Stargazing 101: How to Enjoy the Night Sky

The transition of winter to spring not only warms our bones and give us a boost with the new life springing up around us, but it’s a great time to learn how to stargazer.

With some of the most recognizable constellations like Orion saying goodbye in the west, new ones are replacing them, including Leo the Lion, Bootes the Charioteer and the best appearance of the Big Dipper in the north.

So here are some real life tips on how to survive under the stars while learning about them.  Always remember, you are connecting with every human who has looked up on the celestial night and wondered why…no one owns the original when it comes to a star or the ancient constellations.

The practical necessities for stargazing are:

1. Star maps -- The heart of stargazing are maps of the unchanging stars and the imagined patterns they make.  You’ll need a road map to the night sky that will be a trusted friend.  Whether a wheeled planisphere (available at most nature museums or some bookstores) or charts from a library book, these tools will help you to become familiar with the constellations and bright stars that reappear for months at a time, year after year.  At www.starmaps.com, you can download and print for free a map with notes on plenty of places in the night sky to visit.  The two popular amateur magazines, Sky & Telescope and Astronomy, always have a monthly centerfold of the sky, and highlight what’s visible.  The magazines also have free websites to see their night sky reports, www.skypublishing.com and www.astronomy.com. Other fabulous resources for amateur astronomers are www.spaceweather.com, www.space.com and www.universetoday.com.

2. Red Flashlight – If you’re going to read and keep your night vision, you need a red light.  A red light is used because it doesn’t affect the eye’s sensors like white light, and you maintain a dilated pupil, allowing maximum night vision.  Use red cellophane on a regular flashlight, or paint the bulb red with fingernail polish.  And there are many battery powered lights with red filters available if you look around hardware and sporting goods.

3. Lounge chair – Oh, yeah.  You want to be comfortable.  Lying down in a comfortable lounge chair settles you in to look around the sky, sometimes concentrating on the right sight, other times the left side.  And you are able to look overhead easily and watch for faint satellites—which are more common than you may think!

4. Dress for night – The dip in night temperature creates a dew point when water in the atmosphere condenses as a liquid on everything.   Dew is the enemy of maps, binoculars and telescopes, which can get quite wet around the 2-5 am coldest part of the night. Putting your maps and gear on a table with an umbrella will keep them dry.  And you might need a light jacket, hoodie or a blanket to keep the chill of you.

MarQ photo

5. Computer planetarium program – It’s best to prepare for your night observing by reading your maps and looking at a desk top planetarium show of the night. The best planetarium program out there is the free Stellarium sky program.  Download it in less than 5 minutes at www.stellarium.com.  Play with all the features, in a few sessions of an hour or so you’ll have the program under your control.  You can go to any date in history—like your birthday or 2,000 years ago—and see what the night sky looked like!

6. Binoculars before a Telescope – There is a lot to see with just the naked eyes.  But adding binoculars of any kind will reveal fainter stars that might not be on basic beginner maps.  With binoculars, you can also begin to see some of the faint, fuzzy spots of light that are galaxies and nebula, as well as resolve some of the larger star clusters.  You don’t have to buy a telescope right away to enjoy the night sky, but when you do buy one, you want to get the biggest and best you can afford.

7. Snacks, beverages and the radio – Unless you’re stargazing with a friend, you’re going to get a little lonely—though neighborhood sounds will keep you alert.  A radio for music or late night talk shows will help pass the time.  And you probably will want to sip on a beverage and enjoy some snacks.  Get them on hand early in the observing so you don’t go inside and ruin your night vision.  And take periods of time walking around between lying in the lounge chair to keep you alert and your body awake.

8. Give Time some Time.   Stargazing is like an athletic event in some ways…the longer it goes on the more invigorated you get into what you’re doing. As your eyes adjust to the dark and stay that way after about 30 minutes, you start seeing the sky (as well as your night neighborhood) in ways you never imagined.  After about an hour of continuous looking around the sky, you’ve seen things like airplanes, satellites and maybe some strange lights!  And you’ve gotten used to looking at your star maps, then up at the constellations and bright stars that are your destination to find and remember. If you get two hours under your belt, well, you will find the night sky grip you.  In that amount of time, the stars you began looking at have shifted to the west and in the east there are new constellations and stars to see (maybe a planet or two) in the east.  It’s the continually changing parade of constellations and their treasures that keep you stargazing for hours.

MarQ photo

9. Make Notes and Photos – Keeping an observing log of your own “discoveries” is fun, and duplicates the steps all stargazers—amateur and professional—have taken in their quest for knowledge about the Universe.  And with today’s digital cameras with high sensitivity, it is easy after a little practice to photograph constellations and the Moon among the stars.

10. Read, read, and read – There is always something new being found among the stars above.  The libraries are full of great books that document the history of astronomy as well as how-to observe with and without telescopes.  And the Internet is an amazing resource for everything astronomical—just Google subjects at your heart’s desire.  And, of course, keep up weekly with what’s up in outer space by reading Stargazer MarQ!

TOTAL ECLIPSE OF MOON TUES APRIL 15

       The wee morning of April 15^th will have some excitement in the sky worth getting up for…a total eclipse of the Moon.

       The partial eclipse action begins at 1:58 am on that Tuesday morning when the first “bite” is taken out of the Full Moon, signaling our celestial neighbor is passing through the shadow Earth casts into space.

The total eclipse technically starts at 3:06 am when the entire Moon will be covered up inside our shadow, and remain so as it moves for the next 89 minutes. 

At 4:25 am, the total eclipse ends, the silvery light of the Moon beginning to be revealed again until the partial eclipse phase ends at 5:32 am.

LUNAR ECLIPSE IN THE PLEIADES 2003  Photo by MARQ

       During the totality phase, the bright Moon is rendered dark, and its exact hue is always unpredictable—from smoky dark to copper red.  This color is caused by the refraction of light in Earth’s atmosphere.  This coloration is given a scale of tints called the Danjon Scale, which you can judge for yourself.

       What is fascinating to watch are the stars that reappear as the bright moonlight is dimmed by Earth’s shadow. The starry background is centered with the Moon in Virgo, near the bright star Spica, with red Mars above and to the east, Saturn in Libra.

       The Moon eclipse technically begins when the orb touches the fainter cone of light the Earth throws into space, the penumbra, at 12:52 am.  That’s hard to detect with the naked eye, but a subtle change in the lunar brightness will lead to the partial eclipse phase when the Moon touches the Earth’s dark umbra beginning at 3:06 am.

       An eclipse of the Moon is the opposite of an eclipse of the Sun, when the Moon passes in front of our star.  Both celestial events happen twice a year somewhere in the world.  And finally, our North America gets to see the lights go out on the Moon—for the first time since 2008. 

Photo by MarQ

       A lunar eclipse is a great photo opportunity, even with a good “point-and-shoot” that has a long telephoto zoom.  Use a tripod, crank up the ISO sensitivity of the camera to 1,000 or more, and even use self timer to eliminate camera shake on exposures longer than 1/30^th of a second.   With the free digital images, take lots and spot check them.  But don’t delete any in the field; wait to see any astrophotos on a computer because even mistakes can be creative. 

       The eclipse of the Moon, or Sun, is always an exciting event in our modern world.  So imagine the near hysteria of civilizations hundreds and thousands of years ago, who didn’t understand the celestial motions creating the wonder.

Many ancient cultures figured out that the Moon is repeating its eclipse times and locations every 18 years, 11 days and 8 hours.  This period is called a Saros. So after each lunar eclipse, in 6,585.32 days, the alignment of the Earth between the Sun and Moon will be exactly the same. Incredibly, the ancient Babylonians in about 200 BC figured this out and maybe the Egyptians a thousand years earlier. The April 15^th lunar eclipse is “member 56 of 75 of Saros 122,” which began on Aug. 14, 122 AD and ends Oct. 29, 2338, when a totally new Saros cycle begins. 

This April 15, 2014 lunar eclipse is also the Full Moon that determines the date for Easter. The formula for determining Easter Sunday is: Easter is the first Sunday after the first Full Moon that occurs after the Vernal Equinox.  Easter is Sunday April 20 because the Full Moon on April 15^th was the first full phase after the March 20^th first day of Spring.   

So much mythology and god worshiping has been associated with the near mystical change of the Moon for a brief time.  Human sacrifices, initiations and secret meetings all are part of the folklore and legends of lunar eclipses. Here are a few:

·      Ancient China cultures believed a three-legged frog was eating the Moon, and the Aztecs thought it was being devoured by a jaguar. Other cultures have all kinds of other animals eating the Moon, than sometimes vomiting it back up.

·      A lunar eclipse proceeded the fall of Constantinople May 29, 1453. The blow to Christendom as the Ottoman Empire sacked the famous sea port lasted until World War I.

·      A 2004 lunar eclipse also fell on the night that the Boston Red Sox won their first Baseball World Series since 1918, breaking a losing streak that started with the trade of Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees.  That eclipse was even seen by fans as totality was from 10:23 to 11:45 pm.  

·      Christopher Columbus saved his live and that of his crew when he scared the aggressive natives of Jamaica by making the Moon “disappear” on March 1, 1504.  The famous explorer knew a lot of astronomy, and was aware of the predictions of lunar and solar eclipses.

During this April 15^th middle-of-the-night lunar eclipse there will be the bright, bluish star Spica below the Moon, and to the far right will be the red planet Mars.  The color of Mars and the potentially reddish total eclipsed Moon would be a nice contrast around the 4 am hour.

The color during totality from 3:08—4:23 am will be determined by the Earth’s atmosphere, not anything to do with the Moon itself.  Ash from volcanoes, man-made pollution and forest fires put particulates in the air, and when the sunlight filters through it, there can be tints of colors. 

   There is even a brightness scale proposed by Andre-Louis Danjon in 1921.  Bearing his name, the Danjon Scale is denoted by an L:

L=0 Very dark eclipse with the Moon almost invisible

L=1 Dark eclipse that is gray or brownish in color

L=2 Deep red or rust-colored eclipse.  Very dark central shadow with brighter edges

L=3 Brick-red eclipse, sometimes with a yellowish rim

L=4 Very bright copper red or orange eclipse, and there can be a bright, bluish rim.

Set the alarm clock, loose a little sleep, and go out under the Moon and watch its light be dimmed as it slips in and out of Earth’s shadow.

You can watch the celestial action from the comfort a lawn chair with a pair of binoculars and some snacks. Can determine your own “L” brightness and color on the Danjon Scale, and even take some great photos of the lunar eclipse.  Then compare your results the next day with those posted on such websites as Space Weather, Space, Astronomy, Sky and Telescope, and Universe Today.

We’ll have another total eclipse on Oct. 8, but totality begins when the Moon is setting in the morning sky.  So this is a special lunar eclipse that will worth losing sleep over. 

True Pioneer Robot Headin’ to Taurus
 

       A calling card from Earth is silently heading to the bright, red star in our winter night sky, a true pioneer of mankind’s first steps into interplanetary exploration.

       Pioneer 10 was the first man-made object to pass through the asteroid belt, visit Jupiter and eventually leave the Solar System.

       Launched on March 3, 1972, the TRW-built spacecraft had its switch flipped off on March 31, 1997 when it was about 6 billion miles from Earth.  A few telemetry downloads were squeezed out of Pioneer 10 in 2002 when it was 7.5 billion miles from our Sun, simply a very bright star from that distance.

       Forty-three years after it was sent to the stars, Pioneer 10 is silent as it travels at 27,000 miles per hour in interstellar space.  It is headed toward Aldebaran in Taurus the Bull, the “V-shaped” constellation with the red star that is easy to see in our autumn to early spring night skies.

Today, Pioneer 10 is more than 10 billion miles from the Sun, whose light takes more than 15 hours to reach the spacecraft. Pioneer 10 will take 2 million years to reach Aldebaran, a bloated, red giant of a star, 68 Light Years away.

       But if along the way to Aldebaran aliens snag this strange contraption with the nine foot communications disk, they’ll learn a lot about earthlings.  Welded to the satellite frame is a special plaque that was a bit controversial in the early 1970s for graphically portraying a naked man and woman. 

       The brainchild of astronomer Carl Sagan, this 6x9 inch gold-ionized aluminum plaque was engraved with scientific notation and the image of a man, woman and the Pioneer 10 spacecraft behind them for scale. The outrage of the line drawing showing the man’s penis and woman’s breasts overshadowed the real reason—so aliens know what we look like, where we came from and what our world is made of. 

       The data was ingeniously etched with simple notation in scientific language. There is a chart of our Solar System and Pioneer 10’s left turn at Jupiter and out to interstellar space.

The plaque uses binary code of 0s and 1s for language, the universal hydrogen atom as a yardstick, and the position of 14 “pulsars” in the sky as a bulls-eye to our Sun. The pulsars are the radial lines with their coordinates in binary, the logic being any advanced aliens would know these sites of mega energy output. Pulsars are small neutron stars that emit high energy waves in beams, like a cosmic lighthouse.  

But it was the blatant display of human sex organs that got the ire of some public moral advocates.  Letters to the editors of newspapers who published the Pioneer plaque called it pornographic and obscene.  There was criticism by some religious groups for the lack of a reference to “God” among the clever scientific notation.

Pioneer was a series of NASA satellites that explored the Moon and Venus in the 1960s, each mission a new test for equipment and experiments.  When it was realized that the outer planets would be lined up for a “Grand Tour” by spacecraft in the 1970s, Pioneer 10 to Jupiter and Pioneer 11 to Jupiter and Saturn became the first to push the envelope.  Eventually, Voyager 1 would go to Jupiter and Saturn, and Voyager 2 would complete the “Grand Tour” to Uranus and Neptune in the 1980s.

       The Pioneer 10 was a true pioneer in many ways, including its design.  Because solar panels were no good so far away from the Sun, interplanetary spacecraft need a nuclear source of fuel. And because of radiation effecting scientific instruments, these “RTG” power sources are placed on long booms, away from the main core “bus” of a satellite.

       When launched by an Atlas-Centaur rocket, Pioneer 10 reached a then-high 31,000 mph.  The gravity of Jupiter and its moons changed the velocity of the spacecraft, but nothing in the void of space allows a resistance to the current speed of 26,000 mph. That’s 230 million miles a year.

        Pioneer 10’s sister craft, Pioneer 11, also has an identical etched plaque.  And on the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecrafts of the 1980s, an actual gold record, complete with a needle, were place aboard with images, music and important written words included to explain Earth, humans and our Solar System.

       Voyager 1 actually eclipsed the distance of Pioneer 10, though launched 5 years later in 1977. Voyager 1 is traveling at 10,000 mph faster and has hit 12 billion miles from the Sun—in the minus -200 F. degree void of interstellar space.

       These four stellar voyagers have all left the Solar System and are traveling to the stars. They will soon be joined by NASA’s New Horizon, headed to Pluto in July 2015, then beyond to other “dwarf planets” in the unexplored Kuiper Belt of small bodies circling the Solar System.  Aboard New Horizon are a few messages from its builders, as well as some ashes of 1930 Pluto discoverer Clyde Tombaugh.

 These five American spacecraft are headed to the stars, their design alone a testament to the intelligent creatures that sent them.   

       The message in a bottle that the famous Pioneer and Voyager contain may outlive the Earth itself. Image a civilization actually finding Pioneer 10 and realizing they are the ones who are not alone!  

       Spring Equinox a Welcome Change in Weather

       Spring will finally officially be sprung this Thursday, March 20th as our part of the Earth begins tilting toward our life-sustaining star.

       It’s easy to appreciate the change in seasons, but hard to understand why the weather changes from cold to hot to cold again. In fact, it’s just in the last 400 years that humans have figured out the rhythm of our seasons.

       Seasons happen only because the Earth is a little whacked over on its side.  Instead of spinning like a toy top straight up and down, Earth is tilted 23.5 degrees with a little wobble.  Something whacked us good in the early days of our Solar System, maybe ripping the Moon out of our sides.  And it’s the Moon’s gravity that keeps us tilted the way we are, otherwise, we’d keep wobbling all over the place! We do wobble a little, completing a circle every 26,000 years—and changing North Pole stars in the process.    

       The physics of the seasons is this:  in the Summer our Northern Hemisphere is tilted toward the Sun, and in the Winter we are tilted away.  Sunlight is hotter when striking a surface more direct than at an angle.  Just feel the sun rays on your skin at 10 am, than again at 1 pm.  The higher the Sun angle, the hotter, like around mid-day. 

       That’s what’s happening this week, as Earth reaches a point in its orbit when the angle is between Winter and Summer.  Called the equinoxes, the Spring and Autumn events welcome an equal day and night, with daylight getting longer as the Sun’s arc climbs higher northward. 

       At the Vernal Equinox, the Sun crosses the imaginary line of the ecliptic from the south side to the north, and the Sun is directly overhead at noon. At precisely 12:57 pm DST, the Sun is directly overhead at the Earth's equator. The Sun's daily arch will continue northward, reaching its farthest point north around June 21, the Summer Solstice. The farthest point southward of the Sun's arch against the celestial sphere is the Winter Solstice, around Dec. 21^st.  In between are the Spring and Autumn equinoxes. On Earth, the point where the Sun reaches these points are called the Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn—each 23.5 degrees from the equator.

       So, during Winter, our hemisphere is tilted away from the Sun, the indirect rays not being very warm.  But as we move in our orbit and begin to nod toward the Sun, we warm up.  Keep in mind that the Southern Hemisphere experiences just the opposite seasons—so our Vernal Equinox is the first day of Autumn “Down Under” in Australia.

       People find it hard to believe that the Earth is actually farther away from the Sun in the summer, and closer to the Sun in the winter.

       That’s because we live with a Northern Hemisphere bias. The Earth will be farthest from the Sun, called aphelion, on July 3 at 94.5 million miles.  We’re closest to the Sun, perihelion, in the first week of January at around 91.3 million miles. 

Now, a few facts about our Sun, after all, it’s the star of this Vernal Equinox show!

       Just an average star in many ways, our Sun is 865,370 miles across and is basically 99 per cent hydrogen. The Sun is so huge that is contains 99.86 per cent of everything in our Solar System.  Incredibly, all the eight planets, all their moons, tens of thousands of asteroids and millions of comets make up just 0.14 per cent of the mass in our star family!

       So, how hot is the Sun?  The surface temperature is around 10,000 degrees F.  But the center, where nuclear fission splits hydrogen atoms into stellar energy, the temperatures must approach 50 million degrees F. 

       The surface we see of the Sun, the photosphere, is granular like boiling oatmeal.  Electromagnetic storms create the dark and cooler sunspots, and flames of hydrogen lick off the surface, taking three days to reach Earth.  These solar gases are magnetically drawn to the magnetic poles of planets Earth, Jupiter and Saturn and create glowing crowns of aurora.

Sun in Hydrogen Light by Solar Dynamics Observatory

       The Sun rotates once every 33 days with some variances at different latitudes.  Like all stars, it emits many dangerous wavelengths of energy like ultraviolet and x-rays, most are blocked out by our atmosphere.  But some of the UV rays sneak through; toasting gently our skin if exposed too long.

       Nothing travels faster than light, and those sunrays leave the surface of our favorite star at 186,000 miles a second, or about 670 million miles in an hour. Traveling the 93 million miles from the Sun’s surface to Earth takes more than 9 minutes. So when you’re laying on the beach soaking up the Sun, you are looking back in time at our star. 

       Want to see the Sun close up? It is being watched every minute of every day by four powerful space satellites and several major solar observatories on Earth.  Check out the World Wide Web for the McMath-Pierce Solar Telescope at Kitt Peak in Arizona and Big Bear Solar Observatory in California.

In outer space are observatories in a permanent orbit a million miles ahead of the Earth and a million miles behind us at the “Lagrangian Points”. The two unique satellites revealing each side of the Sun are simply called Stereo A and Stereo B. The die-hard sun watcher is the orbiting Solar Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), which began working in 1996 on a two-year mission that has lasted more than 18 years.

But the real workhorse watching the Sun is the Solar Dynamic Observatory, costing $2 billion and providing the most detailed look at the Sun with its special instruments.  All these great solar observatories have websites devoted to their images, and many are pictures of beauty as well as scientific data. Another great website to daily follow the Sun is Space Weather, which monitors the solar activity in layman’s terms.

       Enjoy our favorite star as it climbs higher in the sky each day, bringing Spring warmth and new vegetative growth to our Northern Hemisphere. And don’t forget to lather up with the sunscreen!

Jupiter is One Crazy Planet

“Now that she’s back in the atmosphere

With drops of Jupiter in her hair,

hey, hey, hey.”   

              Train  “Drops of Jupiter”

No way would any girl want drops of Jupiter in her hair! 

The super-cold hydrogen clouds would freeze her, or the liquid metallic hydrogen surrounding its core mantle would melt her.

But it’s okay to mesmerize her with the sights of Jupiter…just look up at the bright planet Jupiter directly overhead at dark.  The king of the planets is wandering through Gemini Twins, and will be with us through the Spring of 2014.

Jupiter from the Hubble Space Telescope

With any telescope, the giant planet can be seen as a flattened disk with four, star-like moons surrounding it. Two dark bands and grey polar caps are easy to see, and with a serious backyard telescope the detail is amazing.

Jupiter has three times the mass of all the other planets combined—yet it is 1,000 times smaller than the Sun. To put the gigantic size in another way, every planet, moon and asteroid in the Solar System can comfortably fit inside the globe.

There is probably no solid surface to Jupiter.  Most of the 88,800-mile diameter globe is filled with an exotic mixture of – 100 degrees F. cold liquid hydrogen and helium. 

Deep inside the gravity pressure cooker of Jupiter, there may be an Earth-size rocky or liquid core of metallic hydrogen spinning many times a minute.  This creates an electric dynamo, making Jupiter emit more radiation than it receives from the Sun.

One of the many amazing discoveries by NASA’s Galileo spacecraft from 1995-2003 was the intense radiation belts around Jupiter that electrify the surrounding space to a million degrees hot! 

If we could see this electromagnetic system around the “star” Jupiter when looking up tonight, it would be a circle as big as our Full Moon! The NASA spacecraft Juno is headed to Jupiter to study this incredible, high-energy environment.

      The high-altitude hydrogen clouds we see in a telescope are only 5,000 miles thick at the most, just a fraction of the planet’s 44,432-mile radius.

      These cloud tops are an incredibly cold -230 degrees below zero.  And Jupiter has a thin, ropy ring girdling its equator like a hoola-hoop—first discovered by the 1970s Voyager space craft that NASA sent whizzing by. 

      The official moon count is reaching 70 as small, asteroid-like ones are added by advanced research. 

      The Jovian moons we see in a telescope are the same one’s discovered by Galileo in 1610.  Callisto and Ganymede are icy moons larger than the planet Mercury. 

IO, EUROPA, GANYMEDE & CALLISTO

      Two moons, Io and Europa are active worlds in their own right. Both are about the size of Earth’s own Moon.  Io has at least 30 volcanoes spewing sulfuric material into the inner space of Jupiter. Europa is a prime sign for extraterrestrial life in our Solar System.  Europa’s icy surface is fractured with signs of the liquid water heated underneath the alien surface features. Planetary scientists have lobbied NASA for years to provide funds to send a spacecraft to Europa and probe beneath the ice for life.  

The other moons of Jupiter range in size from 1,000 miles to 10 miles in diameter, many with irregular shapes and different compositions.  Some can be seen in serious backyard telescopes. 

Through even the cheapest backyard telescopes, you can watch the four Galilean moons move from side to side of the planet. The moons pass in front of or go behind planet and disappear for a while.  Sometimes all four moons are one side. This Jovian celestial ballet is predictable for centuries in advance.

Though huge in size, Jupiter’s clouds roar around the globe once every 10 hours on the average.  The rotation is so quick it flattens the planet! And inside the clouds are giant cyclones, like the huge Great Red Spot, three times the size of Earth and visible for more than 300 years.  There are intense electrical storms, and incredible aurora at both magnetic poles.   

THE GREAT RED SPOT

Jupiter is located next to the asteroid belt and its immense gravitational influence actually sucks in passing comets and errant asteroids.

That means that Jupiter is taking hits for the inner planets of the Solar System, our Earth included.  Once a rare event to record, amateur astronomers are now recording two or three hits on Jupiter each year with their automated backyard telescopes and digital video cameras.

Just look around the solid bodies of the Solar System and one sees the damage done by violent impacts that mostly occurred in the first quarter of our 4 billion year existence. 

Our Moon alone has more than 100,000 visible impacts, and the planet Mercury is also densely covered with craters.  Natural erosion on Venus and our Earth has wiped away all but the most recent impacts.  On Mars, its less dynamic atmosphere has allowed many crater impacts to still be visible.

      Just like the dramatic impact scars caused by the 1994 comet collision, something struck Jupiter's backside July 19^th causing a supersonic reaction with the atmosphere that created an energy explosion equivalent to dozens of atomic bombs. 

      Yes, if that cosmic debris had impacted Earth, there would be a global catastrophe no matter whether it hit the land or ocean.

      And right at this moment, there are 1,067 Near Earth Asteroids (NEAR) in orbit about the Sun that could smack into us.  They are being monitored by NASA...we hope!  You can check them out at www.spaceweather.com.

      And you can check out all the amazing spacecraft photos and latest news about Jupiter on many websites, including NASA and Jet Propulsion Lab. 

Reconnect with Antiquity Amid the Starry Sky  

“The sad and solemn night

Hath yet her multitude of cheerful fires;

The glorious host of light

Walk the dark hemisphere till she retires;

All through her silent watches, gliding slow,

Her constellations come,

and climb the heavens, and go.” 

                       William Cullen Bryant circa 1860                                                                                                                                                                             

       A moonless week like this one is what turns people on to amateur astronomy by appealing to the genetic, celestial DNA that seems to flow through mankind.

       And if you go out and recognize the mighty Orion the Hunter taking command of the night, you are well on the way to being an amateur astronomer.

       To gaze upon the stars, the Moon and planets is to make a connection with every human being who has looked up at the dazzling night sky and wondered.

       That’s because when it comes to the pattern of stars tossed the sky, no one owns the original.  These are the same stars of Orion—or Taurus or Gemini—that all people who’ve walked the Earth have laid their eyes upon.

Ancient Zodiac Mosaic

       It’s exciting for me to think about not just great astronomers like Galileo and Copernicus looking at these same stars. But people like the Julius Caesar, Cleopatra, Jesus and the Egyptian builders of the pyramids, all saw the same stars I do tonight.

       There are 6,000 or so stars seen with the naked eye from both hemispheres of Earth, and their positions have changed very little during the 10,000 years of civilized man.

       To the stargazers over the centuries, these patterns of stars have become friendly acquaintances whose positions give us a sense of time and familiarity with the seasons.

       Monuments like Stonehenge were built to the rhythm of the stellar seasons, while civilizations worshiped the sighting of certain stars which seemed to trigger the time to plant or harvest.  And then there are the mystical events that often terrorized ancient people when the Sun disappeared behind the Moon, and the Moon disappears in the Earth’s shadow—the total solar and lunar eclipses.

       Even though each star in the night is moving through the Universe at speeds around 30,000 mph, the distance between the stars is so vast that it takes millions of years to see any change in the familiar constellations.   

       So, nothing seen tonight in 2014 is any different than what Moses of The Bible saw thousands of years ago. Confucius was inspired by the same stars that the writers of the Psalms when they so beautifully penned the praises to the Creator.

       “The heavens declare the Glory of God; and the firmament showeth His handiwork.”  Psalm 19:1

Photo by MarQ

       After years of watching the parade of constellations rise and set, a history of people, places and things become engrained in the subconscious of the avid stargazer. And it is those memories, like seeing distant relatives, which draws me to the stars, no matter what time of year.

       But Winter is always special, as the brightest stars and boldest constellation patterns are on display.  Many of the brightest stars of the night have distinctly Arabic names, kept by the star-mappers over antiquity.

       Orion’s shoulders are Betelgeuse and Bellatrix; his knees are Rigel and Saiph. The three stars of the distinctly angled belt of the giant hunter are, from left to right, Alnitak, Alnilam and Mintaka.

The name of each bright star adds to the personality of the night sky. Let your imagination run wild as you realize each star is like a human—a specific size and temperament—each star with its own alien planets and their moons, as well as possible comets, asteroids and other objects yet unknown.

These are also the winter nights to behold the brightest star of all, Sirius, well below Orion and also called the “Dog Star” in the Big Dog, Canis Major. And way above it is Procyon, in the Little Dog, Canis Minor. 

       Above Orion is the “V”-shaped stars making the horns of Taurus the Bull, one of the oldest recognized star patterns going back to forgotten civilizations.  The animal’s eye is reddish Aldebaran, “The Follower.” Just what this star is following is in the Bull’s shoulder, the cluster of Seven Sisters, or The Pleiades, a source of celestial folklore from the Chinese to the Native North Americans. Another fainter star cluster, The Hyades is at the point of the “V,” and they are the half-sisters of The Pleiades in mythology.

       A purely Roman constellation is above Orion and another ancient one.  Founding brothers of Rome, mythical Castor and Pollux head the side by side string of stars making up Gemini the Twins. 

       A Greek man with a strange name of Auriga is the inventor of the chariot.  And he is immortalized by a lopsided wheel shape group of stars. Auriga’s brightest star, Capella, is a yellow one.

       Different cultures in different eras of mankind have arranged the stars and given them names in their native tongues. Whole cultures have put the stars into patterns that immortalize their gods and heroes.  Today, the names of 88 constellations are universally agreed upon, as are the stars names on the modern celestial charts.

       The patterns of the constellations look the way they are only from our perspective in the Solar System. 

       From any planet or object orbiting our Sun, the constellations look the same.  But if we rocketed to the nearest stars, that would change the perspective and alter the familiar dot-to-dot patterns. 

       Connecting those points of light into arbitrary formations have merely served as landmarks to navigate the celestial realm as seen from Earth. Some stars are near, some are far, but seen side-by-side they make up patterns that are given borders by their specific sky coordinates.  

Photo by MarQ

       Modern light pollution has robbed the night of its faintest stars once seen by the naked eye. Few of us can see the Milky Way from our own suburban backyards.  And the number of stars realistically seen from an average neighborhood is maybe half of what it was just 50 years ago.

       When someone gets in the country or mountains on a dark, moonless night and takes the time to look up, their dark adapted eyes can leave them breathless with the splendor of the night.

       The many multitudes of stars that can be seen from a dark observing sight gives the 21^st Century stargazer a hint at what could be seen in the night sky just 200 years ago when there was no electricity.  For thousands of years, the skies were so dark for civilized cultures to ponder.  Modern man can hardly imagine the impact.  The false science of astrology is one lasting influence. 

       Again, unlike the Mona Lisa painting in the Louvre, or the statute of the Pieta at the Vatican, no one owns the original when it comes to the night vault of stars overhead.

       They are there for the asking, ready for you to examine, marvel at or mediate upon. 

       Looking up, like every person who has walked the Earth, gives you some cosmic connection to be enjoyed and cherished.

       And this moonless Winter week is a terrific time to make that connection…something I’ll be enjoying, and hope you will, too.  

      

      

       Martians Messin’ With NASA Rover? 

              A true Martian “now you don’t see it, and now you do” bit of mystery is fueling the alien conspiracy experts demanding an answer to who left a jelly doughnut right in front of Mars rover Opportunity.

       Even Star Trek renowned actor William Shatner has publically asked NASA what’s up with the mystery rock on Mars. Shatner poised the question via Twitter during a NASA press conference on Opportunity’s latest discovery.

       “Have you ruled out Martian rock throwers?” tweeted Shatner, whose role as Capt. Kirk on the Starship Enterprise is one of Hollywood’s iconic characters.  

       To get you up to speed, while perched in its stationary winter position, Opportunity photographed the rocks near it one day, and 12 days later on Jan. 8 a mystery rock appeared.  The white rock has a red center, and is about the size and shape of a jelly doughnut. The information has made its rounds in the UFO circles, fueling the Internet with all kinds of speculation.

       Mars Rover lead scientist Steve Squyres said the object, called “Pinnacle Rock,” is just that, a stony rock—but unlike any seen before. The space scientist thinks the rock is flipped over, exposing an underside that might not have seen sunlight for millions of years. Squyres answered actor Shatner’s tweet by saying he’d look out for any Martians. 

       Conspiracy writer Rhawn Joseph, has filed a suit against NASA for withholding information about the obviously alien object. The advocate of extraterrestrial life says the Martian rock is a living thing that is growing, like a fungus. In papers filed in a Florida court, Joseph calls for NASA to thoroughly examine the object.  This is exactly what they are doing. 

What is it?

       Keep in mind, this new, “now you see it, yesterday you didn’t” Martian rock is in front of Opportunity, an old rover.  The new rover, Curiosity, is on the other side of Mars in an ancient stream bed at the base of a mountain.

The facts so far and NASA’s best hunch as to what’s happen:

       Analysis with Opportunity’s arm of scientific instruments shows the rock to be nothing like any rocks sampled before. And it literally appeared out of nowhere.  Analysis has shown the rock contains twice the amount of magnesium than any other on Mars. It also has sulfur and manganese—all components of volcanic activity like occurred on Mars two billion years ago.

       Hunches where the Martian “jelly doughnut” came from are:

       -- One of the many frequent dust devils in this part of Mars deposited it Wizard of Oz style.  These tiny twisters have cleaned off the solar panels of Opportunity many times, allowing the batteries to recharge.

       -- The stone is debris from a nearby meteor impact that happened between Opportunity’s Martian days 3,528 and 3,540;

-- The rock was kicked out of one of six wheels of the golf cart-sized Opportunity.  Maybe it’s been stuck awhile during the amazing rover’s 25-mile, 10 year trek across a once wet lake;

-- Aliens left it as a subtle message to mess with us humans on Earth. Don’t laugh. There are extraterrestrial investigators that are dead serious about this. .

This isn’t one of those trick-of-the-light mirages that perpetuated the phony “Face on Mars” hysteria of the 1980s.  That famous image by the 1976 Viking 1 orbiter has been photographed dozens of times by the sophisticated orbiters of the 21^st Century and revealed to be nothing more than an interesting rocky plateau.

"Face on Mars" plateau various lighting  NASA photo

As for what this Martian mystery rock will turn out to be, the verdict is still out. And Steve Squires and his team of Mars experts at Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, California are on top of it, in full view of the media and social network. Thus the Jan. 23^rd press conference on Facebook and Twitter.  What was a promised 3-month job for Opportunity’s guaranteed life expectancy has turned into a decade of incredible information gathering.

Opportunity has not moved in six weeks as it waits for the Martian Summer Solstice this week on Feb. 15 and warmer weather to recharge its batteries for power to the wheels.  It is at the rim of a large crater named Endeavour.

Opportunity and its shadow

Mars has become a familiar home to a core group of less than 50 planetary scientists around the world.  They’ll figure it out…but it probably won’t satisfy those alien advocates.  Look for more news at your local grocery store rack of National Enquirer and Globe.