Bob Moler's Ephemeris Blog

Tuesday, October 12th.  The sun will rise at 7:53.  It’ll be up for 11 hours and 9 minutes, setting at 7:03.   The moon, 2 days before first quarter, will set at 10:26 this evening.

A marvelous member of the autumn skies can be found low in the east northeast after 9 in the evening.  It is the famous star cluster called the Pleiades or the Seven Sisters.  I might also add the ‘Tiny Dipper’.  Many people can spot a tiny dipper shape in its six or seven stars, and mistake it for the Little Dipper.  As nearsighted as I am, though corrected, I’ve never been able to see more than a few stars and a bit of fuzz.  However with binoculars, even I can see over a hundred stars appear along with the dipper shape of the brightest.  The fuzz I saw was unresolved stars, but in photographs the Pleiades actually contains wisps of the gas they are passing through currently.  They were born from a hundred million years ago.  In Greek mythology the sisters were daughters of the god Atlas.