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Let's Look!(A column by TRAA members in the Southern Sierra Messenger) Constellation Orion the HunterMsgr. Ronald Royer, February
2005
With its bright stars Orion dominates the winter sky. This group of stars is mentioned in almost all ancient stories, and even in the Bible. His body is well outlined, but with a diminutive three-faint-star head, that is until red-sensitive astrophotography showed a big round faint nebulous head of glowing hydrogen gas. Most ancient stories depicted him as being very proud, big-head, which was his downfall. Our Milky Way galaxy is faint in this direction since we are looking away from our center, but this association of bright stars catches our attention. Apparently they were formed recently from the wealth of nebulosity in this area and so we have many bright, new stars there. Orion's body is framed by these stars. Orange colored Betelgeuse is at the upper left, and blue Rigel at the bottom right. These are giant stars living fast as youngsters and will soon use up their atomic fuel as they form heavier elements such as make up our Earth. Betelgeuse is so large that if it were our sun we would be only one quarter of the way out to its surface. Close call! It may still harm us if it goes supernova, being only 600 light years distant. Three equally bright blue stars form his belt, and hanging from the belt are three fainter stars which form his sword. Imbedded in these stars is the Great Orion Nebula, remainder of the dust and gas cloud that formed, and is still forming, new stars in this area of the sky. This nebula is one of the most beautiful sights in a telescope, and photographs in wonderful color, red and green for the glowing gases, and blue for the dust particles reflecting the light of the nearby newly-formed blue stars. It lies nearby, relatively speaking, at about 1600 light years and takes light 30 years to cross it. When I was young I heard a planetarium speaker say that its gases are so thin that all together they weigh as much as a steam locomotive. I guess those locomotives were very heavy then, about a billion times more than now! For indeed, we now know there is material there for hundreds of stars like our sun. Comet Machholz in the evening sky Msgr. Ronald Royer, January
13, 2005
Last August Don Machholz of Colfax, CA, in the western foothills of the Sierra, discovered his 10th comet. It has now come closest to Earth, some 3 light minutes away, and appears as a fuzzy star to the naked eye up overhead. It is just now developing faint dust and gas tails. It is working its way up the Winter Milky Way toward the constellation of Perseus where it will pass the Double Star Cluster there January 27/28. Last week it passed the Pleiades star cluster, famous in all ancient cultures, in Japanese called Subaru. Machholz is hard to see with the naked eye, but a great sight in binoculars or scope. These Milky Way star clusters are very distant from the comet actually, 7000 and 450 light years respectably. For pictures of these objects, type APOD into your search engine. For maps to find the comet, type in COMET MACHHOLZ.
December Morning Sky AliveMsgr. Ronald Royer, December 2004
Our morning sky still holds all the action with the planet Venus passing other planets. Back in early September she embraced old Saturn. Around November 4 she linked up with powerful Jupiter. Now in early December she is safely in the arms of weak and faint Mars. Always near the sun, Venus can never meet Mars when he is bright and warlike, which will happen this coming October and November. After this encounter, she rushes to catch up with swift Mercury in the mornings after Christmas till the end of the year. This will be a good time to locate the elusive Mercury. Get out and look for these conjunctions about an hour before sunrise, around 5:45 A.M. Such interesting conjunctions happened around the time of the first Christmas. The Magi knew the Hebrew Scriptures predicting a Messiah, so one of such may have started them on their journey. King Herod and his court never saw these morning or evening events since they were either partying or plotting evil. The Magi were the "early to bed, early to rise" wise guys! Don't forget to watch the Geminid meteor shower December 12-14, all night long. The Zodiacal LightDavid Chandler, February 5, 2004 The solar system is dusty, and we can see that dust in the sky. How, you might ask, can we tell where the dust in our atmosphere leaves off and the interplanetary dust begins? That's a good question with a good answer. Our solar system is flat like a disk because all the planets orbit the sun in approximately the same plane. So do the asteroids. When asteroid fragments collide they create dusty debris that litters the disk. Looking
at the solar system from earth is like looking at a pizza from the
point of view of an olive. The planets and other material in the solar
system are seen projected onto the sky as an encircling band passing
through the Zodiac constellations, named for the "zoo" of
mostly animal constellations that lie along it. The sunlight reflected
from interplanetary dust particles appears as a faint glow along the
zodiac, known as the "Zodiacal Light". What's In A Star Name?Billie Chandler, January 29, 2004 As you read articles on astronomy such as this, you will notice--maybe to some degree of irritation--that there are terms we toss around as a matter of course. We need to explain some fundamental terms like for instance, how are stars named? Constellations are nothing but groups of stars that have been determined to be a standard way to address certain parts of the sky. Those three bright stars in a row with distinctive bright stars above and below… we call that area Orion. There is an ancient linage of constellation names together with some more modern names that have been accepted as 88 internationally recognized standard constellations. In describing stars within a particular group ancient astronomers have handed down the practice of naming the brightest star in that pattern the Alpha star. It followed that the second brightest star in that group would be the Beta star, and so on. So when one hears a reference to Alpha Orionis, the star being named is the Alpha star of Orion. Some stars were involved in such widely acknowledged lore and legends that they were given names of their own- like Betelgeuse. But it will also be recognized as Alpha Orionis. As you can see the Greek star names and the Latin convention of grammar combine to make a system only a true astro-geek could appreciate. This system was good for a couple of thousand years. As optics gave us more stars to ponder, we quickly ran out of letters in the Greek alphabet. Asronomers started to catalog stars and assign them numbers. What followed was a plethora of star naming systems like the Bayer, Flamsteed, Struve, and BD catalogs and their number systems. Today there are different naming systems depending on type of star. Variable stars have one system, supernovas are named differently. Some stars not already named are given a name which incorporates their address in the sky. But only authentic scientific institutions and researchers assign names recognized by the International Astronomical Union. Now, you all are pros at the Name Game! Saturn in the Eastern SkyMsgr. Ronald Royer, January 22, 2004
Saturn is an unreal sight in a telescope, yet it is the hallmark of celestial objects. People looking through my telescopes at it often remark, do you have a color slide ahead of the eyepiece? Its ring system is made up of millions of small satellites orbiting the planet, a unique sight, and just beyond the tips are the major satellites. You’ll never forget this sight! The delicate colors. The velvet black background. The Winter OvalJohn Sanford, January 15, 2004 The winter sky tonight offers the most bright stars in one view at one time. Look at a good star map or planisphere, and you can see all the bright stars marked in their constellations. The brightest star in the evening now is Sirius, which stands in first place among the nighttime stars. It's in the south east as darkness falls and crosses the southern sky during the evening. Sirius is a blue-white star and only 8.4 light years away, right in the neighborhood as star distances go. The winter stars form an oval, with Saturn, the ringed giant planet, inside the oval shape. This Winter Oval is formed by the stars (starting overhead with yellow Capella and moving counterclockwise): Castor and Pollux in Gemini, Procyon in Canis Minor, then bright Sirius in the south. Proceeding up the west side of the oval, we come to brilliant Orion, the Hunter, with its stars Rigel, a blue white giant, and then the three belt stars in line, and we finish the oval with the red gem Aldebaran, the eye of the Bull, in Taurus. Within the oval's shape is Betegeuze in Orion, and Saturn, in Gemini, which you can tell by its tan color and the fact that because it's a planet and has some size, it doesn't twinkle like the stars do. The stars twinkle because they are so small that the bundle of rayscoming from each star and entering our eyes can be displaced momentarily by the earth's atmospheric movements. A planet on the other hand is usually large enough that some of its light always reaches the eye, and therefore it shines more constantly. There is one other planet to see in the early evening, and that is brilliant Venus, slowly rising higher at the same time each evening in the southwest right after dark. So get outside and see the best show the night sky has to offer on these clear moonless evenings. And dress warm!
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Just
as Mars was at its closest to Earth in August, so too is the planet
Saturn now closer to us than usual. Planets circle the Sun in non-circular
orbits and now is our best view of Saturn, close to us, rings wide
open, with its south pole toward us. Let’s look toward the East
after dark and see the bright, golden colored planet in the constellation
Gemini, The Twins. To the right is the bright constellation of the
giant Orion, awakening on his side and leaping over our mountains
toward us.