Why do we have a time change?
Standard Time / Daylight savings time
Stars this week
Planets in the morning sky
Billy Newman Marina Hansen
The Night Sky Podcast | 12/1/2017 Why Do We Use Standard Time?
Produced by Billy Newman and Marina Hansen
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Hey, what’s going on? Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the night sky podcast. My name is Billy Newman. And we are back with another episode of the podcast today for November 30, 2017. So I guess we’re looking at the first week of December 2017. And we are probably looking back a little bit at some of the last, the last few weeks of activity that we’ve had through November a little bit, too. But it’s been good. How have you been, Marina? Pretty good. I notice. It’s been a little while since we’ve done another nightscape podcast, but it’s going to be cool. Talking more about events in the night sky and some of the stuff that we’re up to.
Yeah, I’m really excited to be back into it. No,
yeah, I’m happy to be talking with you. It’s fun. And so I wanted to come into this podcast. And I wanted to like talk about because there’s like a few things that have happened recently, but we haven’t really had a chance to talk about them as much. And so I wanted to make sure that we did a little bit of that. I thought it’d be cool to talk about the time change. So it’s December now, we’ve just kind of probably gotten used to the time change of you know, at least for me, like after a couple of weeks of dealing with the with the standard time, and like the early sunsets and all that. And now we’re actually getting a lot closer to the solstice, which we can talk about a little bit. But thinking about the time change, do you know why we have like standard time through here, like any, like trivial facts are on that.
I remember the trivial facts that I heard was something about farmers, farmers, Ben Franklin,
yeah, you’re Ben Franklin, then then you find out? If, if you remember? Well, yeah, it’s just like another piece of trivial information. But I think it was introduced this this idea of standard time and daylight savings time, right? There’s, there’s, you know, they exist, the thing that we have now and then a lot of modern people seem to be planning often about it, how it’s confusing or useless or, or doesn’t seem to serve a purpose. And it is, it does create a lot of complications now in an interconnected world, like we have, where many industries and many, like international lines have things to do, but their times aren’t the same. It’s a weird thing like, no, but it’s probably always been that way. When you’re dealing with time zones. I was thinking like, what would you have to deal with, you know, like air traffic control, or like, you know, airplanes taking off and landing. Remember that day that we left on a flight, and it was the day that daylight savings time? There was like the last day in November or October or something like that, and daylight savings time had changed. And then we had to take a flight that morning. We were wondering for a second like how, how does that hour work? That hour in the air for all those plants that have to leave? Yeah, how does that work for them for for dealing with the transition from daylight savings to standard time, it just seemed like it’d be kind of a weird, awkward thing to sort of to sort out in the air. But then you think about it more. And you realize, well, they have to deal with a change in timezone by an hour. On to almost any flight that they’re going to make sure you follow. Yeah, the thinking of it a little bit. So it’s really just going to be on the same 24 hour track schedule that it maybe would have been before. But let me know, maybe they adjust some stuff. But but it was tricky, though, is like oh, yeah, it would be weird. Does that mean earlier? Or does everybody get that you know, how, however works. But you think about those things that transit, state lines or transit time zones or transit, international lines like going from from America to Mexico, even where they don’t do the same Daylight Savings Time system or to Arizona where they don’t do the daylight savings time system.
That’s gonna say I had a friend who went to ASU for college a few years ago. And she commented on how strange she moved from Oregon.
Yeah, it is it is strange in Hawaii is sort of similar to that. And there’s a reason to why it’s sort of diversified, like it is in Europe is a different timescale, Australia changes over differently than we do here. Kind of interesting, and it’s really it kind of goes back to the way that the world still is, but wherever, for whatever reason, people that that are less than 50 years old, maybe don’t realize it yet, but it’s this thing where every place, every country is still sovereign, all the individuals are really still separated. And they still have to kind of deal with their local environments. Everything in the world is sort of built around this idea that it’s it’s for your local environment, like that’s why time is your local noon, noon local time, right. But it wasn’t just a unified system of time that went coast to coast. That’s why we introduced the the time zone system in the first place and how it worked in other areas too, even 1000s of years ago, is because they needed to do something where they would meet at high noon at their location because there wasn’t really a time system before there were clocks. Right. And so there’s there’s a lot of system about where your local noon is. And so that was kind of how things were set. So that was part of part of the reasoning of how there were time zones. And it’s also strange to because municipality to municipality, the time zones, not the time zones are different, but the mean, but the High Noon point is different. So if you’re at the far east end of a time zone, that high noon is going to be before that point, if you were at a town in the far west, and of that time zone, sort of like how it would be between here in Ontario, Oregon, or burns Oregon, way out by the 395 out in Eastern Oregon. That’s sort of like the that’s the limit of the Pacific Coast times out and then that runs South down, but still has Las Vegas in Las Vegas and Los Angeles are still in like the same local Pacific Time Zone, I think, is that right? I don’t think we switched over. Yeah, it’s not Mountain Time over there. So it’s weird. Yeah. So you think about, well, if the sunset, or if you know, if you see the sunrise or something like that, that many hundreds of miles east of here, that’s going to be before we would see it here even by a few minutes. Like you remember our observations of the solar eclipse this summer. And you remember the timeline, and Tilak it was at 1017 but in Corvallis is 1022. But in burns, it was attend 27, right? It’s the sun is moving physically across that space. And so it takes that long that many minutes different from high noon at one place to High Noon at the next point, or for the eclipses sake, for the eclipse to occur. At that part of the timezone are at the further east end of the timezone, it’s just weird to think about how that’s kind of kind of connected to High Noon stuff is interesting. So So further from that, when we get into the separation of breaking these times or so we have the time zones and all that and then it’s like different geographic regionality. But then we get into this sort of arbitrary system of in the fall and winter, switching things over to a standard time or a daylight savings time. And in modern terms, and in many times, when I’ve heard an argument, it’s only been against the idea of having the separation of time for winter. And for summer, I guess the only thing I have to say is, is a little bit of the reasoning of why that exists. Or maybe some of the thoughts behind what would happen in the outcome. If we didn’t do that, which is a little bit interesting, you really don’t think about the outcome. And part of that is because when we do a time change, that’s at the vernal equinox, or the autumnal equinox, like the fall or spring equinox. So the deal is, at that time of the year, the day length and the night length are the exact same equivalent time, it’s like 12 hours a day, 12 hours a night at the equinox. And so that’s kind of why they do the time change at that time. And you do really notice a significant difference in the daylight hours that you experience, or the scheduling you experience during that Equinox times that makes sense. It’s, it’s going to be about 6:30am sunrise and about a 6:30pm sunset. Sure.
So to follow that. So that’s kind of what happens at the end of September. That’s the environment that we’re at, or at the end of March on the other end of the year. What’s interesting, though, is, is if we take that same idea of using, let’s say, the, let’s say daylight savings time, now this week during Standard Time, and we sort of transpose what what times it would have been for sunrises and sunsets, we start seeing that that seems like a little bit weird seems a little bit off if it were that way. And that’s how our clock would be for these northern states. Because we’re in the Northern Hemisphere. So the further that we get toward the north pole, like in Alaska, or like up in northern Canada, they have longer daylight hours in the summer, much, much shorter daylight hours in the winter. And that’s sort of the same thing that’s affecting these northern latitude states in the United States. And that’s why Arizona and Hawaii don’t have to participate in something like Standard Time to daylight savings time, because they are equitorial are more equitorial. And thus experience a smaller impact of the swing of daylight hours during the seasonality of the year. Does that make a bit of sense? Yeah, I think so. That’s really, it’s strange to start thinking about a little bit. So this is where we get into the fun stuff. Alright, so for a second, consider that it’s today. What’s today. Okay, so the sunrise today was at 7:33am Standard Time. The sunset was at 4:27pm Standard Time. So if we do that fallback system, where we fall back to four that’s why like it’s it’s late at six o’clock now. You already know it’s like really dark it’s been dark for hours, right? It’s It’s weird as way dark. So if we’re thinking about this for 27 system here for like, let’s say let’s, it’s more drastic for this time of year if we use the morning, right because that’s when we’re losing the most out I remember back in summertime, it’s early before you get out or it’s laid out very early before you get up. It’s it’s bright out for most of the day and then late into the night also. But we don’t really consider it too much how odd it would be in the winter, if we’re looking at this 7:33am sunrise time, and this is after it fell back in the winter. So if we remember, back at the at the time change closer to the equinox, when things were a little closer, the sun was starting to get up later and later, like around 730 in the morning. So what this did is it kind of corrected that adjustment of the season. Now if, if standard time didn’t jump into effect at this time, we would have an 8:30am sunrise. So that means like civil Twilight, about after eight o’clock, that means like daylight after 9am. Bizarre, it would be really bizarre. Yeah. And that’s, and that’s just right now and another couple of weeks, it would be significantly after 9am that you’d really have a lot of light out, especially for these winter hours where it’s really cloudy and dark. So it was just kind of a weird thing to think about that that dawn wouldn’t take place until maybe four hours after most professionals would be getting up for for city work. If you understand. You think about that, like so yeah, I think that’s a big part of it is trying to shift the commuting hours to daylight hours. wintertime. Yeah. Now the other side of it, like agriculture, is when you were talking about and that’s a little bit more for the summer season, during the agricultural season, right? Because that’s when we have the growing hours. And that’s a weird one to think about a little bit too. And that one seems to be correlating. Like what we just mentioned, it seems to be correlating this agricultural world do you think about it, a rooster crows at dawn when the sun comes up, but it doesn’t know about Standard Time, or daylight savings time. But a bank does. And a grocery store does back in town. And so they’re gonna operate based on daylight or daylight savings time, they’re gonna they’re gonna get up at an appropriate time, you know, and then start their business for the day. Right?
So if we think about it, like the agricultural stuff, if we go back to our clock, and we go back to thinking that we’re gonna stay in standard time, all throughout the summer and never, never switch to daylight savings time what we’re looking at, under the old system, right, you know, the daylight saving system in June, if you get up at 430 in the morning, you’re going to be watching a sunrise. It’s really weird. Civil Twilight is probably still at 3:50am. Remember staying up? I think we stayed up at a spot when you’re taking photos. And it was really like, like 330-433-3024 it got significantly brighter. In the Northwest sun, you can really see stars anymore, you can start seeing the daybreak. That’s a three that’s like 350 during daylight savings time. That’s a sunrise of 4:30am during daylight savings time in June. So if we remove daylight savings time, go back to standard time, that now jumps back to 3:30am. that the sun is risen in the sky during the summer. Very strange, like when that’s almost more bizarre than a 9:15am sunrise. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. And so if we think about like, how drastic that is that that many hours before the start of even a 5am business day would be let alone a six or 7am business day, we’re getting all that daylight hours during hours. That would be nighttime and back to the agricultural argument. during the summertime, when the daylight hours expands so much, those animals get up that much earlier. That means we would have roosters crowing at first light at 230 in the morning, during summer hours. Wouldn’t that be bizarre?
I was so strange to 30 I think of as nighttime.
Definitely. I mean, I might be exaggerating, you can say three, you can say by three, if by four you were gonna say or be out and be able to see Twilight. You could say about 3am. Standard Time in the summer, you would see Twilight, which seems way too early. And then so be that roosters, Crow, the cows get up the cows need to be milked, the agricultural industry has to be up and moving at that time to be participating. And then with that industry existing and since so much of our industry in the nation was like that for the last 100 years. While we were doing agricultural and industrial development, we had to kind of match those two economic systems with each other. So if we had a whole industry of agricultural equipment getting started at 230 in the morning, we had to have this commerce, the commercial side of that get started at 230 in the morning. Does that make a bit of sense? Yeah, I think so. Yeah. So that’s a bit of the explanation of some of the stuff that we’re talking about about Standard Time. And daylight savings time.
Yeah, it really makes a lot of sense that we do it. I hear it. Most people complain when it comes around.
Yeah, it’s that thing where we’re not we’re thinking about the equinox. But we’re not thinking about the solstice. Right? It’s a weird thing that we’re not thinking about the longest days of the year. And the shortest days of the year when things get a little bit different, a little bit squirrely. And those those times would really be exaggerated the times of sunset and sunrise. Yeah, it would be strange. Yeah, it probably it probably would be. I mean, you know, like I want it to, I want it to be brighter in the evenings, too. I just really want more daylight. I think we’re too far north Marina, I think we need to get somewhere equatorial morsani I’m in, it’ll be so cool. Yeah, we got to do something like that. That’s how we get out of this. I figure. So yeah, that’d be fun to talk about some of the standard time to daylight savings, time change-ups and stuff that are going on for the year. But there’s kind of an interesting idea that we had, you know, that we’re talking about before, before the podcast to about daylight savings and why it’s important how people complain about it all the time. We hear like, you know, podcast arguments about it often. But why do they do that? They should just keep it the same? Seems so silly. What’s it for doesn’t serve any purpose? inspire smart people? I say that. And it’s, you know, if it didn’t exist at one time, it could not exist sometime in the future. Some countries don’t do it. And yeah, be interesting to guy. But again, those aren’t the northern countries. And that’s that thing where everything on the earth isn’t the same experience. And that’s why things are diversified, like, we were talking about high noon, and your local noon. It’s the it’s a diversified experience where your local municipality has the power to say It’s high noon, or say what time it is. Yeah, it’s a weird thing. So back to some starstuff in some space that just kind of floating around this week, it’s kind of interesting, there’s a handful of things that are going on. And we haven’t really been able to do any good observations. That’s really the honest truth of it. And that’s sort of a frustrating part, especially when we’re trying to do broadcasts and stuff like this on a more regular basis. It’s, it’s a tricky thing, when you’re trying to talk a lot about about observations or you know, or about things that you are observing yet, you’re really not able to observe them. That’s an unfortunate downside that of the perpetually cloudy weather of the Oregon winter. And that’s just a fact of life of some of the stuff that we deal with. But we’re really trying to keep up with a lot of it. And we definitely look any time that we can, you know, we’re always kind of poking around and seeing stuff, though, with that said, haven’t really been able to see Venus in the in the morning sky for a while. No, I haven’t been able to. It’s real close to the horizon right now. It’s real bright right now. And I mean, since it’s close to the horizon, it means it’s going to be popping back out onto the winter side sometime soon. Which is pretty interesting. I remember, I think we talked about this, maybe on another night sky podcast, and we were researching it a while for the motions of Venus, how there’s a reproducible set of motions that Venus takes in the sky over an eight-year period, you remember we talking about that? I do recall, it’s really interesting. Lots of cultures have put lots of meaning around that. We’ve talked about that sometime too. But it’s a really interesting thing. Where if, if Venus, if Venus is, again, these are really they’re reproducible, I think to the day, it’s like such a tight lock is some like three fifths ratio of the Venus year to the earth year, or five eighths ratio. I think it makes five motions in eight years. This doesn’t make sense. I’m probably getting this wrong. This is this is this is a common thing affects on this podcast, I’m sure. It’s interesting. Okay. So when Venus, like what we were just talking about is bright, right now it’s in the morning sky. It’s real close to the horizon right now. And then as it’s dropping down to the horizon, it’s going to pass it’s going to be next to the sun, and it’s going to be past the sun after the sun rises. And so then what we’re gonna see is as the sun crosses the sky, and then comes over to the western horizon and sets, then Venus will be there, because it passed the sun. And now it’s an evening star. So soon, we’re going to be able to see Venus as an evening star. It’s going to be cool,
though. It’s gonna be cool. It’s so interesting. How makes that movement.
Yeah. And so that’s, that’s kind of the that’s the, you know, the morning start to the to the evening star stuff. And that’s sort of a regular thing. But what’s interesting is the transit period that it takes for it to become visible again, on the other side, it’s like this blackout period, right? We see Venus a lot. And then it gets real close to the sun where we can’t see it. And then it’s far enough away from the Sun again, where we can see it. And this notion that it’s able to make is dependent. on the time of year it is for us. It’s a really interesting thing. So do you remember when we were talking about what would it be? I’m trying to think about? It’s the speed of motion that the earth makes when it’s closer again, back to the equinoxes. It’s Back to the equinoxes. When we’re at close to the equinoxes, the sun is moving a little faster with the background stars from our perception on the ground on Earth, man. And so it’s a little faster during the equinox, the change of day is a little faster. And then as we get closer to the solstice, it’s a standstill. So it gets slower and slower and slower, and then stops at the standstill. And then it starts to come back the other way, slowly, and then speeding up and speeding up and speeding up until it hits the center. And this starts slowing down again, until it hits that other solstice point that standstill, and then comes back around. So it’s much faster to change your motion during the equinox. That means that for something like this, when Venus passes from being a morning star, to an evening star, it happens in just a few days, like let’s say, let’s say 10 days, 15 days, it was it was not very much it was like a week or two. And it depended on like, I think you’re I think it depended on your place on the earth. Like if you were at the equator, or if you were in Michigan, it would be it’d be a few days different. Yeah, there were some, some some kind of thing like that. But it’s really weird. So like the last time that we saw this happen was in March of last year, I think when when Venus went from an evening star to a morning star. And this whole time it’s been eyes, Morning Star circuit. And then so now that it’s wintertime, near the solstice, and Venus is real close to the horizon, it’s going to drop down from the morning and go to the evening star side. That’s going to take a much longer time because it’s so close to the solstice to the standstill, where the motion is much slower than it would be during the equinox. Weird to track that, isn’t it? Yeah. Yeah, it’s really strange. So it’s cool to talk about. And it’s cool to kind of discuss, like, how that change of time is different. So this is something that that they noticed in the equatorial areas. I think like the Mayans had a position for this where there’s a lot of significance around the cycle of Venus and whether it was a long year or a short year, or it was like it was a long cycle or a short cycle of how long Venus would be gone out of the sky. And this had some prediction over whether it was going to be a rainy season or a dry season that followed. Yeah, it’s weird. And so it’s it’s it was a predictor of what season it was. So if you follow, they don’t have winter, they don’t have summer, they have dry seasons and wet seasons, because they’re an equatorial country. And so because they don’t have that four season system, they see the day is getting longer and shorter, probably like we do. And they see this transit of Venus a little bit, but it would predict the onset of the rainy season. If it was a long time because you’re near the solstice. And then if it was like a short time, and you saw Venus transit, it was predicting like a dry season or something like that, or whatever when it matched up with it was really interesting. It’s kind of cool. There’s a lot of connections between Venus and historical pieces of, of information that we just sort of take for granted now. That’s cool.
That’s really cool. It’s neat. That’s you said it was the Mayans who were kind of the first people who noticed that
um, I don’t know I’m but they are they are a culture that didn’t notice it. And it was Yeah, it’s cool that they did it, but there’s a lot of stuff that they had associated with that fertility. There’s a lot of stuff and Venus infertility. Like it was like Aphrodite in his Venus in Rome, Aphrodite in Greece, and who’s your face? In Sumerian? What was that? What was the name of the Gilgamesh one? I can’t remember the name of the story, Gilgamesh and then there’s like the bad bad lady. That’s been it’s also cheap.
I can’t remember either. I know it’s like ish. No, that’s just gonna say Ishtar, but I wasn’t sure. I think that might be a different one though. Oh, yeah.
Yeah, the name of the planet Venus was the Acadian goddess Ishtar. Cool, whoo. Yeah, Ishtar, used to be Venus. And so it’s been it’s been like a feminine character kind of passed down. So the Acadian Sumerian, Mesopotamian Ishtar stuff turned into Aphrodite in Greece, and that that kind of turned into Venus that we have now in our run of culture. And then sort of similarly the end kind of for other reasons. And like the Mayan side of it, they had their understanding of Venus and how it worked and sort of what it was related to, but they had the feminine stuff tied to I think it’s like the amount of time that it’s up in the sky. For one of its long terms is is the number of days that it is to bear a child from conception to birth. Okay, yeah. So yeah. So if a child was conceived on the first day you saw Venus, it would be born on the last date you saw Venus. That’s really interesting. Yeah. Yeah. So it was it was connected to this position of childbirth or something like that this, this pattern of this thing that you would see in the sky was was the birth of the child and the birth of the next generation are some really interesting kind of a thing. And it was a fascinating coincidence. Just a fascinating thing to kind of get tied in, you know, and then we have like the moon too, with the lunar staff. And that kind of feminine tie to the two, it’s like monthly cycle of like, 28 and a half to 2029 days. So it’s interesting. There’s like a few of these pieces that were sort of mapped together to fit for women is interesting. It is,
I wonder why? I guess it’s just it shows matches that
those numbers were like, Whoa, that’s how long it took to make a baby. that’s to do with women. That must be important. So isn’t it? Yeah, like, I probably add meaning to that, too. Yeah. And there’s a few other meanings to you. And then obviously, like the moon because it like matches up. So similarly to a cycle that men do not experience. And I think that’s why like, you know, like men, there’s like the, the masculine sign and the feminine moon. Right, and you know, just kind of a characterological thing. But it’s interesting how some of those things have been built up over 1000s of years. And then we just sort of exist with them. Now, we don’t really experience or think about it. It’s cool. There’s other stuff. There’s the planets, there’s Venus on the horizon. There’s Jupiter, it’s, it’s up in the morning, too. There’s Mars, it’s up in the morning, too. I think there’s Saturn now it might be up in the morning. Not great times to see Jupiter, Mars or Saturn. Really, Mars is pretty dim. I think this next year is when we’re going to be coming back into another round of the retrograde and it’s close pass and stuff, but it might not be as big or you know, we’ll notice the differences this next year this next summer’s we coming to see it that we didn’t really see. See this timer this last time around. But right now, like what we noticed, I think in the summertime, when we looked at it’s real small right now it’s kind of gone far out. And so it’s it’s like a real dim point of light, whereas opposed to a year and a half ago when it was just enormous. Nor It was huge. The most obvious thing, it was really strange, and it was really close to Antares. It’s really cool to see that now. Nothing like that. Totally different kind of experience. Super dim, super small little star point a light that looks red. It’s interest I Well, you know, it’s probably not I think it’s like an A-plus A positive. It’s like a first magnitude bright, but it’s about as bright as other stars that are bright.
Okay, as well. Yeah, it doesn’t really stand out anymore.
Yeah, you’ll notice it, you’ll see it, but it’s like, Ah, there it is. But it’s not like, Whoa, that’s what I saw last summer I think is huge. And so it’s weird to kind of see the dynamics of that planet because it is so dynamic. I think Saturn has just switched over. Really it’s probably in the sun right now. Or maybe just after it but i think i think Saturn had kind of pulled back from Scorpio a bit and was was pretty well into Sagittarius now. And I think Sagittarius is is like in the sun right now. Right? We just switched over from Scorpio to Sagittarius. And that’s all sort of shifted around now. So what whatever it is, that’s a little bit off. But it’s probably like right in there. I’m just kind of being like right up at the morning. It’s kind of interesting, but yeah, this summer we looked at Saturn and a lot of times it’s it was pretty small or you know, it was it was a Saturday keep it on Saturday. Good deal. But it’s it’s out there to be in Riyadh not a great time for viewing planets right now, I would say unless you love morning observations, which I don’t at all, but But most of all, because there is no sky view. It’s just clouds.
Yeah, I was gonna say even if you do like to do morning observations, if you live in the Pacific Northwest, it’s kind of hard. Yeah, most days. Yeah.
Yeah. Even just in the summer on a good day. It’s bad. orkambi so that’s I guess that’s the planet round-up for the moment. Some of the some of the star stuff that’s going on right now. You could probably pop your head out and see this if you’re in an area that gets some clear skies. fam Alo is due south I guess it’s in Pisces or one of those Pisces Australia’s things are, I always kind of thought it was it was part of Aquarius, is that there is a Capricorn again flipped. I think it was acquired. I don’t know. I thought it was over there. But I guess it’s kind of in a Pisces constellation. It’s close to that. But it’s really it’s the only significantly bright star in the southern hemisphere, or sorry, in the southern sky of the Northern Hemisphere during the winter, so all the bright stars in the summertime, they really shift pretty significantly to the south. That’s where we see that’s what we see. Scorpio, we see Antares we see spika. And we see like our tourists out there we see Vega, all that an Altair, all that sort of stuff is kind of kind of Southern band. And then for a long time in the fall, we don’t really see anything except for the star family. Oh, and then we sort of swing back around as Cassiopeia comes up. And then as Ryan comes up, and Sirius procyon, and then like further south to Cannes Opus and some of the other stuff there. So we come back into that bright band of stars. And it’s interesting we’ve talked about before, but that’s kind of the strip of the Milky Way across the sky. But it’s sort of bent around the Earth, you know, so we only see some of it at time. I think we looked at it in an interesting spot. months and months ago, back on a trip in Eastern Oregon. When we saw in early spring, we saw the spread of sky, late at night across the northwestern sky, kind of from the northeast, to the southwest, we saw this band of the Milky Way where you could see a lot of the winter stars coming up, or setting. And then you can see Vega coming up. It was really weird. You remember that? Yeah, I think I do. Yeah, it was late at night out in Eastern Oregon. We were watching stuff. Yeah. And it was, but it’s interesting to see that see that kind of perspective to notice. Oh, this is just one straight line of stars. With with big gaps on either side.
Yeah, that’s what I really like about our trips out to Eastern Oregon and staying up late out there is that you get to really see that full view of how it’s moving through? And like, how it’s connected across that big strip.
Yeah, really cool. It was really cool going, going like further south to and being able to see some of these other bright stars. Some of these other bright first magnitude stars. But for right now, in the early evenings, family is the only star you can see do South but I think that’s one that is popping up. And yeah, it’s like, right out to the south. So that’s, that’s when you pop out and see, if you look up in the sky, you’re gonna see the square of Pegasus, if you can make it out. I think it’s kind of not super significant. So have fun. You know, there it is. There’s Pegasus. Well, it’s a block. It’s a horse, but it’s just the squares, but I think it’s Yeah, I think it’s like the front part of a horse like a horse is like torso and head or something like that. Okay. But I also didn’t ever really make sense it. illustrations, really these illustrations. They’re not real. The constellations are real, you know, there’s just, it’s just the stars. And it’s just their perspective. And then there’s how we’re mapping to what they are part of. Or you’re like what’s grouped? To what group? Yeah, and it’s for us to help classify, but not because it’s real. It’s a weird thing to think about. Right? It’s a science you study, but it doesn’t exist. It’s just your observation of it. So it’s weird. It’s a weird perspective to kind of stand, but if you look up, you’ll see the square peg assists. And then next to that you’re going to see Andromeda, the constellation Andromeda, and if you know how to and on dark nights, it’s really quite easy. You’re gonna see a fuzzy speck if you kind of know how to find it out there, sort of north of Pegasus, up from the Pleiades and Taurus and sort of down from Cassiopeia. It’s a little pocket in between the Pegasus and Cassiopeia and then like the Pleiades down below, but in that little pocket in there, you might make out a little smudge. And that is the Andromeda galaxy, we had taken some photos of it, I think last year, yeah, I remember that. It was cool that to get to get some observations of it. And you can capture it with just a couple seconds of exposure on a camera if you if you know how to do some of the nighttime long exposure photography. It was cool, though, to get to get an image of it, but you see this little smudge out there. And that’s another galaxy. It’s another spiral galaxy, I think it’s in our local group. And that was the first galaxy that was discovered by Hubble by the astronomer Hubble, not the telescope that it was the he that it was named after the astronomer Hubble, who was the first one to figure out a way to identify Andromeda as a separate galaxy from our own galaxy. It was an interesting thing, they use this this thing called the standard candle that you’re seeing, right? It’s an interesting idea, but if you had a candle, maybe one foot in front of you, and then you had another candle, let’s say right now a foot in front of you a second candle, you’re looking at these two candles, you observe they are the same brightness, you say, Alright, those two are the same things. Now let’s say you take candle number two, and someone runs that out whole football field. And then you look at the brightness. Candle one that’s a foot from you is much brighter. And candle two is way way out there and much dimmer but we already observed improved they are the same brightness. They are the same thing with the same luminance. So what we can do now is measure how bright is this one? How bright is that one? And then how bright would it be if we changed the light? So now we can figure out how far away that far light is by how dim it is. Because it’s a standard candle. It is an interesting thing. So to do that observation, you have to find a, I think like a quasar or you have to you have to find like a supernova, you know, like some, it’s some pop that happens in some kind of relatively special circumstance that happens in the star or in the galaxy, and has to be observed when it happens. And I guess like you’re able to measure, it’s a really complicated the, I have no idea how they really got into this. But, but I think that their first estimates were pretty far away. And then it ended up being like, three times as many millions of light-years away. It’s like 2 million light-years from here. And then it’s obviously been observed for hundreds and hundreds of years. It was named Andromeda because it was observed for a long time. constellation of Andromeda, I think it was thought of the it was thought of as the Andromeda nebula. It was a gashes cloud just local to our galaxy.
Oh, interesting. I was gonna ask what they had thought it was before they discovered that it was a galaxy.
Yeah, yeah, there was no concept of such a thing before that. And so that was the first time that it was observed in such a way it was. It’s really interesting that that’s how it kind of it came about, but that’s really less than 100 years old right now. It’s probably 90 years old that we’ve had the concept of a galaxy. That’s crazy. It is crazy. Yeah. Yeah. That’s a that’s a very interesting thing about science and kind of how
it is. Yeah, especially for things that we observe. How many other things do we see? or know are there but we don’t actually understand what,
yeah, things we’ve known about for hundreds of years, and then we’ll find out. Oh, it’s like this whole other kind of natural phenomena. Yeah. Be really strange. Oh, yeah. I wonder if there’s anything we’ll have happen in our lifetime. That’s like that. I hope so. That’d be cool. So yeah, the Andromeda galaxy is their Andromeda. And then there’s like, you know, Taurus, and the Pleiades. And then like, they’re coming up pretty quick. And then after that is Orion, which is coming up, still sort of like early, but late night? Yeah. But then it’s pretty well up by late night. You have you have, like, serious app and procyon. And you’re really getting like a lot of those brighter northern hemisphere, winters, constellations and stars. So it’s cool to get to pop out and see those this time of year.
Yeah, I’ve been noticing those ones a lot. Really. I think Orion is the one that I just, I don’t know if it’s my timing, but when the sky is clear, that’s the one I keep seeing.
Yeah. Yeah, it’s, it’s a great time of year to start seeing that over the eastern horizon. And I think it’s, I think it’s like, on Christmas, or on New Year’s or something. It’s sort of one of the constellations it’s like, at the horizon at sunset on New Year’s, I understand that. It’s kind of an idea like at the beginning of January, Orion is rising at sunset is like one of those little things that they figured out. Or, you know, you kind of know and watch out for, but yeah, later in the night, though, like what we know Yes, it’s, well, this guy, so it’s been kind of cool. for summer constellations, you know, you don’t really think about him at all, but some of these things that that are kind of tight up toward the north pole, they stay up for most of the year, but you really don’t think about it. Sometimes you think about the Big Dipper that’s a constellation that’s up all year. Sure. But for some of the stuff in the Northern Hemisphere like Vega, Altair and dinette what make up the Summer Triangle that we look at a lot in the summertime I you know, yeah, I forget about in this time of year, they’re still up a bit. And there, they’re kind of pulling, you know, because it’s a circle and stuff the world isn’t super flat. And so it ends up kind of wrapping around since we’re in the Northern Hemisphere it wraps around it and Vega alternative neighbor kind of pulling up, they sort of go east, or sorry, pardon me, they come from the east and they move west and then because it’s a certain you know, because you have to go around the North Pole, they start marking up toward the north in the wintertime here. So now we’re looking at like Vega as like a stark pretty far north. And then Altair is still up, but we’re still seeing it kind of upside-down now where the pointer is down. And it’s interesting just to kind of spot that, but you really don’t think of being able to observe in this time of year I think there is something going on in one of those constellations this year. there supposed to be like they’re supposed to be like, an event, some kind of event, some kind of Nova or some kind of, I don’t even know if it’d be it’s not gonna be as cool. I don’t know. But I think it was gonna be a star that got way brighter for about three weeks and then got dinner. Oh, interesting. Yeah, but I think it’s still one of those things you would see because you were trying to see it late because you like pulled out binoculars You know, he pulled out a telescope? I don’t think it’s gonna surprise everybody. Oh, wow. Look at that.
That’s so impressive.
I was worried about this a few years ago, because I think I’d remember hearing about this, this this thing happened like lira or something. And then I remember thinking like, Wow, well, that would be awesome. But it’s probably going to happen when it’s up during the daytime, and then nobody will see it, you know? Or it’s gonna happen in the wintertime, when it’s like down or something, we won’t get to see it. And it was thought of like, you know, just sort of nicely, like, well, what, that’d be cool. You know, we’ll see Vega and it’s just right out for everybody. And we’ll be able to see it. But they weren’t really thinking like, well, is it going to be during the during the time that it’s in the day or during the night? We won’t get any observations of it? Wouldn’t that be a shame? So? It’s weird. I wonder how many cool things happened for six months during the daytime? Oh, man. Yeah, probably tons of stuff. Yeah. Yeah, like some cool, like, they talked about, like, what, like the 1400s, that supernova are the 1200s. I can’t remember what it was, there was some supernova that they observed. And the Dark Ages, right. And in some cultures got got to believe and write down that it existed. A lot of the Catholic cultures had to pretend that it did not exist. Is because not because the sky is holy, because the sky isn’t changing. Because the sky is God, it can’t change. But we saw it change. And so we have to say it didn’t change. weird, weird old idea. Yeah, big simplification at it. Of course, they saw change. It was it was a huge thing. And then like the star was like on it. Yeah, little remnant deal after that. So yeah, interesting stuff has probably happened, but maybe stuff like that happened, you know, just during the daytime? Like, wow, that’s pretty cool. But no, no observations have been made before. 100 years ago, before we had some kind of satellite or telescope system that did. They can make images of it during the day, or during our day sort of thing. So the mobility we have now for observations is so much bigger than it once was.
Oh, absolutely. And being able to share observations,
yeah, yeah, being able to communicate that stuff with other scientists or other people. I mean, that was like super limited. For the longest time, I think it’s like one of the things that first prove that the earth was round, was one of those things where they had, they had to, like pen pal each other, take a measurement of when you can see the bottom of your, well, you know, like the old wells, a big hole that was straight down, you have to drop a pail down and pull up water and stuff. Yeah, as noon, like we’re to your local noon. And depending on your declaration from the equator, it’s going to be a different time. And it’s gonna be like a different point where where the light from the sun will cast all the way down to the bottom of the well. The point was to make a measurement of that, and then mail that letter letter to like a whole other part of the world from Europe, I think danda wherever, in the south, and then they were like trying to match that up to figure out their calculations on if the earth was round.
So it’s interesting. I didn’t know that that was part of part of them figuring that out. Yeah. Who was that?
We should look it up? I think it was in rare. Earth. What am I looking at? My laptop I want to look at. Let’s see. Oh, my God. Well, thanks for looking at. Yeah, I don’t think that. That seems like a hard thing to search. Yeah. Yeah. That’s one of the things I probably won’t find, right.
That’s so interesting, though, that that was one of the ways that they were, they’re figuring that out. What a terrible way to have to have to work out scientific information, or it’ll be comparing notes of how things are moving. Yeah, some letters. Yeah, we just saw the time that it would take between things.
Oh, yeah. It would take so much time to try and do stuff and to try and make those observations and then prove them out again. There’s lots of stuff that would be related to that. That’d be super hard.
But
yeah, I don’t know. It was interesting. It was cool. Like, kind of thinking about that stuff. But really, that’s like most of the stuff that I think we have to talk we talked about the planets talked about some of the star stuff, kind of where they’re at. Yeah, the supernova thing in Vega. Getting to see that night and stuff. Okay, cool. Pretty cool. Trying to make some, we should do at some time, we should get some cool binoculars, Frank out, make some cool observations during the wintertime. If we ever get the chance to, maybe we’ll save that for the summer.
I’d love to do some winter observations.
Yeah, we got to try some stuff. But when when the weather’s right, we’ll make our opportunity for it. I had a good time and we’ve been doing it, you know, it’s great. But it works when it works. And it doesn’t want it doesn’t something that we’ve we’ve learned over time a little bit and it’ll be cool. Yeah, we have other ways of seeing it will will figure something out. But it’s great. glad we’re back, doing some podcasts and stuff. And thanks a lot for hanging out with me and bounce some ideas around about standard time and daylight savings time and where some planets are where some stars are and stuff.
Yeah. Thanks so much for talking about some of that stuff, folks. I think it’s really cool. Going back over the daylight savings hours. Why? Why do that? Yeah. Yeah. It’s interesting. And then there’s the whole idea of what it really means throughout the year. That’s changing.
Yeah, I’m sure there’s a lot more to the ideas and the decisions and all the stuff that went behind the state choice to do that, or whatever it is, but the all the graph about it when it happens. I think it’s done without without the clarity of understanding. Maybe what graph would happen if they didn’t choose to do that. Right. Yeah. I think that I think that’s what it is. Yeah. Yeah. It seems to be better than that. But really, thanks so much for doing this podcast with me. Thanks. I appreciate so I’m asking Marina Hanson. My name is Billy Newman. And thank you guys very much for hanging out and listen to this episode of the night sky podcast.