10/16/2012 – Ephemeris – Autumn wonders for binoculars or small telescope: The Pleiades
Ephemeris for Tuesday, October 16th. The sun will rise at 7:59. It’ll be up for 10 hours and 55 minutes, setting at 6:55. The moon, 1 day past new, will set at 7:33 this evening.
The most magnificent star cluster of the autumn sky is the Pleiades or Seven Sisters. At 10 p.m. It will appear as a close group of stars of a nebulous fuzz, depending your eyesight or sky conditions low in the east. It is the perfect binocular object, showing under good conditions a hundred more than the 7 brightest stars. Some mistake it for the Little Dipper because the stars do make a nearly handle less dipper. I tend to call it the Tiny Dipper. The stars in the Pleiades are less than half the age of the stars in the Double Cluster I talked about yesterday. The stars in the is cluster are about 100 million years old. Compared to the sun, these guys aren’t out of diapers yet. I’ll have lots more to to talk about the Pleiades as autumn wears on.
Times are for the Traverse City/Interlochen area of Michigan. They may be different for your location.
Addendum
The Pleiades, about what you’d see in binoculars.
Pleiades and Jupiter at 10 p.m. October 16, 2012. Created using Stellarium.
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