Saturday: Is your favorite astronomy-loving relative asking for a telescope this Christmas? Before reaching for your credit card, read this guide to choosing your first telescope, available at http://goo.gl/5oXmGj. If cost is an issue, look no further than this article about low cost telescopes https://goo.gl/8yyddy. These are not cheap telescopes. They are simple, low-cost, easy to use telescopes that your future astronomer will still use for quick observing sessions long after she has purchased a much larger instrument for richer viewing. If you want to give a gag astronomy gift to someone who really bugs you, give them a copy of this column. After such a dud “gift”, you’ll never hear from them again. And that may be the best gift of all.
Sunday: Lieutenant Worf, the Klingon Starfleet officer on
Star Trek: The Next Generation, might say “Today is a good day to die.” But
Deneb, the bright supergiant star in Cygnus the Swan would say “two million
years from now is a good day to die.” This may seem like a long time. But,
compared to the lifespan of most stars, two million years from now is as close
as tomorrow. For example, the Sun will last about five billion years. Small
stars known as red dwarfs may last trillions of years. Prepare your astronomically
short goodbyes to Deneb tonight at 11:00 o’clock when it is two fists above due
northwest.
Monday: Lacerta, the faint lizard constellation, is straight
overhead at 6:00 p.m. It was named by the Polish astronomer Johannes Hevelius
in 1687 to fill the space between the much brighter and well-defined
constellations Pegasus, Andromeda, Cassiopeia, Cepheus, and Cygnus going
clockwise from the constellation just south of Lacerta.
Tuesday: At 6:00 p.m., Saturn is three fists above the
southern horizon and Jupiter is three and a half fists above the
east-southeastern horizon.
Wednesday: It’s getting too cold to see frogs in the wild.
But this is a great time to see frogs in the sky. Ancient Arabs referred to the
stars that we now call Fomalhaut and Diphda as Ad-difdi al-awwal and Ad-difda
at-tani. This means the first frog and the second frog, respectively. Both
frogs are low in the southern sky at 5:30 p.m. Fomalhaut is nearly one and a
half fists above due south. The slightly dimmer Diphda is two fists above the
south-southeast horizon.
Thursday: While you were looking through your underwear
drawer for clean socks, some citizen scientists were looking through sky maps
obtained by robotic telescopes to find brown dwarfs. The project, called
Backyard Worlds: Cool Neighbors, allows anyone with a computer and internet
connection to search through thousands of images to find these strange objects
that are midway between being classified as large planets and small stars. Some
brown dwarfs can have surface temperatures of thousands of degrees Celsius, the
recently discovered ones are cooler than the boiling point of water and may
even have clouds of water vapor! Read more about the discovery and how you can
participate in this project at https://noirlab.edu/public/blog/newly-launched-backyard-worlds/.
Friday: Venus and the waning crescent moon are about one and
a half fists above the southeastern horizon at 6:00 a.m. tomorrow morning.
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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