SKYLIGHTS
Astronomy news for the week starting Friday, June 1, 2001.
The next Skylights will appear Sunday, June 10. The Moon passes
through its full phase this week, when it is opposite the Sun, on
Tuesday, June 5. It will on that day rise near sunset and set near
sunrise. Thereafter, it begins to thin through its waning gibbous
phase. The night of June 5 the Moon will appear up and to the
right of the planet Mars, while the following night it will have
moved to appear up and to the left of the red planet. As we
approach the beginning of summer in the northern hemisphere, when
the Sun will be as far north as it can get (and as high as it can
get for northerners), this full Moon will be the year's second-most
southerly, the "Rose Moon" rising in the southeast, setting in the
southwest.
The brightest and dimmest planets (as seen from Earth) make the
rest of the planetary news. Venus, very slightly dimming, reaches
its greatest elongation west, when it is 46 degrees to the west of
the Sun. This lovely planet, third only to the Sun and Moon in
apparent brightness, now rises in the east just ahead of morning
twilight. Even though the angle between it and the Sun now
decreases, however, Venus will continue to rise earlier, and until
mid-August into ever darker skies. Earliest Venus-rise will occur
around mid-July. At the same time, dim Pluto, not visible without
a good-sized telescope, is in opposition to the Sun the night of
Monday, June 4. When the Moon reaches its full phase, it will lie
roughly 10 degrees below the frigid outer planet, which some take
not to be a planet at all. In truth, Pluto appears to be some kind
of hybrid object that bridges the gap between the outer planets and
the building blocks (the comets) that created them. Apparently
there was just not enough raw material in these distant reaches of
the Solar System to make a respectable planet like Neptune or
Uranus.
The early evening presents us with the tail of the longest
constellation in the sky, Hydra , the Water Serpent, which wraps
itself a third of the way around the celestial sphere. Find
Corvus, the Crow, a small irregular box of stars that for
northerners appears rather low in the south around 9 PM. The top
two stars point leftward to Spica in Virgo, while the bottom two
point to otherwise un-named Gamma Hydrae, the next-to-the-last
bright star (such as it is) that lies in the celestial snake.
Snakes of some sort are quite popular, others being summer's
Serpens (the Serpent), which comes in two parts, the southern
hemisphere's Hydrus (another water snake), and, if you wish to
stretch the definition a bit, the northern hemisphere's Draco, the
Dragon, whose tail winds between the Dippers.
