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The Night Sky Podcast | Venus And Exoplanets Around TRAPPIST-1
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Hello, and thank you for listening to this episode of the night sky podcast. My name is Billy Newman. And I’m Marina Hansen. And we are going to be talking about some of the things in the evening sky and morning sky for the first week of March of 2017. We had a couple things to catch up on, like some things that had happened, I guess in the past couple of weeks of February. Let’s see what what did we miss? Like, there was a lunar eclipse?
Oh, right. Yeah. I don’t think that was really in our viewing.
Yeah, I think it ended up happening for people that would have been out in the Atlantic Ocean. And I think for a good bit of the eastern seaboard, over here, I think most of the East Coast would have seen it. And then
and what kind of what kind of Eclipse was this one? Because it was, it was a different kind than the one that we’re gonna have. Like, we’re gonna have a total solar eclipse in August. Yeah. But this one was, was this one a total solar eclipse? Well, this
was a this was a lunar eclipse of just the moon, I think is what it was. Yeah. So it’s just the moon being on the East Coast is the full moon rose up above the horizon? That’s the big difference that it would be for that. And then I think, well, it’s Yeah, I think it’s been, it might have been only a partial. Maybe that’s just what was for us in the West Coast. Because I think is what I understood is, maybe what I was most concerned with is what it would look like to me when it came up. But I think they were saying that it was going to just be in the Penumbra at that point. So I’m sure if you’re in the right spot, maybe it was a total, I’m sure that seems to be how it works for the moon most of the time, is that like some if there is an eclipse somewhere is getting like the total eclipse because it’s kind of like the earth shadows so big, that it’s a lot easier for that to cast the moon into darkness for a period of time more than it is just the moon smaller shadow cast down onto the earth, like it would be for solar eclipse. So that’s where like the whole earth or the whole half of the hemisphere, we’ll see that lunar eclipse, whereas it’s more difficult to see the solar eclipse, if it’s happening during that day. Kind of interesting how that is. But yeah, it was kind of cool. I think. I remember I remember one. Well, actually, that was kind of early February that we had it. Yeah. So it’s trying to figure out how that was, but it always does seem that we have the lunar eclipses a little closer to the equinoxes. We kind of noticed that. Yeah, I guess. So. It seems like that’s about to happen. Yeah. I seem to remember trying to watch them in September, October, or like February, March, April, a lot of the time. So I yeah, there’s there’s still some more mysteries about some of those chronic cycles. And like, how the eclipse cycle for lunar eclipses go. I just don’t really know all the intricacies of it. But it seems like that’s one of them. Well, it’s kind of strange, like why the lunar eclipses seem to occur so often that. Yeah, it’s actually like, a few years ago, we had the tetrad, we had like, four and those are all like, you know, like, fall, spring, fall spring. Right. It’s interesting how that goes. But it seems to be like my recollection for a long time. So there’s a lunar eclipse. What else was there? There was the exoplanets. We found the exoplanets like the the NASA, I guess, announcement that scientists for a long time had discovered and then had been doing more work to verify that they had found, how many plants was it?
He was seven, seven, or they had already found that they had already found two of them.
That was kind of my understanding to you. And they found five more. Yeah, they found a few others in the system. And I guess they say that a few of them are going to be within that Earth temperature range where it could have right liquid water.
I think they’re like, I think that there are about Earth size also.
Yeah, I was trying to figure out what that meant. Or I guess maybe, yeah, it means that there are size, they probably would have to be about that big. Yeah, it’s probably true. Because I was trying to figure if that was in relationship to the size of its son, which was smaller, but but I don’t think it is. I think it is the mass size of Earth. But I guess it’s all closer.
Yeah, that’s a really interesting part of it, too. Is that there? Yeah, I think they’re all about the same size, which is Earth size. Wow. And I think that they’re really close together. Oh, that’s interesting. Yeah. I had read in the, in the, I guess, the NASA report of it that they had put out that like if you were standing on one of the planets, yeah. That you could look out and see one of the other planets and it would appear in the sky larger than our moon appears to us. Really? Yeah. Wow. Doesn’t that sound crazy? So I can’t imagine looking out and just seeing a few planets lined up.
Yeah, that’d be so crazy. Just like Big Planet. So like, if you were, if you were a species that like grew, you know, if there were two different cultures on these phones, yeah. Before you communicate our seeds, yeah.
Because like we can we can make out definition on the moon. Yeah, their eyes. Yeah. And I was it had said something about how like you’d be able to make out geographical things. Yeah. Or like landmarks and things and you could see the weather. You
can see the ocean you can see like big chains wrapping up onto the coaster. So you know, like, How strange would that be? I think it’d be so easy to get to two now. That’d be cool too. Yeah, stellar right away. Yeah. I wonder how I wonder how it would work. Yeah, it’d be cool. I think it was 40 light years away. Or maybe 39 light years away. It was it. harpist I think Trappist, one Trappist one was it? Was it in Aquarius, or I don’t know, that part of it. It was somewhere distant. Yeah, but 40 light years away, it’s really pretty far, there’s a lot of stars that are closer than 40 light years, like I was thinking about Vega is like 26 light years. I mean, there’s, like serious is only eight light years. There’s like Proxima Centauri, it’s like pretty close. That’s down in the southern hemisphere. But there’s like a handful of stars that are really a lot closer, there was another star that they had found last year that I think I think it was Proxima Centauri, the closest one to it has a planet that goes around it. I don’t know if it’s as likely to have life or be in the Goldilocks zone of a star. But, but it was it was interesting that had a planet next to it, which is I think 4.2 light years from here, which would really take a very long time for one of our conventional spacecraft to travel through space at that speed. But But it’d be really interesting, we’d probably, I mean, if there was focus on it, you do it in the next 50 years. Maybe sense of the doubt in that direction. But it’s kind of interesting, though, that the idea that we know that there’s like an exoplanet nearby that you can study something about. But that’s also tricky, too, because we’ve just I think, in the last year or two figured out, at least the things we know about just in our solar system. And we’ve only done that a small amount, like we’ve only send like one probe out to each of the planets are more than one probe. But but not that many, maybe one jump on sending stuff out to other solar systems right away. But it’s cool, though, that they’ve done so much research and exoplanets. It’s
Yeah, it’s really cool. It’s interesting. How is you had explained to me a little bit how it works, like how they, they identify that there there?
Yeah, the science of this is evolved a little bit if I understand, right, it was 1995. It’s really modern science. But before that they were looking for, for the signs of planets, going around other stars, but it’s really just theoretical, like it was, it was the ideas of Star Trek had planets around it. But it wasn’t really in science understood if there were really planets that could go around other stars other than ours. And it wasn’t just something we could observe because planets were so I guess, difficult to observe at those distances. So we had to create really sensitive, complex equipment to do analysis of a star, I guess, which is big telescopes, I think, when we put them up in space when they were still enough, and able to take, like, you know, like really long exposures with really big mirrors. So they could collect a lot of light from these distant stars. But I guess what they were they were doing was they would they would watch the star This was in the early days, the only had the ability to find really specific examples of exoplanets. So that would be anything that was like a small planet, like a small Pluto rock or mercury rock going around a big star, it’s not going to make much of a big difference. And it would be just hard to detect for us. So the only thing that we could really find were big stars that had really big gas giants, like Jupiter sized gas giants, things that maybe should have just become a double star like a second small star next to it. But like these really big gas giants that were out just right next to the sun, or right next to that star, like somewhere like in Venus’s orbit, if we were to imagine, like a giant Jupiter’s size gas giant next to the sun, like but so close to the sun. And the reason we could detect those is because they had such a big separate mass that as that planet swung around the sun, its gravitational pull will kind of swing it around so you can see the planet wobble a little bit as you watch the precession of the planet, okay, and it’s revolution around so you can see star
so you can see that there must be something else that was affecting its movement. And that’s what I identified to look for.
there being some well i think that that was their proof in a lot of ways. Like there’s there’s a there’s a lot of clutter. complexity in the physics and the math that they’re using. To to say that this is proof? I guess it does check out. But yeah, I think that was the original understanding was that these wobbles in the star had to be caused by some kind of object that I don’t know, if they’ve really been optically observed. I don’t think there’s really any kind of technology that allows us to optically see that there are these planets. Is that strange?
That is strange. Yeah, it’s so interesting being a point where we have equipment and processes for being able to know that things are there that we can’t see. Yeah, that are, it’s impossibly far away from us to be able to
this crazy, so yeah, everything that we see online are all artists renderings of this concept, which is always so misleading and confusing, as you wonder, like, they got great pictures of it right away, given that we don’t even have pictures of Neptune or something. So it was Yeah, it was just silly. Like sometimes when you think like, really? Like, what are? Where do these pictures come from? Is it really Yes, it’s all instrument based. Like it would be if you were flying in a plane in a storm or something like that a pilot still supposed to be able to judge and see everything that’s happening, but without the aid of actual visual a gap likkle part of it, they just have to trust that the truth is there because of the effects of these instruments. seems really strange to me. But so that’s how it was in the in the beginning, I think when they found the first exoplanet was like a really big one going around a bigger or a star, they could see the wobble from, I think it was easy to detect. But it’s gotten more refined now over the last 20 years. And so now we’re at a point where we can detect what it was that we saw, or the NASA scientists discovered. And then and then publish papers on, I guess, a couple weeks ago, we now see that we can find small sets. And I think this is the first like solar system that’s been confirmed, or first small, small, like many small planets, Earth sized planets, a couple of them being like we said, in the in the Goldilocks zone, where you could have potential life. Yeah, liquid water, something about like liquid water. And, like carbon, I think, like we were talking about this morning. Like, if you have that, then you can add heat. I guess it’s kind of like, you can get organic chemistry going that way. I don’t really understand how they started. As that’s another podcast, I guess. But yeah, it’s really cool that they have, they have like a, you know, another solar system to observe that with seven planets, it’s probably going to be a point of research for a long time. But maybe now that they have a sensitivity to discover these things, we’re gonna see them discovering a whole number of other star systems that are out there that have that. Yeah, that have planets. Yeah. Yeah, just solar systems that are out against all these other stars that we’ve learned about,
I’m sure. Alright, I imagine there must be a lot more. You know, if we found one other one, and we’re here. I bet they’re just too.
Yeah, that’s a really exciting thing about is that is that yeah, it was it was wondering for a while, if really big stars, stars with solar mass is much greater than ours, if they would even be capable of having stars because like, they suck all the material in originally. And maybe that might be the case, or I’m not, I’m not totally sure how the physics work around the different sizes of the stars. But, but it might be like that there’s a range of size that has more planets. I mean, it was more likely to have planets stay out of it. Or maybe there’s a range where it’s really big and you wouldn’t have planets. I don’t know. It’s kind of interesting, but, but it’s really interesting to see that we’re now getting to that stage. What I’d heard before, I think when I was in college, I just taken like the basic astronomy class, but they had talked about how most of the work in astronomy science today. The research is getting paid for is is this is the search for exoplanets, which kinda interesting. Well, you know, it’s,
yeah, it seems like a pretty fascinating thing to try to discover and learn more about. Yeah, especially with like this one with Trappist one. And the plants we found on it. Like, one of the things that we’ve learned is that a few of them are potentially potentially playing a second half life. Yeah, it’s really, which seems like something I would want to learn more about. Yeah, absolutely. So it’s just yeah, that’s really cool.
Yeah. So that and the opportunity that there’s other stars. Yeah, it’s really fast. It’s really cool.
How big is, um, I don’t know if you know, how big is Trappist one, compared to like our Sun. Do you know a little bit about this. So
it’s kind of it’s interesting how everything started. So we’re humans. We live on earth, and we’ve sort of set everything up with the understanding of what’s been around us. So when we say one solar mass, that’s the unit for the mass of our star. We’ve just kind of given us like our son is one. What’s that compared to other stars as they go out? It’s too because it’s bigger, or it’s it 147 I think is the biggest one we’ve observed. Oh, 147 which is? I don’t know. I think it’s way I don’t know if we see it all the time. But yeah, yeah, that’s it. That’s when talk about like, main sequence and things that go crazy. I mean, sequences is big with that. So you get like, crazy black holes is like super, super heavy ones. I actually, I don’t know. But But, so back to ours. That’s one solar mass. I think this one and ours is like a yellow star is actually green star. I don’t ever that that didn’t really make sense to me all the time. But it’s so bright that it kind of blows out our ability to see it. So it looks yellow. It’s been confusing. It didn’t really make sense. That explanation to me, seems like a yellow star. But this one is like a brown dwarf star. Or it’s, uh
oh, I had read. Yeah, I had read something about that. It’s like a, it’s like a super door for Super might not be the right word, but it’s super dwarf. I can’t remember what it is, though. But yeah, that’s like, she got to look at that nice article again. He was really I was like a super Dorf.
I heard such comparison of it and Jupiter, like 10 times bigger than Jupiter five times bigger than Jupiter, which is still kind of planet size, or something, which is a really small star. I mean, like Jupiter is like, and then the sun is huge next to it. But But yeah, I guess it was this dwarf star. That’s a brown dwarf. It just means it’s cooler. It’s cooler and temperature, and it doesn’t have the mass in it to have, you know, as hot of a fire going. I guess there’s a lot of stars like that out there. But it was kind of interesting now. Yeah, hearing that. It’s like smaller, and then all the planets are a lot closer to it. I guess like that. I guess it’s cooler. Right? Yeah. What it was like Mercury’s orbit, it was something like that. Everything’s kind of with Oh, if we sort of waste everything back together. Yeah. really fascinating. Yeah, it was kind of cool. But yeah, so that exoplanet discovery is pretty cool. There’s a few other things that been moving around. in the morning. We’ve had like, just a couple. It’s been rough. Right? Like around here. Oh, yeah. I clouds cast. And I think it’s been more rainy this year that it’s been maybe the last two years? That seems like it. A little bit of snow early in the year. A few more like, yeah, a lot more rain. It seems like we’ve had like what California had a good bit of flooding areas where like the last two years or a year ago, and in the years before that there was a severe drought, where they’re out of water, like but now all the reservoirs are that the dam was about to burst here out in the fields. There was a lot of backup patterns of flooding.
Yeah, we’ve had, I guess, very minor flooding. It’s not really the roads or anything. But yeah, a lot of flooding around people’s houses and stuff. A lot of a lot like the valley farmland
around here. Yeah, I saw a lot of that. And yeah, a lot of heavy rain. But there’s just been a lot of consistent sustained rain. Yeah, clouds and storms and stuff, at least for at least for our efforts. We’re doing sky watching pretty consistently for for the month of February. But, but we did get away with a few nights observation and mornings when we get up and go to the the window that looks out to the south sky. And I think it was just a couple mornings ago, but we went out. And it was cool. noticing that we can still see Jupiter, up next to spike and the constellation Virgo as it’s getting closer over to the western horizon as sun or as the sun starts to rise, which means which is really cool that we’re going to see it up maybe around midnight or 11 o’clock really soon, you know, coming up in the evening sky. Yeah. And then coming up toward its position of opposition probably, if it’s in Virgo sometime around, I think may maybe sometime around then as well. We’ll see coming up over the horizon. But so it’s cool seeing Jupiter in Virgo up next a spike up but what’s better than that is like dropping back down. You see Scorpio now up past the sun in the morning sky. And I could spot Antares but most everything else was too dim at the time I was looking that morning. And then if you go a little further back, you can spot Saturn, which is still at those kind of like close to the horizon line. But you can see Saturn now. A little bit closer back to the constellation of Sagittarius. Which was interesting, like remember the summer when we’re looking at it? Yeah, it’s interesting seeing it move. Yeah. So this summer when we looked at it, we saw Saturn in Scorpio, and now with its pro grade motion, it’s moved back toward Sagittarius. And it’s like 29 year cycle. And so I think like by the summer and fall, it’s going to be right up next to the Galactic Center, which I think is going to be kind of cool to look at through a telescope or to do Astro photography of just because there’s gonna be so many active things. Yeah, right in that spot. Yeah, right behind it. Okay, interesting. Okay. I don’t know if it could be exposed for. It seems like yeah, it’d be different. But. But yeah, it was kind of a cool thing. That was really interesting. I guess it’d be an opposition sometime around July. Maybe July this year. So it’d be a good summer started to keep an eye on. I think it’d be pretty fun. Yeah, that’d be a cool. And the other cool thing I was thinking about was when if we remember that Saturn’s year, is 29 years to do to do one revolution around the sun. I think about that, because I just turned 28 a few months ago, and I’m coming in, and you’re kind of coming into the last lap, the last leg of the lap of the year 28. With Saturn now, as it comes into 29. Forgive our, our heaters in the back. Then as we both come into, like the year 29. It’s interesting to think how my whole life is just one chip around the sun.
Yeah. That’s so interesting to think about. That’s neat that it’s wrapping background to right in the spot where it was. Yeah, when you’re born, Bobby. Interesting. I guess it’s kind of lined up there. Now, roughly, yeah, how much it’s going to move over the next few months. Yeah,
it seems like it’s like half a constellation a year. Bad. So I guess it would take to do to do 30 years of it. And then like for you, like Jupiter’s gone around twice. And? Yeah, yeah. Mercury has gone around, like, I don’t know. Way too many times. I couldn’t count. It was like 80 times or something like that. Well, 70 day year, who knows? I’d be sold. so old. I’m like, Oh, no.
That’s a really interesting thing to think about. Especially from our because I think about my Earth year.
Yeah. Yeah, I think Yeah, you think about that, that time that you’ve had. Yeah, be really strange. Gosh, be like the last like, longest slowest part. But But yeah, I thought that was kind of neat. Looking out to to Saturn. Moving around to the evening sky. We were looking at we did another observation I just a couple days ago. Yeah, we got lucky. I was clear for you. That was pretty satisfying. Yeah, we drove up. We we spent a little bit of time, up on the side of the hill looking out to the western horizon. And we were trying to make some Well, I mean, right now, it’s really easy, but making some good observations of Venus. It’s so bright right now. Yeah, it’s still so bright. Really cool. Watching it over like the last month, I think, like January, we were commenting about it a lot as it was moving up into the negative 4.6 threshold of its magnitude, which I think is sometimes the brightest that you can see it a month. It’s moved down a bit. But it doesn’t seem like really too much. It still seems like it’s in the threes. Le negative? Yeah.
Yeah, there’s been enough time between us actually being able to observe it that. I don’t know if I could notice a difference. I feel like it seems as bright as it did. Yeah, it’s really, it’s still Yeah, it’s still so
yeah, it’s it’s super bright right now. But what’s interesting, and what we’re looking at, is that motion that it’s making down to the horizon over the next couple of weeks.
Yeah, it’s interesting that because it’s moving down a lot faster than it was moving way faster.
Yeah. Yeah, it’s been really strange. In fact, like, if you were, if you were to go out tonight, it’s probably already moved a little bit since since a few nights ago, when we looked at it last bit, if it’s the, if it’s the third right now, we were looking at it, maybe the last couple days of February, it’s probably moved down a good bit by now because it’s, it’s going to be gone. If it’s March 3, right now, it’ll be out of sight, like so close to the sun, that we won’t really be able to see it. Before everything set. It’ll be about March 23, or 24th. But it’s gonna move in the next 20 days. I guess that is what that would be. So we’re going to see it from the position that it is now in the evening scan, it’s going to drop all the way down to the sun. In the next 20 days. So fast. Yeah, that’s way fast.
When a How long is it going to be gone? or out of our sight? Are we going to start seeing it in the morning?
Yes, that’s an interesting thing. Because Yeah, that’s how that’s how part of that the motion of Venus works. And it’s really interesting. There’s a few parts of that, that I really want to like spend some time unpacking with you. We can do it in the future. But yeah, other podcasts too. Because Venus has some really interesting movements to it. That had been important to a lot of different cultures and stuff. I won’t get into a ton of that right now. But it’s cool because Venus has this five eighths ratio to the earth, I think is what it is that That’s really steady. And so the times of years that we see Venus come up, and the cycle that it takes repeats. like clockwork, almost, I guess it’s 99, for moons to the day. Yeah, to whatever that means. I don’t know why that is. But I guess they said like, if, if the full moon and Venus showed up on the first day of the year, it would be that exact way. 99 full moons later, it would look the same way on that day. And it would be eight years later. I guess that’s how long 99 Full Moon sticks. That’s saying, Yeah, but so it has this this eight year cycle, where Venus shows up in the sky five times. So it does, it has more years than that, of course, because it’s moving faster around the sun on the earth is. But when we see it appear in the sky, like we have in the evening sky now. Was it since June 1, say something on June 1. So you can get like Star walk or one of the other planetarium apps, where you can kind of like see the motions, or like where the planets are now. And then where they were like six months ago, like what we were doing the other day, you can go in and roll back time to like, say like June 1, June 15. And if you look at the position of Venus, against the sun on the western horizon, you see that it’s right there next to the sun, but it’s probably around the first week or two, that you’d be able to see Venus above the horizon in the evening skies, the sunset. And so I think it’s interesting because that, for this time has been up since June 15. Now up to our current time, in March, only for three more weeks till about March 24. And then it’s gone back to the sun. So it’s like a 270 day period. Crazy. Well, yeah. So that’s, I think, like it’s longer period in the evening, I haven’t done enough research to really find out what it’s gonna do in days for the next period when it shows up in the morning. But what happens next is interesting is that after that 270 day period, it comes up. At this time of year, like we saw, if we’re keeping track of this five eighths rule, like we saw eight years ago, in 2009, which I kind of remember but I don’t really remember what Venus was doing. It would be in the same position as it was eight years ago. The planet Venus. So as we look out, now we see it up against Aquarius, as it’s moving back down the sun, when it’s really close to the spring equinox or the vernal equinox a tunnel and Vernal right?
What are would you I think what are Yeah, what are the definitions for those for a temporary time not Yeah.
A Tableau is autumn for fall equinox. Right. Bernal is this is the spring equinox. Okay. I don’t understand what other etymology Vernal has. But yeah, I think that’s what it is the vernal equinox. Okay. And so as we’re coming up, so Okay, so this goes into the other thing that we’re looking at. I’m trying to keep it all straight in my head. It’s a lot. It’s a lot to say the movement of Venus. But it’s so complex. It’s so strange. And I think there’s there’s only a handful of different motions, different tracks takes in the sky in certain seasons.
Oh, yeah. That was an interesting part of looking at the because we were checking it out on the star walkout. Yeah, we’re looking at it in real life. Yeah, but we were going through time, and we were watching the way that it moves. It was really interesting seeing that shape, though. It seems to me
Yeah. So over a year, like if we were looking at the sun I like I think that shapes called an annual Lima so and that’s the the motion of the ecliptic. So if we were to take a picture of the sun, I think this is what they did a while back is and the book I was looking at it was like from the 1700s it was in the Library of Congress that someone had taken a scan of but it was one of the these early annalena that had like a bunch of kind of like a peachy folder. Remember when your kid got a peachy and had like all these like important stats on the side? It was like a book of those things. I guess before we had computers you know you needed or Google right you need it but you need to like a book that had like that kind of data for all these little things. It was like, like, like Anna Lima match, like things and and almanacs, and little different pieces that were all kind of fit together in this big book. But this Anna Lima is a shape is a word that describes the shape of the ecliptic, and the position of the sun. This is kind of a big term to unpack to you, but you’ve seen it before. It’s kind of this infinity shape or this figure eight shape that sort of lopsided, it’s heavy to one side. And what that is is like if it was 6pm and we were out on a bluff, looking at the western horizon, and we saw the sun there. And we came out every day for the next year at 6pm. And we do Take a picture of where the sun was saying that it, I guess was up at the time, what you would see if you stacked all those images together for the year, if you took them in the same spot, you would see this kind of figure eight shape of where the sun is at that time. And what that shows is the motion of the ecliptic from our position on earth. And it all goes back to the way that the earth tilts down toward the Tropic of Capricorn in the winter. And then up toward the Tropic of Cancer in the summer that 23 and a half degree tilt during that, yeah. So yeah, silly. So yeah, I like so what causes the seasons to go back and forth, causes the ecliptic line, like where we see the sun to go up and down. So like in the winter, if we relate it back to the sun for a moment, and the winner as the sun’s low on the horizon, we get less light, it’s cold for us in the summer, it’s high on the horizon, we get a lot of light, it’s hot for us, this also affects the position of the planets and the signs in the Zodiac, I suppose. As the ecliptic moves through the night, and through the season. So what we look at when we look out, or when we look at this, and alima is a representation of the movement of the ecliptic through the year, as it moves up toward the winter solstice, then down toward the vernal equinox, then to the summer solstice, then to the autumnal equinox, and then back again to the same position it started at.
That’s really interesting. I hadn’t, it was cool seeing it on our just on a little app, because I didn’t. Yeah, it was cool. It’s cool. Being able to visualize it, it was way easier way. Yeah.
Imagine how many years it would take. If you just had a look at this stuff. For the first time. I don’t know how you’d figure it out. I don’t know how they did it. I don’t know how they did it at all, either. But, but what I’d recommend is anyone Listen to me listening to this hearing me trying to explain this? Just go you know, look at it, you’ll probably remember seeing it. I’ve done it times. You know more about it than I do already. But yeah, the the annalena is kind of a cool figure. But that sort of describes what’s happening with Venus, and why it’s moving so quickly down to the horizon and the sun right now. So if we think about the time of the year when the length of our day changes the most. It’s when we’re closest to the equinoxes. So for us in the Northern Hemisphere, right now what we’re experiencing, our day is getting longer, faster than it had before. Because we’re getting closer to the equinox. And then it’s going to slow down, it’s going to come to a standstill. We’re gonna get closer to the solstice. Okay, interesting.
I’m sorry. That’s, that’s why we see the warp in the shape of the figure.
Yeah, that’s why, yeah, we see like, I, well, I think the weapon the shape might be because we’re higher up on the northern hemisphere. I’d wonder what it would be if we took it took observations of it right at the equator, if even, but we probably still see it wobble that somehow I wasn’t really sure about that. But we do see the that it is not like an equal shape. But it seems to be kind of stretched out. And so yeah, that’s what we do see in the shape is that it transits much more distance. If we were to look at the image of the annalena, this this figure eight shape, it transits a lot more distance. straightaways as it would be, and then kind of like a car racetrack as to like, move more slowly as it as it makes the turn. Come back around. So as we come to the standstill at the solstice, it’s at its slowest change of day, right? But when we come into the equinox, I think it’s at its fastest changing day, right? That’s why I think it’s getting so much brighter. So quickly right now. I want to look that up again, because I think I’ve been told the opposite of that once before to not to change the subject, though. So as the day is getting progressively brighter, right now, that’s because we’re making more emotion on the ecliptic. So what we’re seeing is the ecliptic rise out of the southern sky, or, you know, the, the south side of the sky. From our perspective in the Northern Hemisphere. It’s rising up further to the north, and further up toward an endpoint like do West and do east, which I think would be essentially what an equinoxes
Yeah, when it gets to Is it like when the sun gets to its furthest? Well?
Yeah, like, I guess yeah, it’s most like do west or my center point because like, there’s the North Point in the summertime for June, when it comes up super early in the morning and said super late in the evening. It’s coming up at its furthest North Point. But here at the equinox, it’s going to be about at the equal point it would be in the fall as it’s coming back up from this out. So be kind of that center point between the two. And that’s where we make east west. And then we have, like our furthest South rise for us in the Northern Hemisphere like December 21. And that’s like, the furthest South point. So. So yeah, I guess as we’re moving back into the equinox right now, things are moving a lot faster for us each day. And that’s causing, like Venus to move a lot closer to the sun as the sun’s moving up from the horizon as our days getting longer. Does that kind of makes sense? Like if you were thinking about the length of our day, as it seems to be getting a lot brighter, a lot faster, then when the night sky happens is going to happen a little later, or what’s visible on the night sky is going to be kind of affected by right Sunday. Yeah, there’s still light in the sky. I think that’s sort of affecting what we’re seeing with that with Venus, as it moves down so quickly. But to get to your original question, I think it was, how many days? Is it going to be gone behind the sun before we see it? Oh, yeah. Yeah. How long will Venus be gone? Yeah, it’s interesting. So what I’ve all just explained is to get to the point of to get to the point of that one we’re next to the equinox, when we’re moving quickly happens at that Venus will move past the sun and out into the morning sky much more quickly than it will if we were close to a solstice, and the same ocean was happening. So all that preamble was to explain that point, if it’s helpful at all. And so it’s kind of interesting. That Yeah, Venus will, I think, dip too close to the sun to see at around March 24. It’ll be gone for just a few days. And then I think you’ll probably be able to see it again in the morning sky by around April 5, maybe maybe even earlier than that. It depends, I guess, on how accurate you can be. Okay, but I think Yeah, soon after that, it will be popped up on to the other side of the sun. And in the morning sky.
Does that count as a second? time and it’s in? It’s like five eighths rule? Yeah. Is that like the second time? Yeah. So we’re seeing time, if we’re clear this year, this one or for this? Yeah, it’s difficult to describe, I guess.
Yeah. So it from our perspective, we’re saying this is number one, we’re gonna wait to see happen again. Then what we’re going to see is the end of number one happening, and the beginning and number two happening. Okay, right after that. So we’re gonna see it’s one motion in the morning, Scott, or Yeah, in the morning, Scott now, as it comes up, and then and then comes back down to the horizon, and then we’re gonna see it. Throw again, into the night. Yeah, in a very intense guy. And yeah, it’ll be interesting to watch it go back and forth. But we’ll keep up with it. A little bit more. But yeah, so right now, it’s just going to be a few days that it’s behind the sun. And then back up in the morning, I think we’re gonna get to see Mercury, too. Oh, cool. Now the subject. But if, if, like, maybe what we’ll get to observe also is, is as Venus comes up in the morning, and then goes back down to the horizon, again, it’s going to be maybe nine months from now, which might be close to the winter. So we might be able to get have a chance to describe the motion of it. near a solstice, like what we were just talking about, I’ve heard it can be up to like five weeks, but it’s not visible. Like that’s behind the sun because the solstice is so much slower. It’s everything’s such a great expanse, though. At that time. I don’t know. Really.
Yeah. So what is there’s kind of like, an amount of days that will be gone between? Yeah, it’s like, it’s gonna be at least so many days that it’s gone. But not more than this many days.
Yeah, it’s, there’s, there’s a few different variables that I’m not 100% sure on, but it seemed like the maximum was sometime around five weeks, it was like 40 days or something like that. And then the shortest is like four or five days.
Oh, and that’s probably closer to what we’re gonna have this time? I think so.
Yeah. And I know, there’s a few eccentricities of a few of a few things that could be going on. But I think generally, this is going to be a quick one. As it as it rips, right by let’s back out. Yeah.
I want to, I want to make sure we get to see it.
Yeah, yeah, we should talk a little bit more about it as it comes up. Because I know there’s a few other myths attached to this motion that we’re talking about right now. And I wanted to get into the data, but I don’t know if I’m gonna research for it. But a lot of the old Sumerian stuff has a lot of stuff tied into Venus and this motion we’re talking about. And a lot of old Mayan history or anthropology has a lot of information tied to Venus to which I think both of those have some cool facts to kind of go over.
I think that’s really cool. Yeah, I think that there are a lot of really interesting anthropological parts about it. Yeah. I was starting to read or I’d gotten into the part in the book that we’re reading through where it’s talking more about the Mayans and Oh, yeah. Interesting. Yeah, it is. I think it’d be really cool to talk about Mars we
Yeah, we should break that did zooming look at it. And we should definitely come back like in the next week or two, like as long as the direction of Venus. Yeah, we should talk about that stuff a lot. I think that’d be really cool. Oh, that would be so cool. Marina. Yeah. Thanks for doing this podcast with me. Yeah. Thanks for talking about some some Venus observations that we were making.
Yeah, it’s cool. Seeing it. It is really glad we had that clear night. Oh, it’s so fun. It’s annoying. Yeah, it’s annoying going. All cool. Oh, yeah. It was cool. Seeing like, just, uh, Ryan and the other constellations and stuff that are coming in to this comparison.
Yeah, it was cool. Seeing how red they were. Was was more red. Yeah. Set more red. But yeah, really cool. I like that stuff a lot. So yeah, I’m really looking forward to march. And at least hopefully, it gives us a break, at least April and May when we get back to having some nice observations. But we’re gonna take advantage of so much this year. Yeah, it’s gonna be great. So yeah, guys, thanks a lot for listening to just do a little podcast about some space that I appreciate. Thanks for doing this podcast. Thanks, Billy. Thanks, everybody. Yeah, yes, very much. So on behalf of Marina Hanson, my name is Billy Newman. And thank you guys very much for listening to this episode of the night sky podcast.