want an easy way to find due north? A compass points to magnetic north,
which is a few degrees off of true geographic north. Well, tonight’s your
night. Capella, the brightest star in the constellation Auriga the Charioteer,
is due north at exactly 10:03 p.m. It looks like a bright light on a pole on
the north ridge because is only about one degree above the horizon.
Friday: Hot
enough for you? If not, astronomers using NASA’s Spitzer Space telescope think
they have discovered a molten planet orbiting a star almost right next door on
an astronomical scale – only 33 light years away. This planet is about
two-thirds the diameter of Earth and is VERY close to its parent star – about
2% of the Earth-Sun distance. The star, GJ 436, is a dim red dwarf star. For
more information about this discovery, read the NASA press release at http://goo.gl/9nY8w.
The
positional information in this column about stars and planets is typically
accurate for the entire week.
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