Bob Moler's Ephemeris Blog

Friday, December 30th.  The sun will rise at 8:19.  It’ll be up for 8 hours and 51 minutes, setting at 5:10.   The moon, 2 days before first quarter, will set at 12:02 tomorrow morning.

Let’s look ahead at next year’s astronomical events for this last Ephemeris of 2011.  What won’t happen will be the end of the world on December 21st.  There is no planet Nibiru.  The closest alignment of the sun at the winter solstice and the center of the galaxy was in 1997.  What will happen is partial eclipse of the sun, or about a half hour of it, before sunset on May 20th.  An extremely rare transit of Venus, that is the planet Venus will cross the face of the sun on June 5th for us.  We’ll see about 3 hours of it before sunset that day.  The sun will continue to be more active next year with more sunspots and more displays of the northern lights.  It will also be a good year for the Perseid meteor shower of August and the Geminids of December.

* Times, as always are for the Traverse City/Interlochen area of Michigan.