The Occultation Of Aldebaran Viewing the Andromeda galaxy, The occultation of aldebaran, Mercury rising at dawn. Produced by Marina Hansen and Billy Newman. billynewmanphoto.com
Hello, and thank you for listening to this episode of the night sky podcast for the third week of January 2016. This week, I’m joined with Marina Hanson once again to talk about some of this week’s star and skywatching news and events that are coming up. And when in DC, I do Marina, hey, Billy, I’m doing well. Cool. I’m glad that you’re here today, again, with me to talk about some of the cool stuff that’s coming up. I think it’s been a couple, it’s kind of a slow, it’s a slow period right now, in January, in this midsection of January, and then it’s gonna start picking up a lot at the end of January. And then I think if we get good viewing, at least in the northwest here, I think it’s really going to ramp up for us through February and March. And then really, almost all of April, May, June, and all through the summer have a lot of different events going on that are kind of interesting. skywatching things that we’ll be able to keep track of. But I think it’s a little bit of a law right now.
Yeah, I’m excited for the things coming up in the next few months. Yeah, right now it is pretty slow.
Well, you know, I can’t say it’s slow. And then I could say that. I mean, there’s like four planets visible. And they AM. Yeah, that’s really cool. I guess of the fifth one. Yeah, even as I think it’s just a law because there’s gonna be a fifth one soon. So that’s when like hyack comes in. That’s when the news is the headline.
Yeah, the four planets being visible is really cool.
Yeah. So right now and the aim and we’ve been kind of observing this. The last couple nights, we’ve had a couple clear nights in the breaks of all these El Nino storms that keep sweeping through the West Coast. We got a couple clear nights during the last week separated by about five or six days. But I think the first night we got to see that observation, I think was what the ninth where Saturn and Venus were like just a half a degree apart from each other in the morning sky. They were just right up next to each other. That was really cool. Do you remember that? It was like, maybe we can half ago. Yeah, I remember that. Yeah, really cool to see. And then that was like, that’s in Scorpio is now in a Helio conjunction in the morning sky. So Helio, I think a Helio conjunction. And this, this might be the wrong use of the term. But what was explained in the way that things were written about, I think this is astrologically Helio conjunctions are the first constellation that rises above the sun in the morning sky. So it’d be the last constellation to rise above the horizon before the sun comes up. Does that make sense? First, the first constellation you see at first light, right? That’s the Helio conjunction sign. So that’s what some astrological systems, or some calendar systems would use, as their position to identify the constellation in character at that time. So you know how some people maybe complain sometimes that Sagittarius the month that Sagittarius occupies the sun is not the month that the Zodiac identifies for your birthday. Right. And so the reason for this disparity sometimes culturally, was because it was identified through a Helio conjunction of that constellation instead of the other type of conjunct, I think just a regular conjunction, or when when the sun is absolutely in that constellation. So in this in this thinking, it’s the sun is now passed, that constellation is now probably in another constellation. But it’s that constellation that we see at first light, when the sun just starts to come up. That’s the one that I think they would count sometimes. Now that doesn’t really even break down or make things make a lot more sense. astrologically. But for us for astronomy, I think it’s just kind of interesting to think about the different ways that people thought about how they list or identify what the constellation at that time of the year was. That’s really interesting. Yeah. And so because Scorpio is in that Helio conjunction, it’s that first star, or, excuse me, the first constellation up over the horizon, before the sun then finally rises. That’s where Saturn and Venus are right now. And then we’re gonna see Saturn. What’s that? Oh, saying that’s right. Yeah, so yeah, Saturn and Venus right there. Near the hardest Scorpio and so I think Saturn This is gonna be interesting to watch. And we’ll see it throughout the year two is Saturn is gonna stay right where it is in Scorpio. And that’s because Saturn has such a long orbit. It’s like a 27 year orbit. Versus Mercury’s 88 day orbit Earth. Yeah. 365 Day orbit. Mars is 400 and something orbit. I forgot what I what I remember reading or what I remember watching in the Martian, you know, like the number of, of souls on Mars. Yeah, it’s like 460 or something like that. They have like a 25 hour a day on Mars. Because the day is marked by how long it rotates. So it doesn’t really have to be that close to Earth is it’s just interesting that it’s like that, but it’s a little different.
Per world, everything is gonna be different, you know? Strange. So we’re gonna see Saturn, stay at the house. Scorpio through the rest of the year because it has such a slow orbit, we’re going to see Venus move around a lot in relationship to the sun in the sky. And so that’s what we’re going to get to see is Venus and Saturn start to separate away from each other. And then Mars in retrograde, which is now in Libra, is going to be in retrograde until the end of May. And we’re going to see it drop backwards in the sky past Virgo in spika. And then drop into Scorpio and then stop retrograde, right when it gets right up next to Saturn. And then we’re going to see it move out past again, and then back in close to Saturn and then continue on into like Capricorn and Aquarius throughout the rest of the year. But it’s going to be really strange, I think, I think what we talked about on the podcast before on Mars is going to be a retrograde for maybe the next, like, 13 or 14 months. Yeah, up in the night sky, which is really strange. It’s going to be in the night side of the earth for maybe like 15, more than a year, which is way more than what we normally see. Yeah, it’s, it’s cool. And that’s kind of the cool, observational piece about Mars is, is its relationship in orbit to the earth, and then where we can kind of see it in the sky. So we’re gonna see it move a lot this year, and we’re gonna see grow and brightness a lot, too. And that’ll be really fun. But for next week, we’re going to finally see all five planets in the sky. At the same time, there’s some times of the year where you can through a 24 hour period, you can identify all five planets. Does that make sense? Like, maybe three planets are up at sunset. But if you stay up till four in the morning, you’ll see Jupiter rise. And you’ll see that that next planet, yes, you see the whole total throughout the day. In fact, I mean, obviously, all nine planets pass up above us in the sky, and then set past this in the evening, every single day, right? Because there’s always there. But we can’t really observe them all the time, or they’re in the place where it is daytime for us, or they’re in from the sun toward us. So we can only see it one. I think it’d be where the planet is at a position of opposition to the sun. So it is on the dark side of the earth. It’s past that meridian line of day night. So we can look out and see the to the planet out there while it’s not daytime.
But it’s really interesting. So when is it that we’re going to see or that we’re going to start seeing all five of planets together at the same time in the sky? No.
Yeah. So we have, we have four up in the morning sky right now. And then mercury has just made its past. So we saw mercury talks about mercury being visible, and on the rise at the end of December in the evening sky. And now mercury at the very beginning of January, I think by January 7 or eighth that had dropped back down past the horizon. And then it passed the sun and then is now it has such a fast orbit and is in a position right now where it’s just going to be visible really quickly on either side. Normally, it’s not this easy to see Mercury, it’s swung past the sun at the light, or swung past the horizon in the evening sky. And it’s now going to be coming up in the morning sky, I think on January 28. So on January 20, is going to be the start of the period where we’re going to be able to see all five planets at the same time, it might be more difficult observation. And some other times, because mercury might be for this period really close to the sun or really close to sunrise. So it’d be just the last few minutes, you can still see stars in the sky, at least for the first few days until it rises up a little bit further into the night or the morning Twilight sky. That’s cool. That’s just a couple days away. Yeah, it’s just a couple days away. And I think it’s gonna last into the first couple of weeks of February while you can still see all five or you can still make an observation and Mercury along with the other four planets that are up. And I was thinking about this as thinking about the last time that this happened. And and really kind of how rare it is often, I think it’s happened. Let’s see, what was it? I think it happened in 2005. That’s the last time that it happened. And it was also in the morning sky. There you can see all five planets at the same time. And then the time before that that happened was in, I think the springtime of 2003 where you can look up and you can see all five planets in the night sky at that time, too. So it’s been I guess, more than a decade. Yeah, more than a decade now before or since all five bunches up at the same time. So it’d be really fun to get a chance to see.
Yeah, that’s cool. It’s interesting that there’s a there’s all that time between or that they’re just the two years between 2003 and then 2005. And then, yeah, 11 years now it’s 2016.
Yeah, it’s strange. It’s really surprising how few times that happens in history, that the planets align up so that they’re all in one section of the sky at a similar time. It’s really strange. It’s kind of curious how it is. It’s cool. And even we just get to see two planets and a close relationship to each other. That as we’ll kind of come to find year over year over year is really sort of a rare thing. I mean, I guess it happens maybe a couple days a year and that’s I think why the ancients kind of took it in is sort of a significant sign. Right like that. Like, yeah, a prophecy is kind of put down or made mentioned because that’s the thing you Everybody’s going to pay attention to when they’re looking at.
Yeah, that was pretty. Pretty interesting to see. Yeah. seem important. Yeah. Significant. Yeah, I’m
sure. It seems it’s been pretty important back in the past. So I was looking at a few other things that are going on. And I think that the the planet observations that we’re going to be able to make in the end of January and February, they’re going to be the coolest thing that we’re going to get to do for a while and kind of tracking the motion of the planets is going to be cool. But right now, it’s, it ends up being a really good time. If we have dark and clear skies, it ends up being one of the best times to view Andromeda, which is, which is the nearest galaxy, that is not the Milky Way Out there in space from us, I believe. Or is, I think it’s perhaps also one of the easiest to view. It’s the Andromeda galaxy, and it’s, it’s in our local group of galaxies. So there’s a few galaxies and there are a few galaxies out there that are all kind of collected together and a bunch of them. There’s large amounts of space in between that out in the universe. Really strange how that works. I don’t really have any perception of the geometry or geography of galaxy over galaxy over galaxy. But what we can do in the night sky, when we look up with a telescope or binoculars, you can find the Andromeda Galaxy out kind of in between Pegasus, and the constellation of Cassiopeia. So there’s, there’s a little trick to finding it, you kind of you should look it up online, but there’s like three stars, he sort of trace out from Cassiopeia, toward Pegasus. And it’s like, one, two, and then the third and the drop down just a little bit. And you can like see it just barely on a really dark night. You can see it with the naked eye. And it’s like just barely a fuzzy bit of a speck. And it’s a whole other galaxy. It’s really cool.
That’s cool. Our galaxies measured by magnitude also, or how would that be? Because I guess it’s like the it’s a lot of stars that are? Yeah, they would do something like that. They probably identify it. How is the Andromeda Galaxy be measured, then? Or what would it be compared to the stars?
I think it’s a I think it’s a sixth or seventh magnitude item. But I think it’s probably around there. It’s at the limit of visual acuity. Yeah, it’s one of the things you can barely see through through binoculars, you can do pretty well to see it. And I think through a telescope, you can do really quite well. And the reason that this time of year is better is because it’s passing over the zenith point in the sky. And while we’re at midnight, or Well, I guess yeah, midnight. That’s why we call it midnight. But while while the sun is on the other side of the earth, while the the part of the earth that we’re observing from is at its darkest, we can look straight up, which is which is better. Because you know, when you look low on the horizon, that’s why we see sunsets, we see all that murky, smoke and smog, all that atmosphere, we have to look laterally through. But if you look straight up, there’s really only what five miles until the end of most atmosphere that we have to try and get through. And so that’s why they say that this is one of the better times that make a viewing of Andromeda. Because if we have dark skies at night, it’s just going to be straight overhead. And you can make an easier observation of it early in the evening, but it’d be cool. It was I think it was first, what was identified a long time ago, they’d catalog almost every kind of visible speck that they could see in the night sky. Well, before they were really able, technically are seen before, they’re able to technically identify the characteristics of it. So they didn’t know it was a galaxy, they didn’t even believe in galaxies. Until, I think until Hubble proved it in 1927, I think is what it was. For the longest time, there was really no universe construct in society or in the understanding, I think, I think one of the even the idea of having a galaxy outside of the solar system, or having a galaxy to sort of interpret why there are all these stars around us in the first place is really sort of a modern idea. And then the idea of the whole universe and multiple galaxies and multiple millions and millions and billions of stars, and different groups out there was just sort of unfathomable for the longest time. So I think what Hubble was able to do, he was able to measure that it was a certain distance away for the first time. But using observations is really interesting that because galaxies are tricky. This might be over my head, it’s way over my head. I don’t know anything about how to measure the distance to a galaxy. But Hubble was the first person to identify in 1927 that the Andromeda Galaxy mathematically was provable to be millions of light years away, instead of 1000s or 10s of 1000s. And that it was a group of a huge group of stars. And that would be like a whole separate galaxy. I think for a long time. They may be considered it to be just a star cluster, a group stars that was out there. And then they were later able to find out that it was super super far away. I think like 2 million light years. His estimates might have even been low for the time. And then I think, was it, I think I’m trying to figure out the best way to explain it. The idea of identifying the distance to a separate galaxy was through the use of standard candles as this term that they use for at least the term that my old textbook says for, or Cepheids, I think is also the other idea, instead of the super bright pulsars that have a variable magnitude of brightness to them during a period of time. So like 18 days, or 90 days, it’s a star that goes through a pulsating phase where it gets dimmer, and then a lot brighter. And I kind of understand through this, that if this is the tough thing, and it’s kind of a thought experiment to figure out, but if there’s an item that we have right next to us, that we know the absolute amount of light being emitted from that item. And then we have a duplicate exactly if that item, maybe a mile away from us. And it’s the same exact light that’s coming from both sources. But we identified that the one a mile away from us is much dimmer visibly to us, right? Does that kind of make sense. And so what we’re able to do mathematically is figure out the luminosity apparent to us from the candle that is right next to us. And then, by the inverse square law, we’re able to estimate, basically, I believe, estimate, but really, scientifically, mathematically, it’s appropriate. The inverse square law shows that the dimmer light, that is essentially the same amount of light must be so much further away to appear that visibly dimmer. Does that make sense? A little bit? Yeah. So they’re able to do this by identifying really specific bright spots in our galaxy that are far away a standard candle here, that we know the light, and then we’re able to identify it, fortunately, and this is through the work of Hubble early on, and why we have like the Hubble telescope and why there’s so much research and looking at all these other galaxies that are really far away,
is were able to figure out, we have sefie, and here are pulsar, here in our galaxy, we know the standard candle light of that, and then we’ve been able to identify what also in that dromeda. And then through the inverse square law, we’re able to prove scientifically that it is millions of light years away from us. That’s really, really far. Really strange. Yeah, that’s really interesting. Yeah, a lot of fascinating stuff that they used scientifically to identify sort of the stuff around around us a lot of construct. And it’s like, it’s really difficult with stars, we use parallax to identify how far away another star is. Sure, yeah, so so like, if you if you put a finger out in front of your face, and you have one eye closed, and so just your right eye open, and then you switch to just your left eye open. If you kind of pay attention to the background, past your finger that you’re sort of focusing on, you’ll sort of see a shift in it a degree shift. And that’s a little bit of a demonstration of what parallax is, it’s that my view of observing you is sort of relative to an object that’s going to be in front of it. And so that’s going to shift as I move throughout the year. And so what we’re able to do is take a measurement of, let’s say, we look out at Sirius, a fixed position, it’s a star, it’s going to be out there, it’s been there for a long time. And we know that it’s eight light years away, or so I think it’s like 8.1 or more, or whatever it is. So we look at we see series we identify it’s eight light years away, but how. And that’s because we’re able to identify the shift of things that are much further away from it from us. So like, so if there’s a star, right directly back from Sirius, that we’re able to see in like a deep sky telescope, where it’s really dark, and you can identify things that are further past us. We can take an observation in June. And then keep that observation until we get all the way down into December, let’s say when the earth has moved from one side of its orbit all the way around the sun to its far side of the orbit, if you were to think of it that way, which is going to be the most distance the whole diameter of its swing of an orbit. Does that make sense? Yeah, that makes sense. Then they take another observation of that same position. And they’re able to identify the shift the parallax shift that happens of the two stars. And so we see one kind of move out of its way. If it moves more, it means closer. If it moves less, it means it’s much further away. Right? Makes sense. And so they’re able to use this, and a lot of other complicated systems that are really pretty intelligent. And they’re able to use this to identify how far all these astrological bodies are away from us. That’s really cool. Yeah, it is really cool. It’s fun learn about I remember like my astronomy teacher, showing us and kind of talking to us about how that stuff works way back in high school, high school kind of thinking about it again, and like learning about and looking back into this book to about like, all these different things like standard candles and all this sort of stuff, all these sorts of crazy things that they’ve made just in the last 100 years. To identify how everything works in the night sky.
Yeah, it’s really interesting. How of reset those things you’re talking about are, are we’re starting to use. Yeah,
it’s so so recent, just like the whole construction mentally of what we think of as the Milky Way. And the galaxy and the solar system. All those sorts of ideas are really only a few generations old.
Yeah, it’s crazy that the idea of galaxies being a thing is not. Yeah, yeah, not an idea. So,
yeah, so recently, really, if you were a superstitious native, I mean, how would the concept of a galaxy ever even present itself? Yeah, really, you know, when you think about the greatness and the immense amount of space that’s out there, I think the belief was sort of homogenized, that just out into space, you just kind of continue on like the galaxy, I guess forever, or through the limits of the universe, that was kind of controlled as small, you know, sort of contain, it’s really cool. It’s really fun, to kind of get to like read about and then understand, like, how they sort of came about those revelations, and that we can go and do some of that science ourselves to if we want to go out and take a look at Andromeda, we can observe something that even only recently, we’ve just found out is 200 million light years away from us, I was also reading to, it’s on a collision course with the Milky Way galaxy. And so they say that, we say the universe is 14 billion years old, give or take. And then in 10 billion years from now, we’ll be at a position where the Andromeda galaxy and the Milky Way galaxy are intersecting each other in space, possibly, there’s a probability that that will take place, angles and such and time and our brief amount, like we were just talking about, we didn’t even know it was a galaxy 80 years ago. So it might miss us too. But what I hear and the fascinating thing, really like a miracle is that two galaxies can run into each other. And the probability that any two large solar masses, like a star or a cluster, or something will interact with each other will slam into each other is almost zero, there’s so much empty space in between each solid object, that two galaxies could cross into each other and not ever actually collide any physical material with each other. That’s crazy. Yeah, but the gravitational relationship between the two bodies would really be shared quite a bit. And so it’d be kind of like, like centrifugal force. Or if you think of something like Well, I guess just kind of your simple understanding of gravity, just the two bodies are going to be associated with each other now, and then they’ll start to orbit each other just a little bit. And then they’ll still kind of continue to separate. So it’ll be kind of a drag as they pass through each other stars from one galaxy will be caught in the gravity of another galaxy and stay with it. And then other parts will be kind of left alone, but it’ll be kind of the string that sort of split out as a to kind of come into contact with each other. And it’s separate from each other. But that’s 10 billion years. So that’s quite a ways out, I think it’s 5 billion years after our son goes extinct. And that’s the other interesting thing about the whole idea, too, is that 10 billion years from now, many of the stars that we see in the sky, tonight, will be gone, they’ll have exhausted most of their helium, or their hydrogen, and then probably their helium. And then if they’ve gone extinct, they’re going to be a fourth or than fifth or sixth generation star. And as the universe gets older and older, there’s going to be less and less free hydrogen available. And so as those elements get fused into heavier and heavier elements, there’s going to be I think, fewer and more dense stars, they’re all going to be like, like helium, or carbon star. It’s really, I don’t even know how that sort of stuff works on my understanding of anything past main sequence is like super limited. But it’s really strange though, because like billions of years from now, it’s all going to be these really heavy metal or heavy elements that are left, and that’s what’s going to be fusing together. And these galaxies are going to be kind of coalescing, coalescing or cannibalizing each other. And one of the models of the universe is that over the next many billions of years, if things keep going the way they do, that all the matter in the universe was sort of coalesce and come back together sort of collapse back together, like through the cannibalism of the two galaxies between each other, that galaxy, those galaxies were merged, and then that in billions of years later, will merge with the whole local group. And that will merge with the next large local group until there’s a big crunch, where all the magic kind of comes back together, and is kind of fused or stuck together after the Big Bang. So big bang blows it all apart. And then the crunch is it’s coalescence. 100 billion years later, of all the matter coming back together, and being cold and fuse, and then perhaps it would happen again, or that’s just an idea that, you know, has had some legs, but there’s so many different ideas of how the universe is going to come together at work. It’s really cool. It’s fun. Some cosmology stuff, though. I guess for us. It’s more about just what we get to go see. And the other thing we get to see the last thing on our list this week to talk about and it’s pretty cool too, is the articulation of Andromeda, were you reading about this?
A little bit? Yeah. passing in front of what stars that?
Oh, what did I say? Did I say Andromeda? I’m sorry, the occupation of all debris. Yeah. alderbrook the moon in front of all Gibran. Thanks for correcting me. I appreciate it. Yeah, so Audubon is the bright star, the orange giant that’s in Taurus, sort of the head of the bowl horns is sort of the idea of it. And then the Pleiades is sort of the end of the tale of tourists but but yeah, all the bronze there, the moon I think is going to be 80% full, and it’s going to pass in front of for most of North America, it’s going to pass right in front of I think the darker the dark sliver, which is going to be cool to see the dark sliver is going to a cult Alderaan for a period of time, I think there’s like, there’s a small window, and you have to be exact and specific to your local area, because the moon kind of moves sort of quick through areas. But it’ll be probably a good amount of time, a few hours, perhaps. But it’s cool. Yeah, it’s gonna pass over all neurons, so you won’t be able to see all the neurons in the sky. And it’s happened a few other times before, I think, like happens with planets. Sometimes I think every once in a while the moon will occult Jupiter. Like it’ll pass right in front of Jupiter, which is a cool type of sight to see, you know, because it’s just the planet disappears sky. Or for this even just seeing a star disappear out of the sky is kind of a cool thing. Yeah, happens really, quite rarely, it’s sort of interesting to see how the moon’s ecliptic sort of moves throughout the year, you know, it’s not an exact absolute position. And the earth relationship, it’s tilted an axis in the moon’s relationship kind of causes everything to be just a little different. And sort of cycle through this long kind of complicated series of events. Strange, but or just like for observations for us? How it doesn’t happen all the time. It only happens certain times. I think it happened back in October. For a short period of time.
What is it Passover in October?
I think all Gibran that time also. It’s a pretty it’s it’s right in the line. So it will have happened to it. She what’s the other one that’s out there. I’m trying to think of the other stars that I’ve seen close to being occulted. Before I think a cult is a cool word. Is that where they come? Or where that comes from? The occult. It’s sort of its associate. I don’t know, it’s strange.
I’m not sure I was. Because I was looking it up. And there are a lot of definitions for that word. Yeah, it also seems like mystical things.
I feel like maybe not in reality, they’re related. But I think superstitiously the position of the moon, superimposing itself over a star body is probably sort of a supernatural event. I wonder if that’s kind of why those ideas are sort of tied together. I was wondering nouns. It’s cool. But that’ll be coming up, I think, on the 20th. On the night of the 20th is going to be Oh, excuse me, the 19th. I’m so glad. But I looked down at my little notes. It’s going to be the moon occults Aldebaran, on the 19th. And then the morning of the 20th is when we are first able to see mercury. That’d be really cool. All five of them. Yeah, so it’s coming up. This week. There’ll be fun.
What time? What time? Should we go out in the morning? On the 20th? To see everything?
Yeah, that’s a good question. I think sunrise is just about 7am right now. That’ll the brightest that it gets. before you’re not going to be able to see Saturn or Mercury is probably going to be just before 7am. So and that’s sort of West Coast. 45th parallel time. might be different other places. But yeah, I think for you probably have to check your local listings for for civil Twilight. But I think for us, it’s probably going to be between 630 and 7am. It’s going to be our best time to get some observations. It’s tough, though. Cuz see for morning observations and Mercury, you’re really fighting. If it’s arisen yet, right? Because you won’t be able to, you won’t be able to notice the cool thing about the evening is that if it’s up, the sky gets dark, and you’re able to see it revealed itself. But as the morning comes about, you haven’t found it yet. And it’s getting brighter, it’s going to get more difficult as the time goes on. And so if it’s real close to the horizon, you might never actually get to see it, because you won’t identify its location before it just gets too bright. It’s kind of washed out with everything else. So it’s tough. It can be a little challenging to find in the morning, but it’ll be fun. We should try.
Okay, fine. I’m excited to see them all together.
I think it’d be pretty cool. Well, I think that wraps up most everything that we have to say for this episode of the night sky podcast Marine, I want to say thank you very much for joining me and work with me a little bit to talk about this week’s Sky sky watching news. Thanks. I appreciate it. Well, on behalf of Marina Hanson, my name is Billy Newman and thank you for listening to this episode of the night sky podcast.