![]() ![]() ■ A different Sirius challenge: Find it in the daytime! Venus is sometimes not hard to see with the naked eye in a clean blue sky, if you land on the precise spot to examine, and it's much easier with binoculars or a telescope. Hide blinding Sirius A just behind the strip's eastern edge. As Bob recommends, put a homemade occulting bar across your eyepiece's field stop: a tiny strip of aluminum foil held to the field stop with a bit of tape, with one edge of the foil crossing the center of the field. The Pup is east-northeast of the Dog Star and 10 magnitudes fainter: one ten-thousandth as bright. See the additional tips in Bob King's article Sirius B – A New Pup in My Life. Keep checking night after night top-notch steady seeing makes all the difference for spotting Sirius B. You'll want at least an 8- or 10-inch scope and a night of really excellent seeing. They'll remain very nearly as wide for the next few years before they start closing again. Sirius A and B are at their farthest apart in their 50-year orbit, separated by 11.3 arcseconds (they're exactly farthest apart next year if you're picky). The seeing often steadies in twilight, so this may be a good time to try for Sirius B, the Dog Star's notoriously difficult white-dwarf companion. ■ Sirius blazes high in the south on the meridian in late twilight this week. Lower right of Procyon shines brighter Sirius. Pollux is the one closest to it.ĭown below this group is Procyon. ■ Pollux and Castor accompany the Moon across the sky tonight, as shown above. (The "8 p.m." is standard time on Sunday the 13th that means 9 p.m. The waxing gibbous Moon passes under the heads of Gemini. When you face south after dark, Pollux and fainter Castor shine to the Moon's left by about a fist at arm's length, as shown below.Īt roughly right angles to that direction, the Moon shines almost exactly midway between Capella and Procyon (during evening in North America): about 2½ fists from each. The craters themselves, which have been preserved for billions of years, provide an impact history for the Moon and other bodies in the inner solar system.■ The waxing gibbous Moon this evening shines high in Gemini. These light and dark areas represent rocks of different composition and ages, which provide evidence for how the early crust may have crystallized from a lunar magma ocean. The dark features, called maria (Latin for seas), are impact basins that were filled with lava between 4.2 and 1.2 billion years ago. ![]() The light areas of the Moon are known as the highlands. Plans are now under way for humans to return to the Moon through NASA’s Artemis program.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |