Photo of the Week. A powerful hidden electrical
discharge lights the clouds of a thunderhead 60 miles away, See
full resolution.
Astronomy news for the two weeks starting Friday, September
29, 2016.
The next skylights will appear October 7, 2016.
The Moon begins in its third quarter the
morning of Friday, September 23, and after slimming as a waning crescent it passes new at the end of
the month, then grows through its waxing
crescent phase, which does not end until first quarter on the evening of
Saturday, October 8. You can see
a marvelous pairing of the thin waning crescent with Mercury in eastern twilight the morning of
Thursday the 29th, the planet a bit to the left. On the other side
of the sky, the waxing crescent will make a similar, though not as
close, a pair with Venus, the
bright planet down and to the left of the Moon. The following
evening finds the growing crescent between Venus and Saturn, and
then on the evening of Wednesday the 5th the moon will be directly
to the right of the ringed planet, with the star Antares below. The Moon then heads
towards Mars,
which it will pass as our next fortnight begins. The Moon goes
through apogee, where it
is farthest from the Earth, on Thursday the 4th.
While Venus, Saturn, and Mars make a lovely progression up and to
the left in the southwestern evening sky, after a long and
beautiful run through southern Leo,
Jupiter finally goes through conjunction with the Sun on Monday
the 26th. We'll soon see it in the eastern morning sky. Mercury
reaches its greatest western elongation on Wednesday the 28th,
when it rises just as morning twilight begins, while at the far
reaches of the Solar System, Pluto ceases retrograde motion against the background
stars of Sagittarius and begins moving slowly eastward. Once Mars
sets around 11 PM Daylight Time, the sky is free of ancient
planets until dawn.
As the Big Dipper descends into
the northwest, the Little Dipper
stands high on its handle balanced on the North Star, Polaris. Between the two lies the
tail of Draco, the Dragon,
which, after winding around the Little Dipper, looks to the south
with its fearsome head examining the region between Hercules and Vega in Lyra, rather oddly in the direction in which the Sun
is moving through the swarm of local stars.
