TGT #24U- Leonid Showers, Present and Future - People of the 13th Sign - Neptune on Earth, & More!
TGT 11/16/24: Deeper Looks: When Stars Fell on Alabama, and Will Again; Sky Planning: Four Bright Planets in Eve, Two in Dawn; AEL: Neptune Signs; TCA: The Sun in THREE Signs This Month!
Cover Photo - Snakes and Angry Lion
In This Issue:
Cover Photo — Snakes and Angry Lion
Welcome to Issue 24U!
Sky Planning Calendar —
* Moon-Gazing - Another Bright Star and Star Cluster Covered Over; A Line-up of Moon, Planets and Stars* Observing—Plan-et - We Lose One in the Evening, and One in the Morning.
* For the Future - Jupiter’s Upcoming OppositionTCA - Towards Cosmic Awareness (An Expanded Border Crossings) —TWO Border Crossings This Month! Bring On The Snake-Handler!
Deeper Looks - The Net-Yet-Angry Lion
Astronomy in Everyday Life - The Last Planet
Welcome to The Galactic Times Newsletter-Inbox Magazine #24U!
Are you birthday person this November 30th? Congratulations! You will never see your true zodiac sign in a horoscope column! That’s okay, there isn’t much of a future in being a Snake Handler. W H A T? ? ? See the TCA column.
The evening sky loses one planet and so does the morning sky, for a while. But bright planets dominate the evenings. Furthermore, watch the Moon cover up a whole star cluster, a bright blue-white star, and make a one-night line-up with three other bright objects and one faint one but with numerous points of light. See the Sky Planning Calendar for both stories.
Did stars really fall on Alabama? No. They ‘fell’ over the whole world and they will again in 3, 10 and 11 years. See the Deeper Looks column.
Finally, a rare Astronomy in Everyday Life object was found on Earth!
- - - -
Last Reminder: I will be at the Comer Museum, 10-2, in Sylacauga, AL, on November 30th, the actual anniversary date for the Meteor That Hit a Mrs., back in 1954. I will be among the speakers talking about the event—myself on the astronomy and the current status of it all—and I invite any readers who can get there—from Alabama, Georgia, other nearby states?—to say hello!
- - - -
* A Patreon account has been set up for The Galactic Times. Right now, the one tier is simply a $2.50 monthly support for your kindness, since The Galactic Times is a free newsletter now. There are plans afoot for some additional benefits —outreach info, education resources—to be set up there for paid members, resource materials that can’t be housed on Substack. To support TGT, please head over to our Patreon for The Galactic Times site.
* Not a Subscriber? Please hit the link..right… below:
* A Black Friday, Plus and Minus, Sale!
Visit Hermograph Press online and get discounts on several astronomical and historical merch! All discounted heavily, and the sale has begun and runs until December 5th!
Enjoy!
Publisher — Dr. Larry Krumenaker Email: newsletter@thegalactictimes.com
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.
November 17 Jupiter is 6-degrees South of the Moon, though with Jupiter’s brightness, you shouldn’t need the Moon to help find it—Luna’s fat gibbous light all but blocks out fainter objects nearby, and even Jupiter doesn’t shine so well with it close by.
November 19 In the evening, you will find the Moon 1.9-degrees South of the eastern Gemini the Twins star, Pollux.
November 20 In fact, there is a nice line-up in the late evening sky this night and overnight. To the right of the Moon, in order of increasing distance are both Twin stars, Pollux then Castor. To the left of the Moon is Mars first, getting brighter by the day, and then further east is the Beehive star cluster. Use binoculars for that. Best one hour before sunrise.
November 22 Last Quarter Moon
November 26 Moon is at Apogee, its farthest distance this month from Earth.
November 27 A very nice predawn occultation of a bright star. The Moon glides over blue, first-magnitude star Spica, in Virgo. The event is visible over most of the US and Canada and the Caribbean.
November 30 It is a New Moon but only if you are in the western half of the United States of Canada, Mexico and points westward. Otherwise, to the East, you’ll have to wait until December 1st, a good pair of dates to mark the end…or START…of a lunar phase cycle!
Observing---Plan-et
==Venus, Mars and Jupiter Dominate the Evenings==
All five naked-eye, traditional ‘wandering stars’ are visible in the evening but not for long.
Mercury, on November 16th, reaches its Greatest Eastern Elongation, or in more plain English, it is as far to the east of the Sun, shining in the evening twilight, as it will get in this evening appearance. It is 23-degrees from Sol, but it could get farther in other apparitions. This time it is rather decently bright but fades and gets closer to the Sun the rest of the month, setting within 40 minutes after the Sun at the last day of the month. But it will have a great morning show in December.
Venus can’t be missed all month, setting well after twilight ends, in the western half of the sky.
Mars rises about 2.5 hours after twilight ends in the evening as is getting to marginally large enough size to see some details in even a small telescope. It is also getting brighter as it approaches opposition to the Sun. The Moon passes it on the 20th.
Jupiter rises during evening twilight and remains up all night. The Moon passes nearby on the 17th.
Saturn sets at local midnight on the 27th, ceasing to be in the morning sky or being an all-nighter of a planet. Thus dawns have only two planets to see …. until Mercury rises in the dawn in the second week or so of December.
For the Future
Jupiter reaches opposition, rising at Sunset, setting at Sunrise, visible all night, in early December. We’ll have some observational pointers for it in next issue.
Deeper Looks: The Not-Yet-Stormy Lion
On November 17th, in the midnight to dawn hours, the Leonid meteor shower peaks. It only lasts about a day, though some few can be seen before and after for another day.
This year, as in most years, the meteors that radiate out of the Head (or Sickle, a backwards bright question mark shaped group of stars) of Leo the Lion are not especially out of the ordinary. You see perhaps up to 20 per hour just before dawn, not weak, not spectacular (see the Geminids of December or Perseids of August for that). Well, this year probably fewer with the First Quarter Moon nearby glaring out the fainter ‘falling stars.’
Speaking of ‘falling’, the State of Alabama has, on its license plates, “Stars Fell on Alabama”, though this does not refer to the Sylacauga meteor hit one Mrs. Ann Hodges. It instead references a phenomenon known mostly for the Leonids showers. Every third of a century the snoozing Lion gets its dander up and roars. These are years at or near to xx33, xx66 or xx99 (put 19, 20, etc. in for the x’s). At that time it is more like 20 meteors……PER SECOND..or more. This is no meteor shower, it is a meteor storm. The Alabama slogan references a Leonid storm of 1866 (a more spectacular but brief storm on 1833 was apparently not observed though documented elsewhere). No known piece of Lion actually hit then; they all burn up in the atmosphere high up.
The last storm was in 1998 and a smaller storm happened in 1999. Personally, observing it with a class of students was one of the astronomically AWESOME memories I will treasure as long as my mind still works. A literal one-second sweep of open eyes probably had up to 100 trails in all the sky I could see. We’re talking up to hundreds per hour, thousands in a night! See the photo of the 1966 storm from NASA in the Cover Photo.
So when does the Lion not brush us off with a little cosmic dust, like some annoying lion cub? When is the next storm?
Astronomers have gotten better at predicting them. We now know the debris stream was formed from Comet Temple-Tuttle and it isn’t uniform. Unlike other comets that have come and gone and left evenly distributed bits of rock, Comet Temple-Tuttle—which orbits in a 33-year period around the Sun—has a big clump of stuff nearby to it that swings over Earth every 33 years. However, the comet orbital material also has thicker and thinner streams within it, from different passages of the Comet. We get major and minor storms depending on which streams hit us in different years. The gravities of the planets also tend to shift the streams around just as they perturb the Comet’s own orbit. Sometimes we hit one, sometimes it has been moved out of the way. And those streams last for centuries, just not always in the same pathway.
According to an white paper about 20 years ago from the International Meteor Organization, we have a number of storms a-coming:
Comet Temple-Tuttle, a fairly short period comet, will be close by in 2027 so we could see around 50 meteors per hour on November 20th that year. (All mentioned dates are plus or minus one depending on your terrestrial location.)
The year 2034 will be the major storm date but there will be several other outbursts. November 17th will have another 50-60 peak because of the Comet nearby again. On the 18th, you’ll see a storm of 500-600 per hour (those extra zeroes are no typoes!). The storm will be brief —it will be back for a short while to 30-40…then it rises again few hours later to a 300-400 rate!
The next year, 2035, will start with a 30-40 outburst on the 18th, then nearly a day later it rises to 50-60. Dawn of the 20th will see a final outburst of 300-350 meteors per hour. Then you have to wait another third of a century.
Mark your LONG-RANGE calendars!
TCA - Towards Cosmic Awareness (An Expanded Border Crossings)
Oh, this half-month is astrological FUN! We get to have the Sun in not two but three—count them, THREE—constellations of the Zodiac!
Three? What??
The Sun, according to astrologers, is in Scorpio (Scorpius!! Get it right!!!) until the 21st, when it enters Sagittarius. Not quite, guys! It actually is in and leaves Libra the Scales and enters Scorpius on the 23rd. BUT!…
It is only amongst those stars for….hold on….wait for it…..seven days. Yes, one week. Half a fortnight. The 23rd through 29th (Happy Thanksgiving, Scorpions!). Then… the Sun crosses the border into…..
Ophiuchus.
Say that again??
Yup…..Ophiuchus. Oh—Fee--You—Cuss.
You don’t see this one in the newspaper horoscopes, do you? Not much future in being a handler of snakes, I guess. But astronomically, the Sun spends more time in THIS constellation than it does in the Scorpion! Almost 3 weeks, well into December.
The constellations of the zodiac are those star groups that the Sun’s apparent path, the Ecliptic, goes through in the sky (due to the Earth’s orbital motion but that’s not key here). And there are thirteen of them (and there’s more, wait for it below). Ophiuchus, the handler of snakes and the celestial avatar of Aesclepius, the first doctor in Greek mythology, has one foot pushing down on the back of Scorpius, whereas the Sun only goes through one of Scorpius’ narrow claws before it exits enter the good Doctor after a week (See above chart). But 13 wasn’t a lucky number to the Greeks, and 13 constellations don’t divide up the ecliptic evenly (nor are they all the same size), nor do they then match up with the 12 months (more or less formed by the 12 moon phase cycles—another ignored oopsy, calendrically). So Ophiuchus was ignored.
It also shows that if you, a human, make up completely artificial star patterns that have absolutely no reality in nature—human-made constructs—you have to be daft to expect them to have any real say or control over your life.
Sorta like fake news.
Oh, and as far as the Sun signs go, there are actually 14; the Sun touches another one for about a day in March—Cetus the Sea Monster. We’ll talk about THAT then.
And as for how this helps in teaching…..
I’ve always said, if you can’t get the current sky right in the present, how can you possibly correctly predict the future? Often in teaching astronomy, the Ecliptic comes up—in coordinate lessons, where are the planets tonight lessons, and so on. Somewhere along the way, I “innocently” ask about students’ ‘signs’ which garners a lot of interest. I can very easily segue into stating that I think most of them have the wrong signs for their dates, and after getting them to agree that a “sun sign” is the constellation the Sun is in on the day you were born, I wager them that they are incorrect and put down some real money and ask for takers of my bet. At the college level I usually get a few. Then I have them write down on a piece of paper their name, birth date (but not year), the sign they read (I’m a Virgo!), and a blank line. They roll the paper up into a ball really tight, and put all the papers into my hat. I shake the hat up, mixing the balls well, and then redistribute the balls by letting the students draw one out of the hat, but not open them up right away. Using our agreed sun sign definition I discuss the constellation borders (Border Crossings, hint hint, get it?) and tell them how easy it is to determine them. THEN they open the balls of paper while I project on the screen or board the list of dates when the Sun actually does enter and leave the real 14 constellations. They check the paper of the person they got (i.e. not their own), and fill in the blank with the actual ‘sign’. (There are ALWAYS audible gasps <grin>.) By raising of hands I have the paper checkers show how many slips of paper have the written sign match the actual sign; these I have to pay with my bet money.
I always win. Six out of seven on average in any class will be wrong. [I say I will pay the winners after the losers pay me.] Those I have to pay money are always fewer than those who have to pay me. Why? 1) For the reasons stated before—14, not 12 constellations, uneven ‘sign’ sizes. 2) The Earth’s north pole has a motion called precession, because it wobbles around like a top, which changes the direction the Pole points to [today, near Polaris, several thousands of years ago when the zodiac constellations were made—near Thuban in Draco the Dragon (not Draco the Slytherin)] which shifted the constellations of the past to new locations and thus new solar entry and exit dates. The number of days that match are about one in seven.
And, for ethical reasons, since my night astro classes were usually long, I always use the money to order deliveries of pizza for our mid-class break. And it usually mollifies the losers as well as making a good educational (and hopefully, life) lesson.
Astronomy in Everyday Life
The Last Planet
Solar System objects vary in their use for naming places and things. Moon, Venus, these are likely the common-most. The final two planets are likely the least useful. Uranus is rare, but Neptune does get some usage because of its connection to the Greek God of the Sea.
Neptune can be found, dimly, in Pisces, above and slightly left of Saturn in Aquarius. It is already up before Sunset, is highest in the sky around 8PM at mid-month, and sets around 2 AM. It shines at a dim, telescope-needed magnitude 7.9, and a pale green. It stays in the evening sky until around March next year.
Neptune can also be found, less dimly, in Tallasee, AL. The Neptune Technology Company, a manufacturer of water meters, is located at ground level along East-West oriented Neptune Road, says Google Maps, though no street signs were evident.
And there is a great tongue-in-cheek second sign that might be used for Neptune-aficionados for their driveways at home….
‘Til next issue,
Dr. Larry Krumenaker