Not A Lot

Not unexpectedly last week’s Persied meteor shower was obscured by clouds for its entire duration, I did have a look on Friday when the sky was crystal clear just in case there were any late comers, but not a flipping sausage, never mind there’s some more in October.

First up is the Draconids, on the 8th and ninth and then the Orionids, a major shower of shooting stars, on October 20-21.

You’ve probably guessed that there’s not a whole lot going on this week already, or why would I be bleating on about October.

Mercury and Saturn appear near each other in bright twilight just above the horizon due west. Use binoculars to look for them about 30 minutes after sunset. At the beginning of the week Saturn is above Mercury; later it's to Mercury's upper right, check the blog, but even with a clear night you’’ need binoculars.

Venus is in Gemini and blazes in the eastern sky before and during dawn, and is unmistakeable. It’s still about as bright as it was in February when it wasn’t keeping antisocial hours and was setting up to 3 hours after sunset in the west.

Mars still on the dim side but improving rises about an hour and a half before the sun, passing between the horn tips of Taurus is high to the upper right of Venus before dawn. To its own upper right is similar-looking Aldebaran. To its lower right is similarly coloured Betelgeuse, which is the bright star to the top left of Orion. So although Mars will have moved a little by October when Orion returns to the evening star, it will be easily found and at its closest to the earth for a long time.

Jupiter, in Capricorn was at opposition on August 14th. So now it’s with us for the whole night It comes into view low in the southeast early in twilight — the first "star" to appear after sunset. It's higher in better telescopic view by 11 or midnight. You can’t miss it it’s the extremely bright star that arcs across the southern sky throughout the night.

But even with out a blockbuster feature, we’ve still got all the usual stars, and the most spectacular sight at the moment is the Milky Way, it arcs across the sky from north east to the south west and is always worth a look with binoculars, even with poor binoculars you’ll see at least 10 times as many stars. And the Milky Way although it’s a run of the mill spiral galaxy, amongst billions of the things, it still has some pretty impressive statistics.

The stellar disk of the Milky Way galaxy is approximately 100,000 light-years in diameter, and is an average, about 1,000 thick. With between 200 billion 400 billion stars, and its just our look that out of all those stars its our Solar System that produces Britain’s got talent.