Skylights featured three times on Earth Science
Picture of the Day: 1
, 2
, 3
, 4
.
Photo of the Week.. The Sun and clouds combine to
send a beautiful ray pattern in the the air.
Astronomy news for the nine day period starting Friday, August
15, 2003.
Skylights will next appear on Sunday, August 24.
The Moon
wanes through its gibbous phase the early part of the week,
passing third quarter the night of Tuesday, August 19 amidst the
stars of Taurus in the
neighborhood of the Pleiades
(Seven Sisters) star cluster. Just a day before, it passes through
apogee,
where it is farthest from the Earth. As it moves through its
waning crescent phase, our companion glides to the north of Saturn the morning of Saturday, the 23rd, amidst
the bright stars of Gemini, the
two bodies making a beautiful sight, the ringed planet now rising
around 2:30 AM Daylight Time. The next morning the thinning
crescent will be to the right of the star Pollux.
This is a week for the three brightest planets, two of which are
quite invisible. On Monday the 18th, Venus
passes its superior conjunction with the Sun, where it is on the
other side, the Sun
in the middle. If you could see it, the planet would appear in its
full phase, the daytime side fully visible. Then on Friday the
22nd,
Jupiter also passes conjunction with the Sun. Though seemingly
together behind the Sun, Jupiter will be almost four times farther
than Venus. It is Mars
that really makes the impact on the nightly sky, however, as
the planet is now third in brightness, behind only the Sun and
Moon, and considerably brighter than the brightest star. Now
rising in the southeast during evening twilight, the planet is
nearing opposition to
the Sun on its
retrograde path through Aquarius, the tilt of its orbit taking it rather well
below the ecliptic. The actual opposition, marginally the closest
in tens of thousands of years, will take place on Thursday, the
28th, the actual closest approach on Wednesday, the 27th. As Mars
rises,
Mercury (almost as invisible as Venus) sets.
This is the season of the Dragon, portrayed by Draco, whose head is at its highest
point as evening falls. Look for the two stars (Rastaban and Eltanin) that represent its eyes,
the rest of the constellation sprawling to the northwest as it
winds between the Big and Little Dippers. South of Draco lie
the two great figures of Hercules
and Ophiuchus, who is wrapped by
another winding figure, Serpens,
the Serpent, while farther down stalks Scorpius, the Scorpion, which is filled with bright
blue and hot stars that make part of a huge loose "association" of
them that were born more or less at the same time. On the opposite
side of the sky, Orion is made
much the same way from stars that loosely associate with one
another.
