Produced by Marina Hansen and Billy Newman
Link
Marina Hansen Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/marinavisual/
Billy Newman Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/billynewman/
Website Billy Newman Photo – http://billynewmanphoto.com/
YouTube – https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRxCs7sDRYcJoNls364dnPA
Facebook Page – https://www.facebook.com/billynewmanphotos/
Twitter – https://twitter.com/billynewman
Patreon – https://www.patreon.com/billynewmanphoto
Website Billy Newman Photo – http://billynewmanphoto.com/
About  –  http://billynewmanphoto.com/about/
Get Out There Podcast Feed
http://billynewmanphoto.com/feed/podcast/getoutthere
Media Tech Podcast Feed
http://billynewmanphoto.com/feed/podcast/media-tech-podcast
Billy Newman Photo Podcast Feed
http://billynewmanphoto.com/feed/podcast/billynewmanphotopodcast
The Night Sky Podcast Feed
http://billynewmanphoto.com/feed/podcast/thenightskypodcast
Ebook Working With Film (2013)
http://billynewmanphoto.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Working_With_Film.pdf
Ebook Western Overland Excursion (2012)
http://billynewmanphoto.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Western-Overland-Excursion-E-book-0812.pdf
The Night Sky Podcast | Mars And Venus
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 this week, we’re going to be talking about some of the news, Sky events that are going on in the night sky above us for the third week of January. And now 2017. Are you doing Marina
doing well, it’s cool being in the new year.
Yeah, I think it’s really cool. Now being in 2017, finishing up 2016 coming into the second year of doing the podcast, which is kind of fun. Yeah, it’s cool. I will do a few more of them this year. But it’ll be fun to kind of hang out, chat a little bit and talk more about, about the things that are going on that we see and our observations of stuff going on in the night above us. But it’s cool, checking out the sky. And it really appreciated a lot of the stuff that I’ve learned so far from doing this podcast, listen to the things that I’ve kind of been inspired to research from it.
Yeah, it has been cool, having more of a reason to try to find out other things. It’s been cool. I’ve learned a lot more than I was expecting to.
That’s really good. I’m glad. Yeah, I was wondering, I was trying to think over this last year, of different things that we’ve learned about reviewing a little bit about, like, ukulele is
really cool. Yeah, it was really cool. Watching Mars this last year, with all the movement it had, and kind of learning more about that Mars was great, this last show grade and pro grade works. And
yes, that’s really fascinating. I really appreciate you talking about and getting to look at the retrograde motion that Mars was doing that was really cool to see. In like the middle of the summer that we just get so hugely bright. It was cool. And then now Yeah, what do you think about watching the planets, how they’ve moved about each other? Over the course of the year now that like, we both been trying to pay attention to publications.
It’s interesting seeing the patterns and how they move around. I feel like I feel like I need a few years of watching them around to like, really notice how it goes. I wouldn’t expect to
you’d have I don’t have any real sense of where they’re going to be almost, but I do notice how strange it is, though. Like thinking about maybe 16 months ago, you know, when we saw Jupiter and Mars really close to each other in the morning sky are like lately, yeah, sky and then how far apart that moved, you know, by by another time of the year, or how that come together? Again, I think. I think about one year ago now we had mercury coming up and we had all five of the planets up in the morning sky. That was one day talking about this time of year and then now they’re nowhere near each other, at least in that regard. So it’s kind of interesting coming back now and seeing where they are how? Yeah, this isn’t an AI Mars is in the night sky. Jupiter’s in the morning, sky. Saturn’s gonna be in the early morning sky. It’s interesting, just seeing how they kind of spread out again, but then now they come back together. And so what are the you know, they’re different ones that are closer and further apart to each other. Like right now we have right now we have Venus and Mars pretty close to each other. Yeah, they’re pretty close. And it’s interesting, especially like you’re talking about with Mars sticking on that for a second how much that’s changed over the year. And just getting to observe that must be really interesting. Because we saw it at its very brightest,
right? It’s pretty dim now.
Yeah. And then now it’s it’s significantly more dim. I think it’s a drop of four magnitudes to whatever that is.
Yeah, yeah. It’s quite a bit dimmer and especially compared to Venus, which it’s next to now.
Venus is really bright, hugely bright now. Yeah, it’s so bright it might be at one of its brightest showings.
I feel like it must be I’ve I feel like I haven’t really noticed any of the planets. Oh, yeah. It’s maxima. It seems so bright. Especially, uh, I think just a month ago. There are some really clear nights in Corvallis when I was up visiting family. And it just stuck out in the sky so much like if it almost feels like you can feel the light bouncing off of it.
Oh, yeah, I bet you could you know, if it’s significantly more dark, you could probably see your shadow, like, like with, with Jupiter or Mars when it’s that bright. You can see a shadow cast from it from the light from another planet of a nation. Shadow. That’s cool. Yeah. I think that would be how you would if you lived on Venus, you’d be a Venetian. Gotcha. If you lived on Mars, you’d be a Martian Martian. Perhaps maybe I’m wrong. Maybe Venetian is like sounds like the Venetian.
But I think it’s
both Italian. Right? Or Rome, or some Latin from a Latin root for Venus. But I think Yeah, right now, like you were talking about, I think Venus really is coming into one of its brightest sections. Like right now. It’s at a negative 4.6 magnitude. Yeah, it’s coming up. It was just a 4.5 like the week or so in the past. And there’s an interesting thing I was learning from that book we were going through, which will I’m sure we’ll get into a lot as we read through it, and maybe check out or kind of research different things that we could interested in from it. But this first thing was about Venus and about when it’s the most bright, because like we talked about Venus before is it’s an interior planet, right? So the same way, we see a lot of variability with Mars, and how bright it is in the night sky. You know how like when, like, right now, it’s pretty far away from us, it might be on the far side of the Sun from us. So it looks a lot dimmer in the sky, evening sky. But in the summer, when it came up, and it was in opposition to us, it was close, and it did that retrograde loop that was at its closest point to the earth. And so it looked really, really bright to us. So it’s interesting, because with an exoplanet, and I’ll explain this first, and then I’ll get the Venus with an exoplanet, what we’re looking at is the whole broad face of that planet surface, illuminated by the light of the sun, similar to like how we look out to the moon and see a quarter moon or a half moon, or full moon. There’s a whole surface that showing us like, so it’s interesting that for us, when we look at two planets that are past us in the solar system, they kind of behave a little bit differently. Now you can probably still see them at times where they’re, they’re not totally full, but you won’t see them at a point where they’re a crescent, if I understand correctly, they don’t get way more dim to us because they won’t ever be inside the sun from us. So we’ll never really see on the shadow side of the planet, right, we’re always going to be looking out past us from the center of the light source the sun to a point of light, where we’re not going to see that that shadow spot like we see the dark side of the moon, or we see that the shaded section in the moon when it’s a new moon. And the light is on the other side of the of the celestial body of the moon. So since the moon is in front of us in the sun, it’s darkened in our perspective, yet there’s still half of the moon lit by light from the sun on the other side. Does that make sense? Yeah, yeah. So it’s interesting when you think about that. So we’re really looking at Mars, we see variability, and it’s in its light because of that, and we look at it in a different way. But when we look at to Venus, there’s this other characteristic that we see. And that’s with planets that are interior from the earth, toward the sun, those those interior planets of Venus and Mercury. And what we get with them is, is a different orbital path. Like that’s why we never see Venus rise deep in the night sky, go up to its zenith point, and then set sometime near sunrise, like a Venus could be at opposition to us the way the Mars and Jupiter and Saturn can. And it can’t, because it’s going to be inside the sun from it. So for something to be at opposition for something to rise at sunset, it has to be directly straight out from us and the sun, if you were to draw a line between those things, it has to be directly straight out past the earth to rise out in the evening sky from the eastern horizon. So that’s why we never get to see that we only get to see it sort of close to where the sun is in the sky. And so we see it come up like we’re seeing it right now in the winter sky rise each night a little higher and higher on the western horizon until it hits its greatest elongation, and then it’s going to come back down toward the western horizon and go out of view. And that’s going to be its its season of being visible to us then what we see is in the morning, just a few days later, it shows up in the morning sky after sunrise, meaning that it’s past the sun. And then is now on the morning side of the sky where we’re only going to be able to see it before the sunrise is over the the eastern horizon. interesting how it goes back and forth. Now this all gets back to that thing I mentioned a few minutes ago, why it’s getting so much brighter now and when and in what state we see it at the most bright from our position here on Earth. So get this a little bit. So you know how with the moon, there’s a full moon and a crescent moon, right? So for us, the brightest Moon is when it’s a full moon. Right? And the dimmest moon maybe is when it’s a crescent moon. Chase does it? Yeah, I was just gonna say because less of the surface has that layer, right.
But this isn’t the same character characteristic that we see with Venus. And it’s kind of strange like that. So what apparently is happening, maybe I should double check. But what apparently is happening is that the crescent side of Venus is getting so much closer to Earth, that it’s getting a lot brighter. So even though if you were looking at Venus through a telescope, we would see most of a crescent because it’s inside the inside of our Earth’s orbit toward the sun. And it’s going to be passing kind of in front of the Earth and the Sun. It’s going to be kind of a crescent shape when we look at it. And that’s why it’s getting so bright. Not because it’s a crescent but because the planets actually physically really close to a sort of like how Mars is really physically close to it. But it was raising it opposition as well. itself to be really bright. So imagine this for a second, if we had the sun in the center, we imagine the solar system, we imagine ourselves here from a perspective of earth. And then we imagine just a little ways out maybe in the middle of that, there’s this imaginary orbit, a line that goes around the sun with the planet Venus, the stays on that track. So as it’s swinging on the inside of the Earth from us, we see that Crescent, and as it gets really close, it gets significantly brighter and magnitude, from our visual perspective here on earth. And I think if I remember, right, I think Galileo is one of the first people to actually document in his notes, the cycle of Venus, or this Crescent cycle of Venus.
Oh, interesting. Okay, Galileo.
Well, yeah, one of the first, there was understandings of Venus cycles from from much earlier on than that, because people could actually see, in some instances that it wasn’t actually a full shape of Venus. But it was a crescent. In fact, some interesting stuff. Yeah. But since Galileo had the telescope was making observations of the night sky, these were one of the observations that he documented. Pretty interesting thing. But it shows similar to like, what we’re talking about moving from a period of being a crescent shape, to a half shape, to maybe what’s close to a full shape, but not maybe a total full shape. Because if you think about this, like I was saying, a minute ago, we struck this mental model of the solar system where on earth, we look out toward the sun, we see Venus that kind of halfway, it’s passing on the inside of us, we see that Crescent right now, it’s really bright out in that Crescent. But we think like in other planets, they’re like with the moon, when it’s full, we would see it at its most bright, not the case with Venus. Because for our instance, since Venus is inside of our orbit of the Earth, when it’s full, it would be on the far side of the sun, much further away, and that’s a time we’ll see the light source illuminate the full face of the planet Venus to shine back at us.
Oh, interesting. Okay, so when it’s at its brightest is when it’s actually just physically closest to when it’s physically closest to us. That’s really interesting. Yeah, I hadn’t thought about that. Or I didn’t understand that. That was quite how it worked.
Yeah, I was trying to figure this out, too, because I wasn’t sure if it would be one or the other, or, you know, mentally when I’m thinking about it. It’s like, Well, wait, would it be brighter to us, in our perspective, when it was full, or maybe like half full or something kind of swung out to the side 90 degrees, and we see it, we see a lot of it there. Or would it be brighter as it gets closer to us, but we see less of the illuminated surface of that disc is interesting to find out. But as it gets closer to us, we’re really seeing more of the illumination. Now, when it is closest to us, it will be right in line with the sun. Likely, you know as it because it kind of comes back down and gets real close to the sun. That’s why when we look out from Earth, we see straight up to the sun. But then we see Venus there. Do you remember that transit of Venus we watched? Yeah, after the eclipse in 2012. In June, we took that smoke class out of that coffee shop, they said, hey, it’s happening for the next eight hours go out. And we saw that transit of Venus cut across the sun is so interesting. So that’s a situation when we’re in a position of syzygy. That’s a really strange word to spell. I think it’s like s says the G SYZYGY. Oh, yeah, it’s cool word. But it means when three bodies are aligned in a row, or three celestial bodies. So when we look up, it’s the earth to Venus to the sun directly. And that’s the time that’s going to be in a straight line. So if we imagine that same celestial mouse model, we’d kind of swing in our instance, seems like Venus would be kind of out to the side from us. So still getting part of it illuminated part of that sphere eliminated, but still looking like a disk to us.
Interesting. Yeah. is. So is a syzygy is an eclipse This is a G.
Yes. and Eclipse is a form of synergy. Are there other forms of synergies? Sure, there are. I’m not really sure though, I don’t really know how it goes or what really accounts to it. In fact, even this thing of a transit of Venus may not be a syzygy geometrically, maybe it is just from my perspective from the spot on Earth. But it seems like that would be the time that that is happening. When either we’re at a position of New Moon, like the moon is straight in from the sun from us, or when our position at full moon when it’s swung 180 degrees in the other direction, to this farthest away position is still being aligned. So it’s kind of interesting how that goes. But so with the move, we get it a little bit more often. And I think with other objects, we get that that too, but I’m not really sure what what, in all capacities, what it means, but it is interesting now. Yeah, it’s you know, it’s Yeah. Yeah, it was kind of neat. So that’s why we see Venus is so much brighter at this time. And it’s really cool because we’re in the section where we’re having this wide swing or this, excuse me, it’s a it’s a long elongation of Venus. So it’s going up pretty high in the sky. And the cool thing Especially right now is that it’s the winter time so that when the sun sets early, Venus is still really quite high into the southern sky. For a lot of the stars that are going to be up there, we really can look up pretty far out from the horizon and spot Venus because the sun setting so early, and because it’s going to have so much time and that dark sky to pass down to the horizon. That’s what I’ve been looking at what really seems like a very an especially bright Venus when maybe at times in the summer, it is close to the same magnitude, perhaps it’s a, but the sun sets so much later. In the northern hemisphere here, we have such brighter skies later into the evening, a longer period of Twilight, while the sun is on this half of the sphere of the globe. Does that make sense? So when is when the sun and it’s summertime, like we lived in Alaska, and it was nighttime, it may not actually ever get pure dark, right? Because there’s still going to be a bit of light coming up. Because it’s so much closer to that part of the earth. It’s really dipping down a bit. Right. So what we suffer from in the summertime is an illuminated northern Northwestern horizon line. Right, and that impart impinges on the brightness or the luminosity. The luminance that we would see from Venus, when it’s showing itself to be very bright.
Yeah, I think it was a was like last year it was mercury. It was kind of hard to see in the morning.
Right? Yeah. Mercury for that for that reason. Yeah, that reason? Yeah. Because it is still existing. And you know, it is bright. Yeah. But it’s just difficult for us to see because our atmosphere. Yeah, it’s getting in the way. And so that’s a that’s part of it. And that’s why people like to make observations. Deep in the night when things get to their Zenith point, right, you’re kind of straight up because that’s the smallest amount of oxygen or atmosphere for our eyes to look through to get out of the atmosphere why we fire rockets straight up and sideways, I suppose. Like what I think the the atmosphere is somewhere around like 100 miles to get up like to the space station’s orbit. But then if we think about it, when we can look out across the land, 100 miles, we can look mountaintop to mountaintop and that can be well over 100 miles. So we’re looking through so much more atmosphere, when we look laterally across to the horizon. And this is actually the reason that we see sunsets we see haze or mist or we see bluing and mountains, like we see a range of mountains that are close to us. Further away, they’re bluer, more hazy, more cool town. Yeah. And that’s actually the atmosphere, the thickness of the atmosphere stacking up as it gets further and further and distance. And also, to continue on that there’s more particulates in the in the atmosphere at those lower levels. And since we burn things, and we pollute, in some senses as we kick up dust, and since our forest fires, and all of those types of natural instances in weather that move a lot of material. There’s a lot of density of distance, and cumulation of material and those in his lateral direction this way, you know, it takes about 1520 degrees before it seems to get real crisp in the air. If you’re looking at kind of around the horizon line. It’s kind of interesting. Yeah, that’s neat. Yeah, it was pretty cool. I like to kind of think about a few of those things. But yeah, it was kind of interesting how that is just how much better it is. When you look straight up into the air into the sky. It’s a lot darker. But so there’s Venus. It’s really bright. And then just up from Venus is Mars. I checked on Mars a couple times. Yeah, I’ve seen it a few of these nights. Yeah, well Now, tell me about like what you see as being a lot different about it now than what we saw this summer.
I noticed it’s a lot dimmer. A lot. A big thing I noticed.
Yeah. And isn’t it strange how it’s still up in the sky. It was in Scorpio but Scorpio is nowhere near as brave. So the reason that we were able to see Mars in opposition in Scorpio during May and June this last year, but now we see Mars and Aquarius, where Scorpio is now moved on to being up early in the morning. Now it’s like Sagittarius and Capricorn, that are that are in the position of where the sun is that that celestial position of the zodiac is kind of passed on. So now, since I think Saturn is still in position of Scorpio, and then moving towards Sagittarius, but what we see is Mars being in a much dimmer position in the in the constellation of Aquarius. And it’s interesting when we look at that because I think Venus is pretty close to Aquarius. Maybe it’s Aquarius to Pisces, I think maybe in that no man’s land between those two constellations?
Yeah, I think so. It’s interesting that it’s stuck. Or that it’s been that Mars has just been in the sky for so long for as long as it has been. Yeah, a peculiar thing. Yeah. How, how does that usually go along? Do you usually see the different planets?
See, this is an interesting thing about what we’re seeing with Mars and its position right now. And Mars does have a different track through Night Sky than what most of the other planets do. And historically, this has a lot of significance to its why Mars and Venus are kind of pulled out as a little bit different from the other the other planets in their walk about the unit or about the night sky part of it because Mars is retrograde action. And then it’s continued. Like we’re noticing now, it’s continued probe rate motion through a lot of the stars quick enough to stay up in the night sky, or up in a certain case in the morning sky, staying out of view in the night sky for years on us. Yeah. Or, you know, there can be a significant section where, like, what we’re watching now, where it’s been in the evening sky, for the better part of the year, there’ll be another part where it’s out of the evening sky. And it won’t track the same way that we’d look out at Jupiter with in a way it’s it’s still pretty close to the same position, not year over year, it moves a good bit, but it does, as it moves, you know, we’re able to track it kind of it kind of comes up at about the time you’d expect. Yeah, it has its little pattern. Yeah, and Mars definitely has a pattern to it. But as what’s happening right now, since the earth is inside, like we’re talking about Venus. Since the earth is inside, it’s moving a little bit faster. So it’s pulled away from Mars, when we were really close to each other that time, in June when we were in opposition. And we watched Mars, do that retrograde loop. That’s as we watched through the retrograde loop. That’s right as the earth passes. And then now, Mars is still following us in the sky. And so that’s why it’s pulling up back the sky. So even as the earth has changed in seasons, Mars is still chasing us like, like a car trailing in a race is still chasing. So that’s why it’s kind of dragging up through Sagittarius and through Capricorn and now through Aquarius and into Pisces, because it’s still kind of pulling up toward the earth. So it’s going to be kind of interesting to watch. I think it’s going to set I don’t know here in here in a month or two or something. And it’ll be down for a while in the sun and then up in the morning sky. And then it probably won’t be until. I don’t know until like maybe spring 2019 that we see it pretty significantly again. I wonder whether to be Yeah, it might be it’ll be a year for it being pretty dim, we’re not going to have a big bright pass at it for really quite a long time. So now, I think when we look at Mars, we were looking at tonight, and we see Venus in the sky, just up to its left. If we can attract that, that Zodiac line or the planetary that plane, we spot Mars there. And I think that’s a positive first magnitude. So I think it’s the same as another first magnitude star. Wow. Yeah, it’s so much dimmer. Yeah. Yeah, a lot dimmer. So I think in the summer, we saw like 4.2, Venus, I think is the brightest object that that can appear in the sky, which is, I think, close to what we’re seeing at its maximum of 4.6, negative 4.6 magnitude. So we saw Jupiter Mars, excuse me, Mars, at an almost similar magnitude of brightness this summer. Now we’ve seen it drop off so much, nearly five, I guess from four to positive negative four to positive one, it’s been like a really big swing, and then now it’s gonna get even smaller at times. And there’s certain times that you can spot it and just really looks like a little speck in the sky. You think that’s Mars, it was huge and big. And it’s weird, because you don’t see that same variability with Jupiter. Which is why Jupiter is sort of regarded as more stable and more steady. And its path through the solar system or its path through the night sky. And the stars in the background is much more steady and even similar to how we see Saturn. But with Venus and Mars, both you see that chaotic mess up? Yeah, that. And I think that’s why men at the time historically associated Venus and Mars with chaotic entities, Mars associated with war, which is a lot, which is very chaotic. And then a more a more of its time thinking. Women were associated with Venus, who, I guess in their perspective, were quite chaotic, as well. But it’s interesting the connections of how different cultures kind of associated those two,
it is saying, I thought I was interesting. That’s those two planets. Also, because those are the planets that are the ones that are right next to us. Oh, sure. Yeah. Yeah. Venus is the one that’s in from us. Mars is the one that’s out from us
in our line in our Yeah. And I think it’s kind of perplexing to I don’t know if that was well understood. In fact, the heliocentric
I imagine it was it was not willing, but I think it’s interesting now. Yeah, but those are the ones that tend to be next to us. And also the ones we happened to notice more behaviors of
Yeah, in in antiquity. If I understood some of the things I was reading, right. The way that they classified it was what moved most quickly, was closest to us. I will move most slowly, was furthest away from us,
okay, so they probably kind of understood or believed that those those things were closer To us than the other ones.
Yeah, I think I think that was pretty well understood. I’m not sure where they placed mercury in the mix, but I think it was or excuse me What? Yeah, what moved the most dramatically in the sky. So like Saturn, like we were talking about is really quite steady. It takes 2728 29 years or something to make to make its full year trip around the sun, and it’s for your trip through the night sky for us. Jupiter takes 12 years. Venus takes I think, 200 days. Mars takes I think, 500 days. So I think that that’s sort of how it was, it was understood. It was kind of interesting. I was I think maybe it was Aristotle or Plato that might be like, they were the one that the classified, well, this must be, this is moving more. So it must be closer to us. I guess, like you would think of things on a physical plane, you know, if it was just you and me, and then maybe another person 100 feet away, and another person 1000 feet away, you would have to move just very little for me to notice a significant amount of movement for you. Yeah, that person 1000 feet away, would have to run back and forth 50 feet each time to kind of have me notice, like a significant amount of change from my perspective. So it’s kind of interesting. So I think they tried to take that same understanding and place that onto an earth centric model of the universe, which would have been very difficult to try and understand all these motions of the planets. Oh, my goodness, what a terrible time that would have been so confusing. Yeah, thanks for talking about some of the some of the planetary movements.
It’s got cool. Yeah, it’s interesting seeing this change, or seeing how things are kind of different this year from last year with how they look
is really different. I’ve been thinking about that, too. But it’s cool kind of keeping track of it. And that’s what I like about covering stuff about the night sky is the different ways that it changes. And there are new things to see. And there are new kind of connections and conjunctions of things that I think are kind of what makes it continually interesting. Yeah, get into into research. And there’s a lot of historic stuff I want to try and bring into the podcast too. In the future,
too. I’ve been having a good time reading with started that book.
I like it a lot, too. Yeah, I like learning about argue astronomy.
Yeah, that’s what I was gonna say to you. I like that part of it’s been really interesting learning about like, the more cultural meanings of things yeah, like why those things were, were thought about, or understood in the way that they were,
that’s a big part of wild add, always connected with, with the stars and with understanding where they are in the mythology and, and just watching the night sky without a telescope. I’m not really so interested as much like we’ve talked about before of the celestial bodies, you can view with magnified optics. But I really appreciate looking at the way that the shapes the stars are and how they move across the land. And different things can kind of tell, but there’s so many so many complex pieces of how our world works that are sort of tied into esoterically into the way the planets move, the way the stars move about the year. And sort of understanding that from the perspective of an ancient person, I think is really fascinating. Some of the stuff like we’ve learned about the Mayan culture has been really interesting in their connection to Venus. I really want to go through that in an episode of the show with you. Yeah, I think it’d be really cool. Jupiter’s connection to the Chinese New Year, I think is really fascinating. Oh, yeah. I want to talk about that. And Chinese New Year’s coming up soon. So we can talk about that. I can. We talked about it last year. But now there’s more things I know about it. Yeah. It’s kind of cool. Well, Oh, is that oh, well, that’s easy. Of course, he would have done that. Learn about the 28 lunar mansions in Chinese because it takes the moon 28 days. Right for its cycle to go through the mud. Yeah. And so there’s there’s 28 homes the moon resides in. And those are the constellations like where we have 12 Zodiac constellations. Hey, they had 28 lunar mansions, these homes? Yeah, yeah, very interesting. Yeah. So just kind of interesting, different perspectives of the way that the different cultures kind of piece the way that their stars worked. But really fascinating to sort of glean a little information of how they understood things and what they made sense of, very, very, yeah, the Mayans had a different start of the year. Like, of course they would I think they sense their equitorial they built a pyramid with a hole in it to decide what the New Year’s date was. So because there equitorial there is a day of the year on the solstice I Sam, where the sun is going to be at its zenith point, when it comes up to its highest point in the day, it will be directly overhead, there will be no shadow. And so they build this pyramid, they built this whole object, this temple to have this column in it so that the sun would pass up and then on one day would shine directly down this column and approve that it was the first day of the year. That’s really interesting. Very interesting. Yeah. But it was it was probably the solstice or you know, yeah, solstices as it was. Interesting. Yeah. Others like stone hash and the other native american camps that have been found where they where they mark lunar standstills the point where the moon or the sun gets to the highest point to the north or south, it stands still for a second. Near the solstice, I think it moves slowly, and then it comes back down to a point where it’s at the equinox centered, and then goes back out to its southern most lunar standstill. Very interesting. But yeah, there’s a Native American location that shows this. It’s like It’s like a position. And then there’s like these two mountains like these two like pillars in the desert, you know, they come up, and it’s sort of organized so that this one is for the moon, on the sources, and then this one’s for this thing.
Do you remember which tribe or which like section of the country?
That was? I’m not sure. I think it’s there’s, I think it’s an Arizona, it’s in the southwest. That’s cool. Yeah, I’m not sure which which tribe it was, but I know there’s a few that had territory in that area. But yeah, pretty interesting. And similar to how Stonehenge is constructed where, if you’re in there, it’s a it’s a way of understanding the calendar of the year around you by seeing Yeah, sunrises stuff. So really interesting stuff, how that works. I was always fascinated about those types of things and other elements and culture that are like that. But we won’t talk about that unless you want. Yeah, yeah, I think it’d be really cool. I think be pretty cool, too. But yeah, is there any other stuff you want to talk about? I think that kind of covers a good bit of stuff for the week for us. Yeah, I think there are a subset pretty well, yeah. Thanks so much for doing this episode of the podcast with me again. Thanks. Really looking forward to bringing back a bunch more. Talk about our evening observations of the night sky. Yeah, me too. I’m excited for it. Yeah. Before we should do this a lot. This is fun. Eddie’s Yeah. Well, thanks a bunch, Marina. And thanks so much, everybody, for listening. You can go to night sky.io. To check out our website. That’s where you can see a whole list of the podcasts that we’ve done over the past year or so. And you can check out some more information shoot us an email if you’d like. Be kind of cool. I’m sure our emails are listed in there somewhere you can check out check out other stuff of ours, I guess building them in photo comm you can go to instagram.com it’s at Billy Newman marinas at Marina rose house. And yeah, Marina, thank you very much for doing this episode.
Yeah. Thanks, Billy. Thanks for recording with me. I appreciate it. It was cool talking about these planets and stuff.
So on behalf of Marina Hanson, my name is Billy Newman. And thank you very much for listening to this return episode of the night sky podcast.