Moon Passing Jupiter ~ Can Be Seen In Skies Monday

[Kinninigan Profile]

Good show hits the skies Monday


by Mike Lynch
Published: February 17, 2013







First off this week, I want to call your attention to a pretty good show going on Sunday and Monday night between the first quarter (half) moon and the bright planet Jupiter.

Astronomically, it's called a conjunction, but I prefer to call it a celestial hugging or tango. Early Sunday evening, the tango places the moon to the lower right of Jupiter. They'll make quite a dazzling duo since Jupiter is the brightest star-like object in the night sky right now. Monday evening, the slightly more rounded off moon will be to the left of Jupiter as it continues its night to night eastward track among the stars on its way to being a full moon next week.

Both the moon and Jupiter are prime targets for even small telescopes. The moon is always wonderful with its craters, mountains and dark flat lunar volcanic plains called maria. The moon is really where you can use high magnification eyepieces to catch some wonderful detail. Look especially along the line that separates the sunlit and darkened halves of the moon. That line is called the terminator, a somewhat dubious name to be sure.

If you were in a safe, life-supporting space suit somewhere along the terminator, that's where the sun would be slowly rising above the horizon and there would be long shadows.

With your telescope here on Earth, you can see those shadows make the crater walls, hills and mountains really stand out. In fact, you can actually see some of the mountain peaks on the dark side of terminator as they catch the rising lunar sunrise.

Jupiter, the largest planet of our solar system, is now just less than 450 million miles away and with that telescope in your backyard, even in areas of heavy city lighting, you can easily resolve the disk of the planet. You'll probably see at least some of its atmosphere cloud bands. For sure, you'll see up to four "stars" that line up on both sides of the great planet. Those "stars" are actually Jupiter's four brightest moons that circle the planet in periods of 2 to 17 days. Because of this, you will see different arrangements of these moons from night to night. On some nights you can't see all four of them because one or more may be behind Jupiter or in front of it, lost in the glow. If your scope is big enough and atmospheric conditions are favorable, you may see the shadow of the moon passing in front of Jupiter. It will appear as a black dot against Jupiter's cloud deck. A great website to keep up with Jupiter's moon is from Sky and Telescope magazine. Check it out at http://www.skyandtelescope.com/observin ... pt/jupiter

On a different subject, we have some have comets on the way. Actually, comets can be found in the night sky all the time, but most require a telescope to see and even if you do, I can pretty much guarantee you'll be underwhelmed. Most of them are just faint "fuzzies" with little or no tail. A great website to keep up with where comets are in the night sky at any given time is http://www.heavens-above.com/

This website is also great for a lot of other fun stuff, like telling you when and where the International Space Station is coming over your location.

Every once in awhile, though, we get a comet that's visible to the naked eye, and right now there are two of them on the way. Comets are basically a mixture of ice, rock, dust and other frozen gases with a diameter anywhere from about one hundred feet to a couple of miles or so. They spend most of their time in the very cold far reaches of the solar system, but they do occasionally pass close enough to the sun to start partially melting and producing bright tails of vapor and dust. How much of a tail and how bright it is can be really tricky to predict.

I'm always leery of talking about bright comets on the way because many times the predictions don't pan out. No pun intended here (kind of), but one comet called Pan-STARRS may show in March. It may be bright enough to see with the naked eye in the early evening twilight. Stay tuned on that one. Later on this year, starting in November and through December, Comet Ison could put on a really spectacular show. Some astronomers are even predicting it could be the comet of the century - so far at least - but certainly don't bet the farm on it! I'll keep you updated as we move closer to the time of Ison.

(Lynch is an amateur astronomer and author of the book, "Stars, a Month by Month Tour of the Constellations." Contact him at mikewlynch@comcast.net.)



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