Archive
08/17/11 – Ephemeris – The bright planets this week
Aug 17. This is Bob Moler with Ephemeris for Wednesday, August 17th. The sun rises at 6:47. It’ll be up for 13 hours and 58 minutes, setting at 8:45. The moon, half way from full to last quarter, will rise at 10:00 this evening.
It’s Wednesday and time again to take a look at the whereabouts of the bright planets. The ringed planet Saturn will be visible in the west southwest as it gets dark. It’s near the bright star Spica to its left. Spica has a blue tinge, while Saturn is yellowish. It will set at 10:43 p.m. Saturn is a wonderful sight is a telescope with its rings. We are now slowly seeing Saturn slip into evening twilight. We have very little time of good viewing of Saturn before its image deteriorates by being too low in the sky. Jupiter will rise at 11:31 p.m. in the east northeast and is seen against the stars of the constellation Aries now. Mars will rise at 2:54 a.m also in the east northeast and is now passing through the constellation Gemini the twins.
* Times are for the Traverse City/Interlochen area of Michigan. They may be different for your location.
Announcing Starry Starry Nights – August 31, 2011
Starry Starry Night Ad
This is an ad proof. The ad contains a typo “star grazing” instead of “star gazing”. Or is it? I was never fond of the term star gazing. Now star grazing: that’s what we do at star parties, move from one celestial wonder to the next, as if we’re grazing the heavens for its choicest wonders.
The photo in this ad was taken by my granddaughter Nicole (Coley) Farrell. After a lot of standard “astronomer at the eyepiece of the telescope” shots, she was reviewing the shots with her mother who also took about half of the shots. I turned the telescope her way, looking through the finder and shouted “Hey Coley!” And this picture was the result.
08/16/11 – Ephemeris – Solar conjunctions today of Mercury and Venus
Tuesday, August 16th. The sun rises at 6:45. It’ll be up for 14 hours and 0 minutes, setting at 8:46. The moon, 3 days past full, will rise at 9:38 this evening.
Today we have an interesting coincidence. Both Venus and Mercury will be in conjunction with the sun. Astrologers may make a big deal out of it but this time astronomers won’t. A conjunction means that two solar system bodies are just north and south of each other. At 8:07 this morning Venus will be just north of the sun in superior conjunction. That is it is beyond the sun. And at 9:03 this evening Mercury will be somewhat south of the sun in inferior conjunction. Thai is it is between the earth and the sun. Mercury will be going into our morning sky, while Venus will begin to appear in the evening sky later this fall. But the coolest thing of all will be Venus’ next inferior conjunction June 6th, 2012. It will cross the face of the sun in a rare transit.
* Times are for the Traverse City/Interlochen area of Michigan. They may be different for your location.
08/15/11 – Ephemeris – Preview of next month’s harvest moon
Monday, August 15th. The sun rises at 6:44. It’ll be up for 14 hours and 3 minutes, setting at 8:48. The moon, 2 days past full, will rise at 9:16 this evening.
Last Saturday night under partly cloudy skies at the Port Oneida Fair Star Party we saw the full moon rise and it reminded me that the next full moon will be the Harvest Moon. The next few nights will preview the coming harvest moon effect. That is that the moon will rise at nearly the same time for several nights in a row. On average the moon will rise or set 50 minutes later each night. Due to the geometry of the situation the harvest moon for several nights will only rise later by down to 20 minutes a night. Back before electric lights the bright moonlight augmented twilight to increase the daily time available to harvest the crops. This slowdown in the moon’s rise times is affecting us now, though the moon is definitely waning.
* Times are for the Traverse City/Interlochen area of Michigan. They may be different for your location.
08/12/11 – Ephemeris – Star Party at the Port Oneida Fair
Friday, August 12th. The sun rises at 6:41. It’ll be up for 14 hours and 11 minutes, setting at 8:52. The moon, 1 day before full, will set at 6:37 tomorrow morning.
The Grand Traverse Astronomical Society will be part of the 10th Annual Port Oneida Rural Arts and Culture Fair, an event sponsored by the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. Tomorrow night the society will bring their telescopes to the Thoreson Farm on Thoreson Road of M22 North of Glen Arbor for a Star party beginning at 9:30 p.m. Thoreson Road is a loop off M22. On tap will be the full moon, and Saturn if skies permit early. Even though the full moon skies will be bright, there are plenty of wonders still visible in the telescopes. Early on yours truly will be talking about the state and advancements of astronomy during the heyday of the Port Oneida community in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
* Times are for the Traverse City/Interlochen area of Michigan. They may be different for your location.
08/11/11 – Ephemeris – Prospects for this year’s Perseid Meteor Shower
Thursday, August 11th. The sun rises at 6:40. It’ll be up for 14 hours and 14 minutes, setting at 8:54. The moon, 2 days before full, will set at 5:31 tomorrow morning.
In the next two nights the Perseid meteor shower will be at a peak. The problem this year will be that the moon is full, or full enough that the skies will not be dark all night. Hope is not completely lost, because there will be a few really bright meteors, a few an hour, rather than the 50 or more an hour visible in dark skies. The paths of meteors appear longer in the evening where the radiant point of the meteors lies low in the north northeast, when the bits of rock skip through our atmosphere at a very low angle. These bits of rock were liberated by comet Swift Tuttle on a prior pass of the inner solar system. It orbits the sun in 130 years, and its path takes it very close to the orbit of the earth, so this time of year we pass through its debris.
* Times are for the Traverse City/Interlochen area of Michigan. They may be different for your location.
Addendum
Perseid Meteor Shower radiant after midnight
The radiant is actually circumpolar for northern Michigan. At 10:30 p.m. it’s just east or the north compass point and very low on the horizon.
08/10/11 – Ephemeris – The bright planets this week
Wednesday, August 10th. The sun rises at 6:38. It’ll be up for 14 hours and 17 minutes, setting at 8:55. The moon, 3 days before full, will set at 4:24 tomorrow morning.
It’s Wednesday and time again to take a look at the whereabouts of the bright planets. The ringed planet Saturn will be visible in the west southwest as it gets dark. It’s near the bright star Spica to its left. Spica has a blue tinge, while Saturn is yellowish. It will set at 11:09 p.m. Saturn is a wonderful sight is a telescope with its rings. We are now slowly seeing Saturn slip into evening twilight. We have very little time of good viewing of Saturn before its image deteriorates by being too low in the sky. Jupiter will rise at 11:54 p.m. in the east northeast and is seen against the stars of the constellation Aries now. Mars will rise at 3 a.m also in the east northeast and is now passing through the constellation Gemini the twins.
* Times are for the Traverse City/Interlochen area of Michigan. They may be different for your location.
08/09/11 – Ephemeris – The moon tonight – musings
Tuesday, August 9th. The sun rises at 6:37. It’ll be up for 14 hours and 19 minutes, setting at 8:57. The moon, 3 days past first quarter, will set at 3:19 tomorrow morning.
The moon tonight is in its gibbous phase, as it has been since first quarter last weekend. This Saturday it will be full. So now most of the moon’s face is in sunlight. Besides the dark, lava filled dry seas of the moon, which give us the dark spots that some of us imagine as the face of the man in the moon, we can spot many craters and other formations in a telescope. Even as the moon has been accumulating spacecraft, rocket parts, rovers and Hasselblad cameras for the last 50 years none can be seen from the earth. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is taking photographs of the moon in unprecedented detail. They’ve already located the Apollo landing sites, and discovered a lost Soviet lunar rover. Who knows what else they’ll find.
* Times are for the Traverse City/Interlochen area of Michigan. They may be different for your location.
08/08/11 – Ephemeris – The lunar seas and the possible second moon theory
Monday, August 8th. The sun rises at 6:36. It’ll be up for 14 hours and 22 minutes, setting at 8:58. The moon, 2 days past first quarter, will set at 2:17 tomorrow morning.
With the announcement last week that the earth may have had two moons, we’d kind of look at our surviving moon in a new light. Tonight the terminator, the line between light and dark on the moon, really the sunrise line crosses through the Sea of Clouds or Mare Imbrium. Telescope will reveal the crater Copernicus near the moon’s equator that will come into sunlight an hour from now as you listen to this. Two astronomers from the US and Switzerland propose that the collision of the earth that created the moon also created another moon. After a time this second, smaller moon crashed into our moon and created the dark seas on the side that faces the earth. The far side of the moon only has one small sea, the Sea of Moscow, discovered by the Russians in 1959 with their Lunik 3 spacecraft.
* Times are for the Traverse City/Interlochen area of Michigan. They may be different for your location.
We might get an aurora (northern lights) tonight (August 5, 2011)
Also southern lights too. There was a big coronal mass ejection (CME) yesterday. Arrival time of the stuff at earth is thought to be 10 hours UT (6 a.m. EDT) plus or minus 7 hours. Though no reports yet. See Phil Plait’s Bad Astronomy for more on it. Also check out www.spaceweather.com.
Bob Moler's Ephemeris Blog 