Very much the same in the pre midnight sky this week, in fact if you haven’t noticed yet, the sky shifts by a smidgen less then 7degrees to the west each week, or 360 degrees dived by 52 weeks. This is why we don’t get a great deal of change week by week. The planets give us a bit more variation because the obviously move against the fixed background of the sky.
Early Friday morning, if your one of the legion of listeners who live in the Western United States a pretty unimpressive star, Nu Pegasi, will be occulted for up to 1.2 seconds by the small asteroid 4569 Baerbel along a thin track (only 9 miles wide!) running from southernmost California through Arizona, Colorado, and the Dakotas. The star will be low in the southeast. But blink and you’ll miss it.
Summer almost upon us and we’re into the brightest 6 weeks of the year now which means the summer constellations are appearing Scorpio is up in the South East now. The brightest star in the east these nights is Vega. You can't miss it. Look for the little triangle-and-parallelogram pattern of the constellation Lyra dangling to its lower right.
We have a new moon tomorrow, so more spring tides.
The planets are a little better this week Saturn is a little West of South when it gets dark, and Saturn has a mate this week. Saturn and the star Porrima have now closed to 17 arc minutes of each other, practically as close as they will get. Although they look like neighbours, Saturn is only 76 light-minutes from Earth, while Porrima is 39 light-years in the background. That's more than a quarter million times farther away!
Low in the dawn, Mercury, Venus, Mars, and Jupiter continue drawing farther apart in a long diagonal line. Jupiter is the highest and easiest. Far to its lower left are faint Mars, then bright Venus, and then very-low Mercury, as shown in the scenes above. Bring binoculars for Mars and Mercury. If you’re up an hour before the sun look east Venus and Jupiter should be unmissable.
Now for some news about the Black Shadow’s deadly gamma ray space laser, apparently the chap who set up the orbital synchronous lock was a bit of a cowboy and Barbara’s doomsday machine is now sedately heading for a low lunar orbit which will render it useless. But I have been told by a very unreliable source that she is hoping to get it up and running in time for the next projected end of the world on October 21st, keep your fingers crossed.
And that was your nights sky for the week ending on the 167th anniversary of the founding of The Young Men's Christian Association.
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