Skylights featured three times on Earth Science
Picture of the Day: 1
, 2
, 3
, 4
.
Photo of the Week.. The wonderful auraural --
northern lights -- display of November 7, 2004, fills the sky with
electrical color. Gemini, Saturn
below it, rises at lower right. See another view.
Astronomy news for the week starting Friday, November 19, 2004.
Since last week fully held the waxing crescent
Moon, this one holds the waxing
gibbous. First
quarter took place around midnight as Thursday the 18th turned
to Friday the 19th to begin our week. The Moon will then pass its
full phase during the day on
Friday the 26th, and will rise just short of full -- and therefore
just before sunset -- the night of Thursday the 25th. At the
beginning of our week, Friday the 19th, the Moon also passes south
of
Uranus in Aquarius. With the
Sun approaching the
Winter Solstice in Sagittarius, the fattening Moon will
be climbing the northern part of the ecliptic, giving us plenty of
bright Moonlight later in the week.
Saturn, in
eastern Gemini, is now seriously
encroaching on the evening scene. Rising around 8:30 PM, it stands
high to the east at midnight. This is also a week for Mercury, which
reaches its greatest elongation to the east of the Sun on Saturday
the 20th. The apparition is not very good, however, as the little
planet will still be very low in southwestern evening twilight and
will be quite difficult to find.
Even with such evening activity, the morning sky remains
undefeated, as it still holds the twin glories of
Jupiter and
Venus, Jupiter much the
higher at dawn, Venus the
brighter. With Jupiter rising ever earlier and Venus (preparing to
swing in back of the Sun) rising later, the two are separating
fast, the giant planet now rising just before 3 AM, Venus not until
almost 4:30. By the end of the year, about the time Jupiter makes
its passage into the evening sky, Venus will be rising as twilight
begins to lighten the eastern morning sky.
As the Moon brightens, the stars seem to fade away, overwhelmed by
Moonlight. The brighter ones are still there to view, however. By
late evening, Orion is climbing
the eastern sky with stars bright enough to withstand the Moon's
glow. Then just an hour after Saturn rises, so does Sirius (in Canis Major), the brightest star of the sky, which
makes it the champion twinkler as well (the twinkling effect caused
by the Earth's turbulent atmosphere). Look to the northwest of
Orion to find Taurus with its Pleiades and Hyades star clusters, and to the
northeast of him to Gemini and back to Saturn. Obscure
constellations seem to fade away, lost to moonlight. Among the
least of these is a jagged row of stars that passes nearly overhead
for mid-northerners and that make Lacerta, the celestial lizard, which finds itself
surrounded by Cygnus, Pegasus, and northern Andromeda, the row pointing
northward to Cepheus and the
famed variable star Delta
Cephei.
