Photo of the Week. Jupiter in Aries (October 3, 2011), the triangle of stars to the
right (north).
Astronomy news for the week starting Friday, October 14, 2011.
A quiet week is in store with no big events, leading us to peaceful
contemplation of the stars. We
begin with the Moon waning in its
gibbous phase as it heads towards third
quarter the night of Wednesday, October 19, about or shortly before
the time of Moonrise in North America. Rising, it will make a fine sight to
the south of Castor and Pollux in Gemini. It thereafter wanes as a thinning crescent as it looks ahead to new
late next week. The morning of Thursday, October 20, the just-
past-quarter will take a bead on Mars,
appearing rather well to the west of the red planet, while on the
following morning they will rise with the Moon just a bit to the
southwest of Mars, the two in conjunction (the Moon six degrees to
the south) during the day on Friday the 21st.
Approaching its opposition to the Sun on Friday the 28th, Jupiter now rises in mid-evening twilight, is fully up by
the time the sky gets dark, and crosses the meridian to the south just half an hour
past local midnight (1:30 AM Daylight Time), almost exactly as Mars
rises in the east, the two near "quadrature" with one another (a
right angle apart). The red planet has now moved several degrees
to the east of the Beehive
cluster in Cancer, these two
having been in conjunction with each other last week. Though
slowly coming onto the evening scene, Venus, for now elusive, is
still setting in mid-twilight, while Saturn, just having gone through opposition
with the Sun, does not rise until shortly before sunrise and is
quite out of sight. Mercury sets
even earlier than Venus.
One thing to anticipate, though, is the Orionid meteor
shower (the debris of
Halley's Comet), which peaks the night of Friday the 21st and
the following morning, though the near-quarter-Moon will shine some
of them (typically 20 an hour) away.
The fall constellations are now
full upon us. Look in early evening to the east and to the rising
of the Great Square of
Pegasus, which comes up looking like a large diamond and
crosses high to the south around midnight. Pegasus, the Flying
Horse, is not the only one of its kind. To the southwest of the
Square lies the tiny, faint constellation of Equuleus, the Little Horse, making one wonder what
might have been in the minds of the ancients to make such a figure
out of it. Then passing nearly overhead, find the "W" of Cassiopeia, the Big Dipper, opposite the celestial Queen, more or
less out of sight as it swings beneath the pole. To the northeast
rises the bright, first magnitude harbinger of winter, Capella, of Auriga, the Charioteer.
