The Ellensburg, WA sky for the week of June 6, 2020

Saturday:  The CWU campus is closed. But astronomy learning lives on! The Physics Department and the College of the Sciences is hosting a First Saturday VIRTUAL planetarium show today from noon to 1:00 p.m. CWU professor Bruce Palmquist will host the Intergalactic Planetarium Short “Film” Festival. You’ll see a variety of short Worldwide Telescope Tours created by CWU Astronomy and Douglas Honors College students featuring videos about the Solar System, star formation, and Harry Potter astronomy. Stay at home, practice good physical distancing, and visit https://cwu.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJcuduChqz8jGdQ86cUyKBKmR2K_jdcEqSx- to register for the Virtual tour.

Sunday: Saturn, Jupiter, and the Moon line up left to right, low in the southeastern sky at midnight. By 4:00 a.m., they are two fists held upright and at arm’s length above due south.

Monday: According to an Australian Aboriginal legend, a young man was undergoing an initiation rite that required that he avoid contact with women. But the two wives of his brother liked him so they seduced him. When his brother found out, he set fire to the house they were in. The young man and the two women escape by casting a spear into the Milky Way and pulling themselves into the sky. What does this have to do with astronomy? In the legend, the man becomes a bright, pulsating red star and the women become two dimmer white stars above and below him.  What does this have to do with you? You can see the bright red pulsating star called Antares making its way into the evening sky. It is one fist above the south-southeastern horizon at 10 p.m. What stands out about this story is that aboriginal culture must have been paying attention to variations in star brightness long before the “official” discovery of variable stars in the late sixteenth century. For more about aboriginal star observations, go to https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-news/aboriginal-australians-observed-red-giant-variability/. 

Tuesday: The stars Pollux and Castor, along with the planet Mercury, make a small downward-pointing triangle centered about one fist above the west-northwest horizon. Pollux and Castor are at the top of the triangle, representing the heads of the Gemini twins. Mercury is between the hips of the twins.

Wednesday: Summer is nearly here. How do I know? Because the days are very long. Because the temperature is rising. Because the school year is ending. (Wait. How can we tell that with all of the kids at home?) Also, because the Summer Triangle is fairly high in the eastern sky at 11 p.m. Vega, the third brightest star visible from Ellensburg, is about five fists above the east horizon. Deneb, at the tail of Cygnus the swan is about four fists above the east-northeast horizon. The third star in the triangle, Altair in Aquila the eagle, is two fists above the east horizon.

If you want to put somebody off, tell her to wait until Deneb sets. At Ellensburg’s latitude of 47 degrees, Deneb is a circumpolar star meaning it never goes below the horizon.

Thursday: I hope that you have never been in a collision. It can be scary and dangerous. The biggest collision in our celestial neighborhood will occur in a few billion years when our Milky Way Galaxy will collide with the Andromeda Galaxy. Here’s an article about what it will look like:

https://www.universetoday.com/141750/this-is-what-itll-look-like-when-the-milky-way-and-andromeda-galaxies-collide-billions-of-years-from-now/. If you can’t stay up a few billion years to see the collision, stay up until late at night to see the Andromeda Galaxy. First find the Great Square of Pegasus. At 3:00 a.m., the left hand corner of the square is about three fists above the east-northeast horizon. Less than two fists to the left and down a little bit is another star the same brightness as the star at the corner of the square. From that star, hop about a half a fist up to a star that is about one fourth as bright. Less than another half fist in the same direction is a fuzzy oval patch of light known as the Andromeda Galaxy. The galaxy is impressive to see in binoculars. It consists of nearly a trillion stars and is 2.2 million light years away.

Friday: The Moon and Mars are two fists above the southeastern horizon at 4:00 a.m.

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.