The Ellensburg, WA sky for the week of October 24, 2020

Saturday:  Halloween is next weekend so make sure you load up on peanut clusters, almond clusters, and open star clusters this week. That last one will be easy (and cheap… actually free) because two of the most prominent open star clusters in the sky are easily visible in the autumn sky. The sideways V-shaped Hyades Cluster is two fists held upright and at arm’s length above due east at 10:00 p.m. containing over 300 stars; the Hyades cluster is about 150 light years away and 625 million years old. The Pleiades Cluster, a little more than three fists above due east, is larger at over 1000 stars and younger. Compared to our 5 billion year old Sun, the 100 million year age of the Pleiades is infant-like. 

Sunday: Last year, the Hubble Space Telescope got the first close-up view of a comet from another star system. Comet 2I/Borisov was discovered by amateur astronomer Gennady on August 30, 2019 as the second interstellar object ever confirmed. 2I is the new official designator for the second interstellar object. Astronomers know it is from another star system because it is going way too fast, 110,000 miles per hour, to be gravitationally bound to the Sun. Read and watch more about the discovery at http://tiny.cc/mhh0tz. 

Monday: Venus is two and a half fists above the east-southeastern horizon at 7:00 a.m.

Tuesday: What time is tea time? Certainly not during an autumn evening. The constellation Sagittarius the archer, with its signature teapot shape, is sinking into the south-southwestern horizon by 7:00 p.m. The handle is on top and the spout is touching the horizon ready to pour that last cup of tea. Saturn is riding the teapot, about one and a half fists above the south-southwest horizon.

Wednesday: Mars starts the evening one fist to the left of the Moon, low in the eastern sky right after sunset. By midnight, the Moon has moved a little closer to Mars. Both are more than four fists above the southern horizon.  By 5:00 a.m., Mars and the Moon are a half a fist apart, low in the western sky.

Thursday: Bright Jupiter is two fists above the south-southwestern horizon at 7:00 p.m. Saturn is a half a fist to the upper left of Jupiter. Pluto, not visible even with a small telescope, is between the two giant planets.

Friday: Uranus is in opposition tonight. That doesn’t mean it refuses to work with the other political party. It means that Uranus is on the opposite side of the Earth as the Sun is so it is highest in the sky during the darkest part of the night. Also, it is visible with binoculars for the entire night. Go outside at 9:00 p.m. and find the Moon. Put the Moon in the lower right portion of your binoculars. Uranus will be in or just outside the upper left portion of your field of view. Follow the object throughout the night. By 5:00 a.m., Uranus will be to the upper right of the Moon. Try to find Uranus for the next few nights. You’ll know you have the right object if it moves a little bit to the right each night compared to the background stars.

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. 

The Ellensburg, WA sky for the week of October 17, 2020

 

Saturday: Mars is four fists held upright and at arm’s length above the southeastern horizon at 10:00 p.m. For more information about NASA’s plans for the Moon and Mars, watch NASA administrator Jim Bridenstein’s keynote address to the 2020 Mars Society Convention at 10:00 am, PDT. Go to http://tiny.cc/5htzsz for more information.  

Sunday: Venus is two and a half fists above the east-southeastern horizon at 6:30 a.m. 

Monday: The red supergiant star Antares is right below the Moon at 7:00 p.m., very low in the southwestern sky.

Tuesday: The Orionid meteor shower consists of the Earth colliding with pieces of the remains of Halley's Comet's tail. This shower peaks after midnight for the next two nights. This is not a meteor shower that typically results in a meteor storm. There will be about 15-20 meteors per hour, many more meteors than are visible on a typical night but not the storm that some showers bring. The Moon is in the waxing crescent phase, meaning it will set. The best time to observe will be near dawn, after moonset. Meteor showers are named after the constellation from which the meteors appear to originate. These meteors appear to come from a point in Orion, the hunter. This point is about one fist held upright and at arm’s length above due east at midnight. You can follow this point throughout the night as it will remain one fist above the prominent reddish star Betelgeuse (pronounced Bet'-el-jews). The Orionid meteors are fast - up to 40 miles per second. If you fall asleep tonight, you can catch the tail end of the shower every night until early November. For more information, go to https://earthsky.org/?p=27937. 

Wednesday: Rho Cassiopeiae is the most distant star that can be seen with the naked eye by most people. It is about 8,200 light years away. That means that the light that reaches your eyes from that star left over 8,000 years ago, before the beginning of time according to the Byzantine calendar. Rho Cassiopeiae is six fists above the northeastern horizon at 8:00 p.m., just above the zigzag line that marks the constellation Cassiopeia.

Thursday: The Moon, Jupiter, and Saturn make a small triangle in the sky tonight. Look south at 7:00 p.m. Saturn is a half a fist above the Moon and Jupiter is a half a fist to the upper right of the Moon. 

Friday: Along with the not-so-subtle drug reference in their name, The Doobie Brothers could have made an astronomy reference in their song lyrics if they would have written: “Old Earth water, keep on rollin’, Mississippi moon won’t you keep on shining on me.” Astronomers now think that some of the water on Earth may be older than the Solar System. The chemical signature of the water indicates it came from a very cold source, just a few degrees above absolute zero. The early Solar System was much warmer than this meaning the water came from a source outside the Solar System. For more information about the old Earth water, go to http://goo.gl/QsEu5P.

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. 

The Ellensburg, WA sky for the week of October 10, 2020

Saturday:  Look up in the sky. It’s a bird. It’s a plane. It’s a dolphin. A dolphin? The constellation Delphinus the dolphin is nearly six fists held upright and at arm’s length above due south at 8 p.m. The constellation’s two brightest stars are called Sualocin and Rotanev, which is Nicolaus Venator spelled backwards. Venator worked at the Palermo Observatory in Italy in the mid nineteenth century. He slipped these names into Giuseppe Piazzi’s star catalog without him noticing. The Daily Record (shop Ellensburg) would never let anything like that get into their newspaper. Their editing (shop Ellensburg) staff is too good. Nothing (pohs grubsnellE) evades their gaze. 

Sunday: The Milky Way makes a faint white trail from due northeast through straight overhead to due southwest at 9:00 p.m. Starting in the northeast, the Milky Way “passes through” the prominent constellations Auriga the charioteer, Cassiopeia the queen, and Cygnus the swan with its brightest star, Deneb, nearly straight overhead. After Cygnus, you’ll see Aquila the eagle with its brightest star Altair about four and a half fists held upright and at arm’s length above the southwest horizon.

Monday: You’ve heard of moons. You may have heard of dwarf planets. Did you know that they can share similar features? The five largest moons of Uranus have the same heat signatures as the largest dwarf planets such as Pluto and Eris. That means they are relatively dense and don’t immediately radiate away all of their daytime-absorbed heat at night. Uranus is visible with binoculars, four fists above the southeastern horizon at 11:00 p.m., midway between the very bright Mars and The Pleiades open star cluster. Read more about Uranian moons at https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-news/uranian-moons-are-like-dwarf-planets/. 

Tuesday: Would you like to visit Mars? How about America’s desert Southwest? Not enough time? Then just look at some photos from… from…. Hmmm. The photos at https://goo.gl/Elx7O8 look like they could be from either place. The Murray Buttes region of Mars, where the Curiosity rover has been exploring, looks a lot like the landscape of Utah. So much so that the Mars-based movie John Carter was filmed in the desert of southern Utah. Look for John Carter at your local video store. Listen to the soundtrack on your cassette player. Then take a Polaroid selfie of you enjoying each experience. 

This is a great time to visit Mars in the sky because it is at opposition, meaning it is at its closest point to Earth in this orbital cycle and it is out all night. There is a bonus to this opposition because Mars will be at its brightest until 2035. Mars is five fists above due south at 1:00 a.m. (midnight Standard Time). Being due south at midnight Standard Time is another characteristic of a planet at opposition.

Wednesday: Jupiter and Saturn are both two fists above the southern horizon at 7:00 p.m. Jupiter is the brighter of the two. If you have binoculars with a fairly wide field of view, they will fit both Saturn and Jupiter. Although you won’t be able to see it, Pluto is between the two giant planets.

Thursday: The constellation Vulpecula, the fox, stands six fists above due southwest at 9 p.m. It is in the middle of the Summer Triangle, which is defined by the bright stars Vega, Deneb, and Altair. The fox is so faint that you need dark skies to see it.

Friday: Venus is two fists above the east-southeastern horizon at 6:00 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.

The Ellensburg, WA sky for the week of October 3, 2020

Saturday:  The CWU campus is mostly closed. But astronomy learning lives on! The Physics Department is hosting a First Saturday VIRTUAL planetarium show today from noon to 1:00 p.m. Former CWU professor Tony Smith will give a show featuring stories and highlights about the stars and planets in the October sky. He will use the browser-based Worldwide Telescope program found at http://worldwidetelescope.org/webclient/. There will be a virtual planetarium show on the first Saturday of every month for the rest of the school year. Stay at home, practice good physical distancing, and visit http://tiny.cc/hpyxsz to register for the show and to attend online using Zoom.

Sunday: Since Halloween is later this month; the stores are filled with bags of candy clusters. Instead, take time to look at a star cluster. The Hyades cluster is an open star cluster that represents the V-shaped face of Taurus the bull. It is one of the biggest and nearest star clusters with about 200 stars 150 light years away. The Hyades cluster was the first cluster to be the subject of detailed motion studies. These studies allowed astronomers to pinpoint the distance to the Hyades and provide important information about the scale of the universe. Aldebaran, nearly two and a half fists above the eastern horizon at midnight, is a foreground star and not a part of the Hyades cluster.

Monday: Jupiter is two fists above due south at 7:30 p.m. Saturn is less than a fist to the left of it. Go inside and read for a while. Then come back out and look for Mars two fists above the eastern horizon at 9:00 p.m.

Tuesday: Finally, get up early and find Venus two and a half fists above the eastern horizon at 6:30 a.m.

Wednesday: The Draconid meteor shower peaks for the next three nights with tomorrow night being the best. The meteors appear to come from a point in the head of Draco, the dragon constellation. This point is nearly straight overhead at 7 p.m. tonight. This point remains near the trapezoid-shaped head of Draco throughout the night. Unlike most meteor showers, this one is best observed in the early evening rather than after midnight. Call this the “early to bed” meteor shower. Draconid meteors are slow moving which means you will have an easy time differentiating true Draconid meteors, from Comet 21P/Giacobini-Zinner, from the stray grains of dust that happen to enter the Earth’s atmosphere every day and night. Could this be the year for a great show by the Draconids? The Moon is approaching the gibbous phase so it will obscure the dimmer meteors throughout most of the night. For everything you need to know about the Draconid meteor shower, go to https://earthsky.org/?p=180611.  

Thursday: It is good to plan ahead while you have meteors on your mind so start thinking about the Orionid meteor shower. This shower, which consists of the earth colliding with pieces of the remains of Halley's Comet's tail, peaks on October 21 but produces meteors from now until early November. These meteors appear to come from a point in Orion, the hunter. This point is about two fists above the southeastern horizon at 1:00 a.m.. You can follow this point throughout the night as it will remain near the prominent reddish star Betelgeuse (pronounced Bet'-el-jews). The Orionid meteors are fast - up to 40 miles per second. For more information about the Orionids, go to https://earthsky.org/?p=27937. 

Friday: Coffee. First scientists say it’s good for you. Then they say it is bad for you. Recently, the same argument was applied to an exomoon, a moon orbiting a planet outside our Solar System. No, astronomers are not debating whether exomoons are good for you. Of course they are. But there are conflicting reports over whether the initial exomoon observation shared a year ago was real or just a blip in the data. Astronomers studied the light of a star as a Jupiter-sized planet and then its Neptune-sized moon blocked it. This transit method is one of the most popular ways to observe exoplanets… and maybe exomoons. Read more about the debate at https://www.sciencealert.com/the-first-known-exomoon-is-called-into-question-in-follow-up-studies.  

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.