Skylights featured three times on Earth Science
Picture of the Day: 1
, 2
, 3
, 4
.
Photo of the Week.. Remembering winter's Orion makes it feel more like
spring. The Winter Triangle of
Betelgeuse (near center), Sirius (lower center), and Procyon (lower left) occupies the
lower left quadrant of the picture. The bright object to upper
left is Jupiter, which was passing through Gemini at the time.
Astronomy news for the week starting Friday, May 6, 2005.
The Moon goes through "new" this week on the morning of Sunday, May
8, when it passes more or less between us and the Sun (actually a bit
south of it, thus avoiding an eclipse),
rendering it invisible for a time. The morning of Saturday the 7th
the Moon will appear as a very thin waning crescent low in eastern
dawn, but very difficult to see. By the evening of Sunday the 8th
it will have switched sides to the west, but will be even thinner
and near-impossible to find. By the evening of Monday the 9th,
however, you will have no difficulty spotting it in fading
twilight.
If you look early enough, you might use the Moon as a guide to find
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap040610.html">Venus, which on
the evening of the 9th will be down below the Moon and just above the
horizon. Now beginning to encroach on the evening sky, Venus will
slowly climb the western evening sky, and will be nicely visible by
the end of the month. Moving easterly through Taurus, its nighttime side awash
with earthlight, the growing
crescent passes just below Elnath
(Beta Tauri) the evening of Tuesday the 10th and then heads toward
Saturn in
Gemini, which it will approach
the night of Thursday, May 12.
Ever so slowly, by nightfall the ringed planet slips deeper into
western skies. Crossing a benchmark of sorts, Saturn now sets at
local midnight (1 AM Daylight Time). It is nicely replaced,
however, by giant
Jupiter, which is high in the southeast as darkness overtakes
the sky and crosses the meridian to the south around 10:30 PM
Daylight Time. Though rising before sunset, Jupiter is still
effectively with us all night, as it does not set until after the
beginning of dawn. From about 3 AM (Daylight) on, it shares the
sky with Mars,
which is still well ahead of Earth
in orbit, and is rapidly moving to the east against the stars of
eastern Aquarius to the south of
the constellation's "Water Jar."
The Moonless sky may help you find all the stars of Ursa Minor's Little Dipper, which in
early evening is reaching out to the east of Polaris (the North Star) and nicely
set for viewing. Polaris and
the front bowl stars Kochab and Pherkad, are easy to see: look
roughly half way up to the north. The other stars of the handle,
though, are faint and tough to pick out, while the southeastern
corner of the bowl is even more difficult. Once found, though it is
charming indeed. Halfway between the Little Dipper's bowl and the
Big Dipper's handle, find Thuban,
Alpha Draconis, which around 2700 BC served as the pole star, as
the precession (wobble) in the
Earth's axis takes the pole on a 47-degree-across circle around the
northern sky.
