Saturday: One
Family Affair explored the trials of well-to-do civil engineer and bachelor
Bill Davis as he attempted to raise his brother's orphaned children in his
luxury New York City apartment (as described on Wikipedia). Another family
affair explores how a well-to-do Solar System raises its constituents from
birth, through growth, change, and death. Just like Buffy and Jody started off
full of energy, planets start out hot and molten. Cissy got wrinkles as she
approached middle age; planets become cratered as they age. We watched the TV
show “Family Affair” to learn about a nontraditional Manhattan family grew and
changed. Astronomers study other planets to learn how the Solar System will
evolve. For more information about this Solar System Family Affair, go to http://goo.gl/G029D. Jupiter,
the dad of the Solar System family, is about three fists held upright and at
arm’s length above due east at 7 p.m.
Sunday:
How do you study the life cycle of a dog? Easy. Get a dog from the animal
shelter, care for it for 15 years and study it. How do you study the life cycle
of a star? Easy. Pick a star, watch it for a few billion years, and…. Wait a
minute. Astronomers can’t observe something for a few billion years. Instead,
they study stars that are at different points in their long life cycle and
piece together the information from those different stars. What they do is like
studying a one-year-old dog for a few minutes, then studying a different
two-year-old dog for a few minutes, and so on. The sky in and near the
constellation Orion provides an example of four objects at different points of
star life.
First,
find Rigel, the bright star in the lower right corner of the constellation
Orion. This star, rapidly burning its fuel for a high energy but short-lived
existence, is three and a half fists above the south horizon at 10 p.m. About
one fist up and to the left are the three objects of Orion’s sword holder. The
middle “star” is really a star-forming region called the Orion nebula. There
you’ll find baby Suns. Now, look about two fists to the right and a little
below Rigel. You should be looking at a star that is about one tenth as bright
as Rigel but still the brightest in its local region. The third star to the
right of that star is Epsilon Eridani, the most Sun-like close and bright star.
Betelgeuse, in the upper left corner of Orion, is a star at the end of its life
that started out life a bit larger than the Sun.
Monday: Mars
is about four fists above the south horizon and Saturn is about two fists above
the east-southeast horizon at 6 a.m.
Tuesday: Jupiter
is a half a fist to the upper left of the moon in the eastern sky at 7 p.m.
Wednesday:
It’s a bird. No, it’s a plane. No, it’s a super moon. During this full moon,
the moon is at perigee, meaning it is at its closest to the earth. And when
items are closer to us, they appear larger. So a super moon is really a close
moon, a moon that leads to extra high tides and brighter night skies.
Thursday:
January is the coldest month of the year so it is time to turn up the furnace.
Fornax the furnace is one fist above due south at 7 p.m.
Friday: What
you see with the naked eye isn’t all that can be seen. While astronomers can
learn a lot from observing the sky in the visible wavelengths, many celestial
objects radiate more light, and more information, in wavelengths such as radio,
microwave, infrared, ultraviolet, x-ray, and gamma ray. In 2009, NASA launched
the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) to study objects that radiate in
the infrared range such as asteroids, cool dim stars, and luminous galaxies.
For an interesting comparison of how different wavelengths show different
aspects of a galaxy, go to http://goo.gl/nvuax. If it weren’t for infrared
telescopes such as WISE, astronomers would not know about the significant
amount of dust in galaxies.
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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