#24D - Sun Watching After April 8th - 'Earthly Objects' in the Night Sky - & 10 More Stories [w/Paid]
TGT 3/1/24: Deeper Looks--Spot watching, Solar Disk-o!, Next 20 Years of Eclipses; Sky Calendar--Mercury Emerges, Large Crescents, Lunar Eclipse, A Comet, Occultations; Sky Words in Everyday Life
Cover Photo - Using Eclipse Viewers Outside of Eclipses
In This Issue:
Cover Photo — Using Eclipse Viewers Outside of Eclipses
Welcome to Issue 24D!
Sky Planning Calendar —
* Moon-Gazing - Morning and evening Crescents pass planets
* Observing—Plan-et - Mercury emerges into a great evening apparition
* Border Crossings - The (Nine Days) Age of Aquarius* For the Future -
- Planetary occultations
- Comet Pons-Brooke
- March 25th Penumbral Lunar Eclipse
- Information on the Total Solar Eclipse April 8thAstronomy in Everyday Life - What If We Use Earthly Objects for the Night Sky?
Deeper Looks
- What Can You Do With Solar Viewers After April 8th?The items below are available only to Paid Subscribers:
- Eye Spy on the Sun - An experiment on naked-eyesunspot watching (Cover Story)
- Solar Disk-o - Watching the Sun’s surface or Eclipses without a viewer or telescope
- Shadow Travels - Where will the next solar eclipses be viewed before 2045?
Welcome to The Galactic Times Newsletter-Inbox Magazine #24D!
The Moon goes from Last Quarter to New Moon and past that, but this New Moon is a super-large one, if only you could see it. Instead, enjoy the very large but thin evening crescent pass by emerging Mercury and later, Jupiter
We ‘translate’ our issue into Earthly terms for what’s happening in the sky….in Astronomy in Everyday Life.
For the Future—-planetary occultations, a bright comet low in the evening sky, a penumbral lunar eclipse.
Finally, for paid subscribers, four articles on Sun-watching, what to do with those solar viewers after April 8th.
Enjoy!
Publisher — Dr. Larry Krumenaker Email: newsletter@thegalactictimes.com
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Sky Planning Calendar
Moon-Gazing
Moon passages by a star, planet or deep sky object are a good way to find a planet or other object if you’ve never located it before.
March 3 Last Quarter Moon, and it covers up Antares, the red giant heart of Scorpius. Thattakes place roughly 3 AM CT but only if you are in the Eastern United States, with the western borderline being from SW Wisconsin to eastern Texas, and an eastern border of west of a line connecting North Carolina and Florida.
March 8 Both Mars and Venus have the Moon pass under them by 3- or 4-degrees but you’ll need binoculars to catch the low crescent between Sunrise and 30 minutes before.
March 10 New Moon and Perigee. The largest Super (New) Moon you can’t see (unless it is a total eclipse time…..). While the Moon is hiding, be sure to jump your clock one hour ahead—if your region does Daylight Savings time. Later, in the evening, you *might* catch the thinnest Evening Crescent with Mercury above it, around 30 minutes after Sunset. If your horizon is really low and clear…
March 11 The Moon will point like a stretched bow and arrow to Mercury below it. Again, look with binoculars first and low in the sky.
March 14 Jupiter is that bright star 4-degrees south of the Moon, and to its left. Prior to that you’ll find the Moon skimming past the Pleiades star cluster by less than the Moon’s own diameter.
Observing---Plan-et
==Mercury Emerges from the Glare, but Planets Disappearing==
Mercury is moving away from the Sun in the evening sky, becoming easier to see after March 8th when it sets more than 45 minutes after the Sun does. It reaches its brightest on the 15th even though it has yet to reach its maximum distance away from the Sun.
Venus, bright as it is, is slowly diving into the Sun’s glare. You can find it brilliant but increasingly subdued in twilight glow rising no more than an hour before the Sun. Note that that interval is shrinking week by week.
Mars remains low and dim in the morning twilight, also until summer.
Jupiter will be met by the Moon two days before First Quarter, the 14th, and is the brightest evening object after the Moon, setting generally around 11:00 PM local Daylight Savings Time.
Saturn just had its annual meeting with the Sun in the sky on February 28th and it remains too close to the Sun in the dawn sky to bother with.
Border Crossings
The Sun crosses from Aquarius into Pisces on March 12th. Hurrah! The horoscopists agree for at least the nine following days!
For the Future
Occultations of bright stars like Antares are nice (especially when they occur with the Moon’s edge dark—not this time, though) but it gets really interesting when the occulted one is a planet. Venus is Sun-covered April 7th, in the late afternoon, mostly an East Coast event. Venus CAN be seen with the naked eye in daytime, if you know where to look, so using the Moon as a guide to it, even if you aren’t having the Moon cover the planet up, is a bonus. Saturn gets ‘knocked around’ multiple times, June 27 in the morning-midday, plus on September 17 and November 11. Mars is the show just once, next December 18.
An added event, the Moon sends the Seven Sisters running as it passes through the Pleiades September 22.
Comet Pons-Brooks
This Halley-like comet is approaching peak brightness and visibility. It is currently in western Cygnus and north (above) Pegasus low in the northwest, about 10-20-degrees maximum altitude. In brightness it is binocular level, no particular tail structure, so it will appear as a small fuzzy blob. It breaks the naked eye level of magnitude 6.0 around March 7th and peaks in mid-April at around 4.0.
March 25th Penumbral Lunar Eclipse
An almost partial eclipse, the Moon’s limb just misses the edge of the darker inner shadow, the umbra; the Moon is 98% of the way into the outer shadow, the penumbra, at eclipse max.
Technically the eclipse begins 11:53 PM on the 24th, CDT but nobody can see the penumbral edge, it is too diffuse and dim on the Moon. One might expect to to start to see a dusky shading on Luna’s leading edge perhaps 48 minutes before maximum eclipse, give or take, say 1:25 AM whereas the max coverage is at 2:13 AM. That predicts a loss of shadow coverage viewing around 3:01 AM.
How close to those ‘starts’ and ‘ends’ can YOU do?
Are you earlier or later?
Viewing is best in the Americas, except eastern Brazil, and in the Pacific as far west as Japan and most of Australia. Europe? Only the western part—the UK, and west of a line from Norway to Germany. A smidge of west Africa, too.
Information on the Total Solar Eclipse April 8th
On the TGT Substack homepage, you’ll see a menu item: April Eclipse Links. Here you will find all the articles that were published in the various issues of The Classroom Astronomer, our sister publication (though it is still on hiatus). A 31-page PDF is available via a direct link here. It will download immediately. And check TGT issue 24C for information on meteor craters in the US and Canada that are in or close to the Moon’s shadow path (paid subscribers only).
Astronomy in Everyday Life
What If We Use Earthly Objects for Those in the Current Sky?
What if every celestial object mentioned above was replaced with an Earthly counterpart?
The Moon is New this fortnight. Celebrate it at this Augusta, GA, eatery—it’s good (even if the Moon isn’t quite astronomically correct).
We have a lunar eclipse coming up….though not as totally as this commercial operation would suggest….
The four visible naked eye planets are well represented….
The Moon’s by the Pleiades (Cherokee art on a wall in Chattanooga, TN)...
…and there’s a Comet near the Winged Horse…
Deeper Looks
What Can You Do With Solar Viewers After April 8th?
Millions of people in Mexico, the United States, and Canada are going to be watching the solar eclipse of April 8, 2024. Most will see a partial eclipse. A few will be in the right place at the right time to witness the totality of the Moon blocking the Sun’s disk and seeing the pearly tenuous corona.
But….
This is the last —the VERY LAST— total solar eclipse in the continental United States for more than two decades. Which brings up a question: what can you do with those solar viewers starting April 9th?
First, the author and some of his colleagues ran an experiment for about 6-8 weeks in September through October of 2023. We were watching for sunspots visible to the naked eye…safely. Entitle this result Eye Spy on the Sun.
Second, there’s a way to watch for sunspots that doesn’t use a telescope or solar viewers. We’ll look at that in Solar Disk-o.
Last, we’ll talk about upcoming eclipses, in North America and elsewhere, during the next two decades. Call this article Shadow Travels.
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