#38: - Happy New Year, But WHICH Year?? - Powering Mars Bases Using Winds- & 2 more
TGT 1/1/23: The Six Astronomical New Years!; Sky Planning Calendar--Venus Emerges, A Comet, Meteors and Perihelion All At Once; This Just In--Wind Power on Mars; Astro Art in a Park.
Cover Photo - Wind Power on Mars
In This Issue:
Cover Photo — Wind Power on Mars
Welcome to Issue 38!
Happy New Year—But WHICH Year??
This Just In -
- Powering a Mars Base Using Winds (Cover story)Sky Planning Calendar —
* Moon-Gazing - Quiet Evenings
* Observing—Plan-et - Venus is Emerging; Comet, Meteors, and Earth, Algol Eclipses
* Border Crossings - Sagittarius is the Sun’s Winter HomeAstronomy in Everyday Life - Astronomy Art in Birmingham, AL
Welcome to The Galactic Times Newsletter-Inbox Magazine #38 !
Welcome to the New Year! Which one? Not the one at midnight!! Is it the Astronomical Tropical Year, or perhaps the Mean Anomalistic One? You can choose which one to celebrate, or all, and be astronomically correct when you pop the cork!
We have plans….and we’ll reveal them shortly. Meanwhile, be safe on the January 1st, and after. Whichever New Year you celebrate.
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The sky is pretty quiet, but things are bubbling under the surface. Comet ZTF is coming into view—and those meteors coming from its position are just a coincidence— and Venus is also coming into view, brightly. It is a good time to monitor Algol, the easiest eclipsing binary star.
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Publisher — Dr. Larry Krumenaker Email: newsletter@thegalactictimes.com
Happy New Year….But Which Year???
January 1, 2023. The first day of a particular year. Our calendar is based on astronomically on something called the Mean Tropical Year, which is defined as from equinox to equinox. Only…..January 1st isn’t on an equinox. Or even a solstice. It is…just a day. So how did 2023 – or any other year – get to start on January the First?
No idea.
There are 10 days between the usual December solstice and the end of the year. The solstice was a good time to end things because the Sun was at its lowest arc across the skies, ancient myths required scaring/sacrificing/worshiping gods to make the Sun go back up and bring back the warmth of future seasons. It always worked. In ancient Roman times, the ten days after the solstice were the time of the feast of Saturnalia, a festival for the god of time. The outermost visible planet, Saturn, took the longest time to go once around the celestial sphere. Most people would have been extraordinarily lucky to reach two Saturnian years back then! Those ten days ended and were not actually counted in the civil calendar so the next month, and year, began when Saturnalia was completed. January, named after Janus, the god that looked both forward and backwards, in this case, into the past year and the next year, was the appropriate name for the first month of the year. So this is probably as good an origin story for January 1st as any.
But What About the Year?
Our calendar year is based upon the astronomical Tropical Year, which is 365.242189 days long because, darn it, the Earth isn’t properly synced up rotationally with its orbital revolution period. It is that nearly-one-quarter-day off that gets us a leap-day in February every four years, and 2023 happens to have not one of them. Don’t get me started on what happens when you multiply 0.242189 by 4 and do NOT get 1.000. That’s a whole ‘nother story.
But there are FIVE other terrestrial astronomical definitions of an Earth Year. One we can hand-wave over—the Mean Eclipse Year. That’s from lunar node to lunar node (which node—ascending or descending--the definition doesn’t say). It is useful for eclipses and only lasts 346 days and some change.
The other years are:
Mean Sidereal—measured fixed star to fixed star, which changes slightly and slowly due to gravitational influences of the other planets—365.256363 days.
Mean Anomalistic—from one perihelion to the next perihelion—same idea but the perihelion swings a bit slower and increases the year time—365.259637 days.
And then, two artificial convenience measures, Average Gregorian and Average Julian Years. The latter is based on the Julian calendar of our Roman ancestors, the former on that calendar change that happened in the Middle Ages that got everybody in a tiff because they lost ten days of their lives. Respectively those years are 365.2425 and 365.25 (exactly) days. As they are artificial, we’ll ignore them.
So when IS New Year’s Day beginning exactly? Well, from when do you want to start?
For convenience, let’s allow January 1st, 12 midnight (any time zone, doesn’t matter here), 2022 be our starting point. Should you pop the champagne at midnight, January 1st, 2023? Astronomically….No.
Using the main definition, the Mean Tropical Year, we don’t reach the same place in space until 5:48:36 AM (to the nearest second). You gotta drop the ball somewhere in the coming dawn, specifically just after Nautical Twilight begins in Alabama.
You think that’s bad? Try a Happy New Sidereal Year! That takes place at 6:09:00 AM; that’s near the end of Nautical Twilight. Pop the cork in near dawn conditions.
Oh, wait! Happy New Mean Anomalistic Year will happen at 6:13:48 AM, a few minutes before Civil Twilight begins. You might as well sleep in!
OK, if you want to have a REALLY late New Year’s….take that Mean Eclipse Year and add 27.212221 days—a Mean Draconic (Lunar) Month-- and that puts your Lunar Eclipse New Year on January 8th…..maybe not….
Whatever New Year you decide to follow---or maybe celebrate all of them!—make it a good and safe one!
Dr. Larry Krumenaker
Publisher, The Galactic Times
This Just In
* Powering a Mars Base Using Winds (Cover Story)
Normally, we think of powering missions to planets beyond Earth with either nuclear energy or solar power with photovoltaic cells. The latter work on Mars but are weaker because of being 50% farther away than when on Earth. But, as the Insight mission—and others—just learned, the Martian dust can punch out the lights of any solar-powered mission in time, covering up the cells so much they can not charge up the mission’s batteries. Good night, Opportunity. And nuclear power has its dangers and controversies. So if you are planning to send humans to Mars, how you are going to charge the refrigerators and keep on the lights, besides dusting everything? Especially when those global dust storms hide the Sun for months?
Wind power.
Until the recent missions, both orbital and lander, we have not had a lot of good wind data on Mars, globally. And now NASA has been able to model the winds at a great many sites on Mars’ surface, including many proposed landing spots for human habitation.
In this December 20th Nature Astronomy article, V. Hartwick et al. say “We demonstrate that wind energy compensates for diurnal and seasonal reductions in solar power particularly in regions of scientific merit in the midlatitudes and during regional dust storms. Critically, proposed turbines stabilize power production when combined with solar arrays, increasing the percent time that power exceeds estimated mission requirements from ~40% for solar arrays alone to greater than 60–90% across a broad fraction of the Mars surface.” They point out that “mandates to ‘follow the water’ and ‘find shelter’ direct attention to regions with evidence of surface liquid water as in recurring slope lineae in the Valles Marineris, Mawrth Vallis and mid-latitudes, close to large near-subsurface ice deposits as in the Northern Hemisphere polar and mid-latitudes or within large-scale magma deposits such as along the Tharsis volcanic plateaus.” But these do not necessarily have the solar cell power possibilities to be good survivable habitation sites for humans.
Original studies, such as those examining the winds are the Viking sites, were flawed in that these were deliberately chosen to be areas of low winds. Furthermore, wind turbines have recently advanced into different designs that are more effective in low wind-fields on Earth, and could handle similar low forces found in the low density atmosphere of Mars and thus the earlier rejected Martian studies of wind power needed to be re-evaluated.
Hartwick et al. found 50 sites in which the return on investment in wind energy is at least 50% and adds to whatever energy solar cells bring in. They are shown on the Cover Photo map.
Assessment of wind energy resource potential for future human missions to Mars, DOI: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-022-01851-4
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.
View or Download this information on our Sky Event Online Calendar on The Galactic Times homepage!
January 1 Uranus covered up by the Moon, if you are in Central America, the Caribbean, most of North America, northern Europe. But it happens in the late afternoon US time so….
January 3 Mars is a half-degree North of the Moon in the afternoon US time. You’ll find it left of the Moon in the evening, and behind the Moon if you are in East Africa.
January 6 Full Moon.
January 7 Pollux is the bright star near the Moon in the dawn.
January 8 Apogee, the Moon at its farthest distance, smallest apparent size, around the midnight between the 7th and 8th.
January 14 Last Quarter occurs this evening.
Observing---Plan-et
You might catch Mercury around Venus in the twilight glow within a day or so of New Year’s, with a low horizon that can make that easier to observe, and binoculars even easier. By the 7th, it is in conjunction with the Sun and gone. It will be back quickly, though, in the dawn in the second half of the month.
Venus may fool you, looking like a low bright light of a plane far in the distance coming at you, only it just sits there in the western twilight glow. But every night that darn plane will be getting higher and landing, er, setting later, as much as two hours later by month end.
Heading eastward, Saturn is the dimmest planet at magnitude +0.8. Find it in a neat equilateral triangle with two stars of the constellation Capricornus near the Moon circa and after New Year’s Eve. Interestingly, its disk is the same size as Mars’ on that first day of the month even though in miles Mars is much the dwarf. That’s what being only a bit more than a half Astronomical Unit from us (Mars) compared to Saturn’s 10 AU from us does to your appearance. It also makes Mars brighter, magnitude -1.6. But by the end of January the brightness, and time in view, will fade, and we’ll lose Saturn in February.
Jupiter is high in the East once the Sun sets, brightest thing in the sky once Venus sets early.
Finally, there’s Mars, bright and red and giving the bright winter stars a run for your attention. It is stationary then resumes its eastward motion on the 12th. Remember that cool occultation of Mars about a month ago? Those who missed out geographically get their turn in a few weeks. See the next issue of The Galactic Times!
Other Sky Events
Meanwhile on Earth….. we are as close to the Sun as we can get—perihelion—on January 3rd, about 147 million kilometers (91.4 million miles). If you thought being close “to the fire” would get you warm, clearly as this recent cold spell showed you, that ain’t the case. Our day-to-day climate is dictated far more by the tilt of the Earth’s axis, not its distance from the Sun. Both determine how many photons of energy per square area (you chose the units) we get, but the tilt factor is by far the more powerful. Only if the Earth had no tilt would the distance be a true weather factor.
About the same time and date (specifically, around 10 pm on the 3rd US Central Time), we get one last shower…of meteors, not photons. The Quadrantids can whip up a storm of 120 per hour. They come from the defunct constellation of the Quadrant, now a part of Bootes the Herdsman, and between it and the tail of the Great Bear (end of the Big Dipper). This part of the sky, though, doesn’t rise until late in the night, and if it weren’t for that darn moon approaching Full and washing out the sky, you might have gotten a good show. Still if you can hack the cold, you might give it a try to see a few, but look early; this is a shower that lasts only a few hours.
It is a good idea to look for Quadrans anyway, for it is here that you and your new Christmas telescope or binoculars can hunt for the winter comet of C/2022 E3 (ZTF). It isn’t yet above the threshold to be naked eye (and even when it will be, it won’t be by much) but it will be crossing in or near the region of Quadrans during the first 2-3 weeks of January. The chart below shows you where to hunt for it. It reaches perihelion on January 12th, but being so far north AND actually beyond Earth’s orbit, it isn’t in the solar glare and thus we can view it. It will pass somewhat close to us on February 1 and thus be at its brightest then.
And Further Afield….
This is a good time of year to watch the eclipses of Algol, the Demon Star, high in the sky in Perseus. Its eclipses cycle through the hours of the day and night. Most of the time is moderately bright, magnitude 2.1, but every 2 days 20 hours and some change it dims to 3.3. The entire eclipse takes about 10 hours from start to finish. For the winter and early spring, we’ll list the evening eclipse apparition dates for easier scheduling. The thing to do is, of course, to compare the brightness of Algol to stars of known brightness on a periodic basis and make a graph of progress of the dimming and the light recovery and, in this case, try to find the time of max eclipse!
January 1 and 4
Border Crossings
This is the most time of the year where reality and ‘signs’ have the least coordination. The Sun is really in Sagittarius these two weeks. The newspapers say it is one sign to the East, in Capricornus. Right….
Astronomy in Everyday Life
The last week of December I was in Birmingham, AL, and was walking around in the evening in the area of the University of Alabama, Birmingham. I was happy to come across a small pocket park with an interesting art object—three lighted poles with scientific designs on them:
Always glad to see science on display, but it is the third column, the one on the right in the picture above, that is of real interest. The two on the left appear to be pretty much just biological images—not my thing—but on the right is a whole lot of math, chemistry, physics—-and some astronomy!
Can you see them? On the left, the familiar E-mc squared. Center has the equation for gravitation between two objects. On the right, a black hole-wormhole diagram.
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