The Prettiest Star

Better Late Than Never

Orion's Back

The Eagle Nubula (photo Nasa/Hubble)

On Thursday, the red long-period variable stars V Bootis, R Bootis, and S Hydrae should be about at maximum light (7th or 8th magnitude) this week. V Boo is easy to locate with binoculars less than 1° from 3rd-magnitude Gamma , doesn’t mean a lot to me either

I was asked on the bus about meteor showers, well the next reasonable shower will be the Perseids peaking on August 12, so more about that next week.

Venus and Mars both in and near Taurus) are in the east during dawn. Venus is a dazzler; Mars, well to Venus's upper right near Aldebaran, is 110 times fainter. They're moving farther apart: from 13° to 16° separation this week.

Aldebaran, similar to Mars in both brightness and colour, twinkles about 5° or 6° to Mars's lower right or right. Higher above them are the Pleiades. Far left of them shines bright Capella. And look lower right of Venus for Orion everybody’s friend. Which is mercifully back again until next spring

Jupiter the roman god of the moment shines low in the east-southeast during twilight. You can’t real miss low in the South East after 9:30 and moving higher and further south as the night progresses any binoculars will show it as a disc. And it just had a thump a black dust mark, like those of the Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 impacts in 1994, appeared suddenly in Jupiter's South Polar Region around July 18th. It's now spreading out. So it looks like its had another impact. Probably our turn next, maybe on the first of the 4th next year.

Saturn in Leo is getting very low in the west after sunset, there a slightly out of date guide on the blog, which I’ll remember to do this week.

I discovered another anniversary on the internet this week, it seems that that the Eagle Nebula, made famous by Hubble, 3004 light years away, was formed 5000 years ago this year by a super nova, which when it blew dominated the night sky for some weeks. If you do the math, it would have been visible here around 4 AD. Which would be plausible, except that the Eagle Nebula is 6500 light years away, it gets dafter though it seems that a highly advanced peace loving humanoid species were wiped out in the cataclysm. Which would make it a hell of Christmas decoration, and as you know everything on the internet is true.

That was your nights sky for the week ending on the 95th anniversary of the outbreak of world war one.

Man In The Moon

Unless you’re in a coma you’ve probably heard that tomorrow is the 40th anniversary of the launch of Apollo 11. If your old enough I’m sure you can remember the excitement. I was allowed to stay up and watch the landing at about 3 am but I fell asleep. I had all the models, all the posters and any magazines I could get hold of; in short I was a boring little Herbert. It’s easy to forget what a staggering achievement it was. When JFK announced a goal of landing a man on the moon by the end of the decade, all they’d so far managed was 16 minute sub orbital flight with Alan Shepard aboard. This is the equivalent of promising to circumnavigate the world when all you’ve actually done is rowed across Port Melon in a bath tub, but they did it. When reporters asked Shepard what he thought about as he sat in Mercury 3, waiting for lift-off, he replied, 'The fact that every part of this ship was built by the lowest bidder”.

90% of Apollo 11 was fuel to get the tiny command and lunar modules out of Earth Orbit, at launch it was 365 ft high, I still remember that and all that came back was the Command Module was a truncated cone measuring 10 feet 7 inches tall with a diameter of 12 feet 10 inches across the base. It took 3 days to get the moon, 3 days of excitable waffle by Patrick Moore and James Burke; Steve Watt would have been in his element. And then on the 20th they landed, though they should have aborted but Aldrin ignored procedure and landed with about 15 seconds of fuel left. The Neil Armstrong got this wrong, but he might have been nervous. Then they came back to a well disturbed heroes welcome, Buzz Aldrin went slightly mad for a bit, Neil Armstrong became a recluse and Mike Collins is now managing a fish and chip shop in Enfield, maybe.

They went back 5 more times but the public lost interest, which is why all NASA does now is probes and low earth orbit missions, they have the technology, but not the funds, to build a moon base, ands go to mars they even have plans for an interstellar mission. And after all the best way to sort out global warming is to find a new planet to ruin, but at least we got Sky TV and Sat Navs out of it, god bless America.

And there’s another anniversary this week. On July 16th 1994, the first piece of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 hit Jupiter, speaking of which, Jupiter rises around 10 p.m in Capricorn and shines highest in the south before dawn, dominating the South Eastern sky for most of the night.

Like all the best cowboys Saturn has just about disappeared into the sunset.

Venus and Mars are still faffing about due east during dawn. Venus is very bright, Mars, to Venus's upper right, isn’t.

I’ve put some Apollo pictures up on the blog, and a guide to Mars and Venus if you’re daft enough to be up at 3:30 am

The middle of the year

The Pleiades above Venus

The Pleiades through a scope, claerly a star cluster

Not that its got much to do with the night sky, but today is the halfway point in the year, day 183, so we’re 182 days away from new years day, and next new years eve, and we’re closer to next Christmas than the last one, and bizarrely there’s still no Christmas crackers on sale in the co-op.

10 days ago we had midsummer’s day, last Saturday was the latest sunset and on Friday we have another turning point, though after this one things start getting hotter rather than colder, not that we’ll notice. On Friday Earth is at aphelion, it’s at its farthest from the Sun for the year about 3 million miles further from the sun than it is in January, but to be brutally frank, its quite hot enough isn’t it, and we should all take this opportunity to be smug that its even colder in Melbourne at the moment, because of it.

Mercury is having a poor apparition deep in the glow of dawn. Look for it early in the week about 28° lower left of Venus and Mars. Binoculars will help, but don’t get up especially for it.
A very bright Venus and Mars remain together due east during dawn. Venus is a dazzler; Mars is 130 times fainter. Mars was only 2.6° above Venus on the morning of June 26th; it widens to 5° above Venus by July 4th. Early in dawn, look for the Pleiades to their left. And the position of the Pleiades, or the seven sisters, and look on the blog if you’re unsure what it looks like, gives a fair indication of how different the summer sky is from the winter sky. From October to March the Pleiades are high in the southern sky way up to the left of Orion, which completely dominates the southern winter sky. Orion’s still there, in fact it’s with us all day long, which is why we can’t see it. The stars we are seeing at the moment are the ones that are up during the day in the winter. The constellations we see all year round such as the plough and Cassiopeia are the northern ones, effectively above us and the sun, so they never drop below the horizon.

Jupiter is in Capricorn at the moment and rises around 11 p.m. and shines brightly in the south at dawn. Any binoculars, even the ones I found in a skip 20 years ago will show it as a disc.

Saturn is still fairly high in the west at dusk, but it sinks lower as evening advances.

Uranus is still very dim in Pisces, is high in the southeast before dawn, but to be honest I wouldn’t know it if I was looking at it.