5 Weeks Away

Now if you were listening to Keri yesterday you may recall he said that last night would be hopeless for star gazing, well that was just another fine example of how he’s not to be trusted, last night was the best night we’ve had for ages. And gave me the best view of Orion I’ve seen since March, and the first sighting I’ve had of Mars since last winter.

I’ll be away until from today until mid December so this will be the last Scilly Stars until the 16th of December. So this week the plan is to give you any highlights that occur over the next 6 weeks. But sadly there aren’t any except possibly the Geminids meteor shower which appears to radiate from the constellation Gemini. They can be seen as early December the 6th when one meteor every hour or so could be visible. During the next week, rates increase until a peak of 50-80 meteors per hour is attained on the night of December 13/14. The last Geminids are seen on December 18, when the rate drops to one every hour or so. Have a look on the Scilly Star map on the blog and set the date for the 13th of December. Gemini rises around 6 and is high in the South by midnight with Mars trailing about an hour behind.

Video Of The Geminids

Most of the other highlights are for diehards, involving Jovian moons or Asteroids. But there is one it should be hard to miss, the full moon on the second of December, not so interesting in itself, but the next one is the last of the year and falls on New Years Eve, which makes it a blue moon, so why not celebrate.

Throughout the whole period Jupiter will be in the Southern Sky at sunset, edging further to the SW as the nights go by, and setting around 9pm by mid December.

Tomorrow morning if your out and about at 6:30 you’ll be able to see Venus near the South Eastern horizon with Saturn further south, very close to the moon and a little further to the west Mars. As the weeks go on Venus sinks into the sun, to reappear in the New Year, but Saturn and Mars are still there moving a little to the west each day, which means they are rising earlier every night.

Mars appears in the East tonight at about 10pm, Saturn at around 4am. By mid December Mars appears north east at 9, as Jupiter sets and Saturn rises around 1:45 am. We’ll have to wait until January before we see Saturn before midnight.

I’ll update the blog while I’m away, when I can, but there’s always the Scilly Star Map link over on ther right which will give you a map of the sky between now and eternity.

That was you night sky for the 5 weeks ending on 236th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party.

All you ever wanted to know about Magnitudes

The Crag Nebula (Huuble)

Firstly today I’m going to bang on about Stellar Magnitudes, these range from -26.73 for the sun, to 31.5 which is the dimmest object visible by Hubble, the sun from Neptune is – 19.3, which is brighter than the full moon from the earth at -12.6. You’ve probably noticed by now that the brighter an object is then the lower is its apparent magnitude. Its not a particularly linear scale, the moon is 14 orders of magnitude dimmer than the Sun but is actually 450,000 times less bright. Venus ranges from -4.6 to -3.8 and even at its dimmest is brighter than Jupiter and Mars at their brightest at -2.9. Very occasionally, there’s a supernova which frightens everyone to death, for example the Crab Supernova of AD 1054, now the crab nebula in Taurus, which was a dazzling -6.5, which is pretty bright con (6500 light years away).

That was clear wasn’t it, and it will make my life a lot easier, now what have we got this week,

Look low in the east around 10 or 11 p.m. and you'll see the bright winter constellation Orion already on the rise. Above Orion is orange Aldebaran. Above Aldebaran is the fingertip-size Pleiades star cluster. On Friday the waning Moon will be shining to Orion's left in the middle of Gemini, as shown in the blog.

Mercury is in superior conjunction, behind the glare of the Sun.
Venus (magnitude –3.9) is sinking lower in the dawn every week. Look for it low in the east 60 to 30 minutes before sunrise.

Mars (magnitude +0.4, remember +tive means dimmer, in central Cancer rises around 11 p.m. below Castor and Pollux in the east. It's very high in the southeast before dawn.
Jupiter magnitude –2.4, shines brightly in the south at dusk and lower in the southwest later in the evening. It sets around midnight.

Saturn (magnitude +1.1, in the head of Virgo) is getting higher the east-southeast before and during dawn. More than 20° to its lower left is bright Venus.
And its my birthday in 16 days, I don’t mind what you get me as long as its expensive, if your poor, why not club together, and did you know that if you look on Google maps you can see Barbara burying her ill gotten gains from space, I won’t tell you where, until I see what I get for my birthday.

That was your nights sky for the week ending on the 2nd anniversary of King Juan Carlos I of Spain saying to Chávez, President of Venezuela, "Why don't you [just] shut up?" at the 2007 Ibero-American Summit in Santiago, Chile.