Report for 2003-05-30

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Brought to you from beautiful Park City, "View-tah".

Contents

Astronomical Times (Mountain Standard)

Northern Lights

Geomagnetic activity spiked towards the end of the last week. That's when Stephane Levesque of Quebec, Canada captured this beautiful shot of the northern lights. Sunspot activity on our star continues... so lets hope for an outburst big enough to make it down to mid-northern latitudes. 

Viewing Outlook

Solar System

Space Weather Update

Sunspot activity continues at a decent clip lately. Checkout this animated gif. It shows the growth of Sunspot #365 over a four day period from 5/24 through 5/28. This sunspot fired off a series of Solar Flares on Wednesday 5/28. Since the sunspot was nicely centered on the Sun, they were Earth-directed. While geomagnetic activity surged... and aurora were seen at high latitudes worldwide... somehow, it seems to have missed us here in Park City. Sometimes you just can't catch a break :(

There will be an Annular Eclipse on Saturday 5/31 visible to folks from Scotland to Greenland. During an annular eclipse, the moon will be directly between the Earth and Sun. However… due to orbital eccentricities, the moon will not appear large enough to fully block out the Sun…. leaving a beautiful looking ring around it instead. If you’re not going to be in Greenland Saturday… there will be a total eclipse in November that’s visible from the Indian Ocean :-)

This classic shot was taken by Dennis Mammana of Skyscapes.com. It captures annularity in 1992.

Ginger Mayfield of Divide, Colorado, captured this image of a solar flare near sunspot #365 using a Canon D60 digital camera and a Solarmax 60 H-alpha filter.

Planetary Report

Mercury, the 1st Planet

Venus, the 2nd Planet

Venus is now rising less than an hour before the sun. If you'd like to check it out... do it soon. Venus will disappear from the morning sky during the summer months and reappear in the evening sky this fall. As it sinks, it grows in phase and shrinks in overall size and brightness. At this point, it is considerably past its maximum size and brightness now. It has shrunk from over 1' in diameter to only 11"... less than 1/5 of it's largest. It has also dimmed from over mag-4.6 to under mag-3.9...  This beautiful shot of crescent Venus was taken by Brian Colville of the Maple Ridge Observatory while Venus was about 1/2 illuminated. It is currently over 90% illuminated.

Need to no more about Venus? Checkout this article by The Planetary Society.

Earth, the 3rd Planet

 
Earth from Mars

This beautiful picture was captured by the orbiting Mars Global Surveyor Spacecraft. It is the first-ever image of Earth taken from another planet. At this point, Mars is some 70 million miles away. Wow! What a beautiful shot. In case you're wondering, that little guy in the upper right is our Moon.

Lunar Phase

I took the accompanying shot of a 32 hours old moon while camping last summer in Utah's Uinta National Forest.

Visit our Lunar Information Page for even more images and information

Mars, the 4th Planet

Mars continues to grow... and has now reached the 12" mark. At this point, surface detail is becoming visible under excellent viewing conditions. This will grow easier too as Mars continues to grow throughout the spring and into the summer... culminating in August, when Mars will be bigger and brighter than at any time in over 70,000 years! Why is this you may be wondering... Earth and Mars both orbit the Sun on different paths and at different distances. This summer, both planets will be on the same side of the Sun. This type of alignment, known as Opposition, occurs about every 26 months. No big deal, right? Well... that depends because the separation at opposition varies considerably. On August 27th, that distance will be about 35 million miles. At the previous opposition in June of 2001, the distance was 41 million miles and in 1995 it was almost 70 million miles. So... what can you expect? Well.. only the best views of the Red Planet in your lifetime! Mars will shine at mag -2.9. This is about as bright as Jupiter ever gets! Additionally, Mars will have an apparent diameter of 25". That's about 2 times its current size. Still not convinced? Want even better views? Well, short of climbing aboard a spaceship (not completely out of the question nowadays) you'd have to wait until 2287 for a closer peak.

I got another chance to view The Red Planet Thursday morning. Predawn skies were just a bit dancy, but... the views were nice. I couldn't quite push the magnification as hard as I would have wanted (can you ever do this?), but... detail were starting to show. This is gonna be an awesome summer :-)

The accompanying image was taken by Utah Skies own Don Brown on May 20th .  As the summer progresses, you can bet there will be more!

Jupiter, the 5th Planet

 

Rising:		10:55 am
Visual Magnitude:		-1.92
Visual Diameter:		34"
Distance:		5.72 AU
Constellation:		Cancer

 

Taking advantage of clear skies on Monday night, Don and I viewed just such an event. When we setup, we saw three moons... We wondered where #4 might be...  after a bit of searching, we noticed the shadow. This of course meant that the 4th moon had to be transiting the planet. Shortly thereafter, we noticed a little bright pimple on the leftmost edge of the planet. Io had left the building :-)  These types of events happen fairly regularly. So, if you get out every once in a while, you should have no trouble viewing on yourself. Let me just tell you... viewing a shadow transit is pretty easy. Viewing one of the moons against the background of Jupiter on the other hand requires very steady skies and a telescope with good optics.

To find Jupiter look slightly west of overhead shortly after dark. Jupiter is the brightest star-like object in the night sky. Need a bit more help? Checkout this star chart.

Saturn, the 6th Planet

Saturn's rings are now tilted wide open to us... roughly 27° from edge-on. Over the next 15 years, they will move from wide open.. to edge-on to wide open revealing the other pole. This and next year will be the best time to study Saturn's beautiful ring structure for some time, so... get out there and do it.

Saturn is now rising before 10:00am and is already well into the western sky by the time it's dark, making planetary observers hurry to get in any decent views. . Saturn can be found about 15° north of Betelgeuse... the alpha star in Orion. Did you know that the rings are visible in binoculars? It's true. You'll have to hold it extremely steady... or maybe even mount it on a tripod, but.. they are visible.

Uranus, the 7th Planet

Neptune, the 8th Planet

Springtime on Neptune? Yup... that's what the latest observations seem to indicate. The southern portion of the 8th planet is having some spring like conditions.  Spring is always a fun time of year.. and that's a good thing, because spring last for over 40 Earth years on Neptune. 40 years? Yup... Because it takes Neptune 165 years to orbit the Sun, seasons last just a smidge over 40 earth years.

This beautiful shot was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. Pretty cool, huh? Notice the Great Dark Spot in the center? The GDS is thought to be a hole in the planet's outer atmosphere.

Similar to Jupiter, Neptune is categorized as a gas giant. Neptune is roughly 17 times more massive than the Earth. Neptune was first observed by Galle and d'Arrest on 1846 Sept 23 very near to the locations independently predicted by Adams and Le Verrier. Special thanks to Don Higgins for pointing our some inaccuracies which had crept into some of our previous reports on Neptune.

For more information, checkout CNN.com/SPACE.

Pluto, the 9th Planet

Take this bit of planetary information either as an interesting side note, or an observing challenge. Pluto is in the constellation Serpens, about 15 degrees north of Mars. At magnitude 13.9, Pluto is basically out of reach of smaller telescopes. One way to verify that you have found Pluto is to sketch the star patterns over several nights. If you have actually found Pluto, one of the the faint star-like objects will have moved over the course of a few nights. This is Pluto.

This high resolution image was created from images taken by The Hubble Space Telescope.

Need more information? Checkout the Pluto Home Page.

Deep Sky

Hubble Vision

We've got a special treat for you in this weeks Hubble Vision section. These are the first shots made public from the new camera installed in the Hubble Space Telescope. I'm sure you'll agree that these shots are even more impressive than previous Hubble products.

Iridescent Glory of Nearby Planetary Nebula

This photograph of the coil-shaped Helix Nebula is one of the largest and most detailed celestial images ever made. The composite picture is a seamless blend of ultra-sharp images from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope combined with the wide view of the Mosaic Camera on the National Science Foundation's 0.9-meter telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory near Tucson, Ariz. The image shows a fine web of filamentary "bicycle-spoke" features embedded in the colorful red and blue ring of gas. At 650 light-years away, the Helix is one of the nearest planetary nebulae to Earth. A planetary nebula is the glowing gas around a dying, Sun-like star.

Credit: NASA, NOAO, ESA, the Hubble Helix Nebula Team, M. Meixner (STScI), and T.A. Rector (NRAO).

If you are able to find all of these objects, you may be one of the few, the proud, the Deep Sky Obsessed. 
E-mail your findings to DeepSkyObservations@UtahSkies.org.

IDA-Utah Light Pollution Update

Stay up to date on astronomical happenings by regularly checking the Utah Skies website at http://www.UtahSkies.org  

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