Lest We Forget

The Geminid meteor shower which I for reasons I would rather keep out of the public domain I forgot to mention last week peaked on Monday but they will be around until Friday at least. Best viewing will be after midnight, but some meteors can be seen earlier. As the name suggests the radiant is in Gemini which is easily found up and a little to the left of Orion’s shoulders.

Mercury and Mars, are very close together on the western horizon at sunset but are both very dim and not worth the effort.

Venus which would be worth the effort except it rises so early blazes in the southeast before and during dawn. Venus rises some two hours before the first glimmer of dawn

Jupiter shines in the south to southwest during evening, the brightest star like point in the sky. We are gradually losing Jupiter now it’s setting around midnight.

Saturn (magnitude +0.8, in Virgo) rises around 2:30. and is well up the southeast before and during dawn, far upper right of brilliant Venus.

On Friday, look to the lower left of the Moon (by a little more than a fist-width at arm's length) for the delicate Pleiades star cluster. Below the Pleiades by a roughly similar distance is orange Aldebaran, the eye of the bull in Taurus.

And that was your night sky on 1941st anniversary of the end of the Year of the four emperors. Who were respectively Galba, Otho, Vitellius who sounds like an expensive yoghurt for people with more money than sense, and finally Vespasian who became the fourth Emperor of Rome within a year. First Galba, was assassinated, by Otho’s agents, Otho then ruled for 3 months until he topped himself, then Vitellius ruled for 8 months until he was beheaded and chucked in the Tiber, and finally Vespasian who by some sort of miracle died 10 years later of natural causes.