The Ellensburg, WA sky for the week of December 28, 2019

Today: Say goodbye to one of the bright summertime stars. Fomalhaut, in the constellation Piscis Austrinus or the southern fish, is a half a fist above the south-southwestern horizon at 7:00 p.m.

Sunday: Is your favorite someone lamenting that she didn’t get that space-related calendar that she wanted? Are you sad that you ran out of money and can’t fulfill her last-minute wish? Do you wish you could spend more quality time with her? Worry not. NASA has a free English or Spanish language calendar available for download at https://eospso.nasa.gov/publications/25.  Spend many hours reading about NASA scientists and projects.

Monday: “Far out, man. Astronomers just discovered the farthest out object in the Solar System and nicknamed it Farout.” This Kuiper Belt object is more than 100 times farther from the Sun than Earth is, more than twice as far as Pluto is. For more information about Farout, go to https://goo.gl/YtGsRE. Look in the early morning sky for some not so far out objects. If you care more about the nearest objects, call them “near-bys”, look for Venus, our nearest and brightest neighbor, is about one and a half  fists above the southwestern horizon at 5:00 p.m. The waxing crescent Moon, our nearest neighbor, is low in the south-southwestern sky.

Tuesday: The bright star Regulus is one and a half fists above the eastern horizon at 10:00 p.m.

Wednesday: Today is the day we celebrate the anniversary of something new – a new classification of celestial objects. Giuseppe Piazzi discovered Ceres [pronounced sear’-ease], the first of what are now called “asteroids”, on January 1, 1801. Ceres is the largest asteroid in the belt between Mars and Jupiter. At first, Piazzi thought it was a star that didn’t show up on his charts. But, he noted its position changed with respect to the background stars from night to night. This indicated to him that it had to be orbiting the Sun. The International Astronomical Union promoted Ceres to the status of “dwarf planet” in August of 2006.

Thursday: Has it been tough to wake up this past week? It should have been because the sunrise has been getting a little later since summer started. I know. I know. December 21 was the shortest day of the year. But, because the Earth’s orbit around the Sun is elliptical and not circular, the Earth does not travel at a constant speed. It moves faster when it is closer to the Sun and slower when it is farther away. This leads to the latest sunrise occurring in early January and the earliest sunset occurring in early December, not on the first day of winter, the shortest day of the year. On the first day of winter, however, the interval between sunrise and sunset is the shortest. For more information, go to http://goo.gl/SJC5r.

Friday: Late tonight and early morning’s weather forecast: showers. Meteor showers, that is. The Quadrantid meteor shower peaks late tonight and early tomorrow morning between midnight and dawn. Meteor showers are named after the constellation from which the meteors appear to originate. That makes this shower mysterious because there isn’t any constellation with this name now. The shower was named after Quadrans Muralis, an obsolete constellation found in some early 19^th century star atlases. These meteors appear to come from a point in the modern constellation Draco the dragon. This point is about three fists above the northeast horizon at 1 a.m. This year, the waning gibbous Moon will set well before dawn so you may be able to see many meteors in the hours before sunrise. Meteors are tiny rocks that hit the Earth and burn up in the atmosphere. Most meteors are associated with the path of a comet. This shower consists of the debris from an asteroid discovered in 2003. Keeping with the comet-origin paradigm, astronomers think the asteroid is actually an “extinct” comet, a comet that lost all of its ice as it passed by the Sun during its many orbits. For more information about the Quadrantid meteor shower, go to https://earthsky.org/?p=4287.   

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.