The Inter Regnum

Vesta find it if you can.

Mars is gibbous now; it's more than a month past opposition. The north polar cap (bottom) remains big and bright despite the advance of spring in the Martian northern hemisphere. At center-left is dark Syrtis Major; at upper right are dark Sinus Sabaeus and Sinus Meridiani. At top, the Hellas region is slightly bright.

The Winter Triangle

Now you may claim and with some justification that it’s not summer yet and technically you could be right. But and it’s a big but, if you get up early enough in the pre dawn sky the summer constellations have arrived, ready to shove Orion, Gemini and Taurus unceremoniously out of the way. If for reasons of your own your up an hour before sunrise, in the twilit dawn sky you’ll see Scorpio and Sagittarius teapot, itching to reassert themselves; and Sagittarius is quite easy to spot, it looks a lot more like a teapot than an archer. If you look in the next couple of days, you’ll see them in the Southeast along with a rapidly ageing moon. There’s a guide on the blog for you anyway. And here it is.



But the husky hag of early darkness in her robes of snowy grey is still with us for a while yet; quite lyrical that but sadly not mine, so we still have the winter triangle in the southern sky. Comprising of the red giant Betelgeuse on Orion’s right shoulder with Procyon a little up and to the left with down below Sirius, the brightest of the stars, giving us the third point. I know I mention the winter triangle quite a lot but this time I have a lovely picture for you on the blog.

Tomorrow Mars stops its retrograde motion and starts to move east again against the background of the stars. If as many of you believe the Scilly is at the centre of the universe this retrograde motion is difficult to explain, and involves the planets doing elaborate little pirouettes around their main orbit. But it all falls into place if you bite the bullet and accept the sun as the centre of the Solar System it all falls nicely into place, and we can thank good old Copernicus for working it out and Newton for telling us how.

As for the planets, only 3 again this week, Jupiter and Mercury are immersed in sunlight, in fact Jupiter is on the other side of the sun at its most distant at the moment.

But Venus is very much back with us at a very bright magnitude –3.9 the planet of love is slowly emerging from the sunset. Look for it due west just above the horizon about 30 minutes after sundown. Venus will gradually creep up into better twilight visibility for the next three months. Venus isn’t a very nice place when all’s said and done. It has a dense atmosphere of CO2 which traps most of the suns heat, there’s a little water there which will be in the form of superheated steam, the surface temperature is hot enough for rivers of molten lead, not that there are any, that’s just how hot it is. Global warming gone mad, so take you telly of standby and switch off the radio, now.

A much dimmer Mars, now faded to magnitude –0.4, shines very high in the east at dusk and toward the south by around 9 p.m. It's in Cancer, below Pollux and Castor after dusk and left of them later in the evening. So if you’re unfortunate to be born is Cancer with Mars right still retrograde then you’re in for a hell of a time, allegedly.

Saturn not overly bright, in western Virgo rises in the east in twilight and shines higher in the southeast later in the evening, and stands highest in the south around 1 a.m. It’s a lot dimmer than it could be because the rings are still almost flat on to us. The best way to find it is to look on the APL star map for Scilly on the blog. If you can find it, it has a yellowish glow and won’t twinkle too much.

And that was your night’s sky for the week ending on the 15th anniversary of the state of Mississippi formally ratifying the Thirteenth Amendment, and becoming the last state to approve the abolition of slavery. A mere 130 years after most of the others.