A bit of a challenge for you this week, which I’m can say with a fair degree of certainty that none of you will take up, Comet McNaught. I did mention this comet before in the May round up, but couldn’t find any easy way of placing it for you, well now there is and its now naked eye bright. But and it’s a big but, you’ll have to get up very early or better still go to bed very late. Mid-June is when Comet McNaught should be most interesting, offering the best compromise between its increasing brightness and its decreasing altitude at the start of dawn. Moreover, the sky will be free of moonlight. It’s about 15° high in the nor, nor east as the sky starts to grow light on June tonight, but it appears roughly 1° lower every day after that. The comet passes Capella on the 21st, and it’s very low by the 24th, when it passes through Auriga, the constellation named after the guest house not the guest house it self.. By now Comet McNaught may be as bright as 4th magnitude, but moonlight is returning.
Comet McNaught June 1oth.And Capella is the key to spotting the comet. Cappella is the brightest star in Auriga, the sixth brightest in the sky, and there’s really nothing else in the early low Northern sky at the moment, apart from the inevitable cloud that will make all this redundant. McNaught is moving towards Cappella up to the 21st. Find Cappella with binoculars and slowly move them eastward parallel to the horizon and you should find it, otherwise just scan randomly in the general area.
It’s quite a striking green, with a blue tail, pictures and a guide of course on the blog. Gas molecules of cyanogen (CN) and diatomic carbon (C2) in a comet's coma fluoresce green in sunlight. Ions of carbon monoxide (CO+) and carbon dioxide (CO2+) in the ion tail fluoresce blue. A comet's dust tail, on the other hand, simply reflects sunlight and is basically Sun-colored: pale yellow-white. This is clearly not a very dusty comet.
As for the planets no real change at all.
Mercury barely rises before the sun, so forget about it.
Mars still forms a striking pair with bluer Regulus in the late evening western sky.
Jupiter rises around 1 or 2 a.m. daylight saving time and shines high in the southeast before dawn.
Saturn (magnitude +1.1, in the head of Virgo) glows in the southwest during evening. The diagonal line of Saturn, Mars, and Venus is shrinking week by week. The three planets will bunch up low in the sunset in early August.
That was your night sky for the week ending on the 377th anniversary of the Catholic Church forcing Galileo to recant his view that the Sun, not the Earth, is the center of the Universe. He was wrong anyway, but it was a big step up the road.
It’s quite a striking green, with a blue tail, pictures and a guide of course on the blog. Gas molecules of cyanogen (CN) and diatomic carbon (C2) in a comet's coma fluoresce green in sunlight. Ions of carbon monoxide (CO+) and carbon dioxide (CO2+) in the ion tail fluoresce blue. A comet's dust tail, on the other hand, simply reflects sunlight and is basically Sun-colored: pale yellow-white. This is clearly not a very dusty comet.
As for the planets no real change at all.
Mercury barely rises before the sun, so forget about it.
Mars still forms a striking pair with bluer Regulus in the late evening western sky.
Jupiter rises around 1 or 2 a.m. daylight saving time and shines high in the southeast before dawn.
Saturn (magnitude +1.1, in the head of Virgo) glows in the southwest during evening. The diagonal line of Saturn, Mars, and Venus is shrinking week by week. The three planets will bunch up low in the sunset in early August.
That was your night sky for the week ending on the 377th anniversary of the Catholic Church forcing Galileo to recant his view that the Sun, not the Earth, is the center of the Universe. He was wrong anyway, but it was a big step up the road.
No comments:
Post a Comment