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Saturn in Leo is getting very low in the west after sunset, there a slightly out of date guide on the blog, which I’ll remember to do this week.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