 Welcome to the skies over Colorado, February 2021. I'm staff astronomer John Ensworth for Longmont Public Media. In the news this month, we have a new planetary radar system that has come online. This was installed at the Green Bank radio telescope in West Virginia. That is the largest steerable dish on earth. The largest dish on earth is in China. This one is 100 meters or 328 feet in diameter. A telescope has been in operation on this site since 1956, the original collapsed in 1988. This uses the National Radio Astronomical Observatory's very long baseline array, including telescopes in the US, Hawaii, St. Croix, and the Caribbean. And what they've been able to do with this initial test is to radar image the Apollo 15 landing site. What you're seeing here is not a photograph, even though that's what it looks like. This is purely a radar image. That is amazing detail, so good for them. This month the planets are hiding behind the Sun. We're gonna return to this later in the video as our observing challenge. We're going to take a look at an image from the SOHO, SOA Observing Heliospheric Observatory, that is always staring directly at the Sun. What you see here is the vein holding a little mask. The actual size of the Sun is this white circle in the middle. And you can see really close to the Sun Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, and Mercury, and the star cluster of the Pleiades we've covered in earlier videos. Jupiter and Saturn are still close together after their conjunction that hopefully you saw in December. The SOHO spacecraft is located at the L1, or Lagrange 1 point, 1 million miles Sunward from the Earth. So it is always able to stare directly at the Sun and nothing ever gets in the way. Is the Martian landscape leaking water? We have known for a long time on the walls of some craters there are dark markings that look like water which at this very low pressure have to be a very briny high salty slurry version of water leaking out and trickling down the walls of the crater before it evaporates. A new study they have conducted lab experiments mixing sulfates, salts, ice particles, and volcanic ash similar to what is expected on the surface and also directly measured on the surface of Mars. And they found that the grains do get covered by slushy water and then over time winds can jostle these loose forming dryish landslides. But it is not the same mechanism as having actual body of water which we know there's a lot of water in the crust of Mars it's not leaking out here necessarily. Future missions will work to resolve exactly what's going on and if this simulation is correct. Your Astral 101 fact for this month are we use different frequencies of light when we are observing the night sky and radio astronomy particularly that used for the radar earlier is just one of them. Looking from shorter wavelength on the left with gamma rays all the way the longest wavelengths on the right being radio waves this is all different forms of light. What we see with our eyes is this narrow little strip visible light right in the middle between ultraviolet and infrared. The universe is doing different things at these different energies x-ray and gamma ray very high energy events. Our radio astronomy is often showing off cooler events or things in which electrons are being excited to high energy. All these different frequencies give us different windows on the universe. The sky above your backyard this month. The moon begins the month at last quarter February 4th middle month is pretty close to new you can see that our full moon is now a few days back from the end of the month even though this is a shorter month. The planets are definitely changing now the Sun is moving eastward through the sky it's overtaking all the plants we were able to see in the new year. Mars is still high in the south sky it's sunset and it sets after midnight the early month and around midnight at the end of the month so that is the big beacon of red non-twinkling star-like object in the southwestern sky. Also in the evening Neptune sets shortly after sunset early in the month and then it's too close to the Sun by the end of the month to see while Uranus sets near midnight early and then around 10 p.m. at the end of the month. Mercury is low and very difficult to see in the evening sky at the first of February. Taking a look at the sky chart here is mid-month just after sunset there's Neptune, Uranus and Mars up the highest. On either side of midnight Mars is going to be the only thing early in the month and then it'll be down in the southwest and difficult to see not a good view in the back years or telescope. Basically mid-month midnight the sky is turned over to the stars and not the planets. In the morning sky all the planets we've lost are going to start reappearing on the other side of the Sun. Venus has been up for a few months easy to see in the morning sky it's getting lower and lower getting kind of lost in the glare of sunrise by the end of the month. Jupiter and Saturn emerge later in the month but are still very difficult to see and Mercury joins them actually going between them at the very end of the month. Taking a look at this here is sunrise just about to occur those Mercury Venus Jupiter Saturn even Pluto which we're not going to see in the back of your telescope. Sunrise begins the month at 7.07 a.m. and back all the way to 6.34 a.m. by the end of the month. Sunset changes from 5.19 to 5.51 p.m. We are gaining almost a full hour of daylight by the end of February and the Sun is definitely climbing in the sky. Local noon we're going from 33 degrees above the southern horizon at the beginning of the month to 43 10 degrees higher. Your feature object this month is the Sun since it's blocking a bunch of planets right now. On average it is just under 8 minutes and 19 light seconds away from us. You've heard of light years and that is how far light travels in a year that's a distance but in this case the Sun is so close that its light gets here in just over eight minutes. That's just about 93 million miles that changes about 3 million miles from our closest point in the beginning of winter to its most distant point the beginning of summer. The Sun is 29,000 light years from the black hole in the center of our galaxy and it doesn't rotate like a big solid body. It's a ball of gas so the equator actually rotates every 25 hours sorry 25 days and the poles every 34 days. It is definitely the brightest thing in the sky with the brightest nighttime object being a negative one and a half for serious dimmest thing that a person with good eyes can see in a dark location is about six or seven magnitude. The Sun is at a stunning negative 26.74 magnitude. Your Colorado observing challenge this month is to try to see maybe with binoculars this clustering of planets at the very end of the month. By 7 20 a.m. the Sun will be up they will be invisible back at up to 6 20 a.m. the Sun will still be low have a few stars in the western sky and maybe be able to pull these out. A few of them by eye a few by binoculars. You have multiple conjunctions going on here and that would be bigger news if people could see it easily. The astronomy events near Longmont. A few things are continuing via zoom and other web based applications. Longmont Astronomical Society February 18th at 7 p.m. will feature a walking tour of the optical history artifacts and anecdotes from the astronomical ICM John W. Briggs. Check out longmontastro.org. February 19th would have been their open space telescope night and those are not yet back. Little Thompson Observatory in birth that is closed through June 2021 possible zoom meetings. I'm going to try to present a talk on axions a dark matter possibility in February see if we can get everything to work. Estes Park Memorial Observatory is remaining close to the end of February they will determine what to do after that it's a smaller community up there and could conceivably figure out who's got all the shots and open up a little early. Northern Colorado Astronomical Society took a break over Christmas and they will be picking up February 4th 2021 6 to 15 p.m. with Charlie Davis Texas Star Party and McDonald's observatory webcast very interesting visiting the Fisk planetarium observatories closed but they will have a live event February 11th at 7 p.m. the future of the autonomous self personal autonomy social oppression social media the observatory will have every Wednesday at 3 p.m. live shows going from February 3rd April 28th on their YouTube channel check out colorado.edu slash SBO this month my suggested reading or software be another desktop software program called starry night pro plus eight it's for both PC and Mac and this is the software that I used to generate the star maps you saw earlier in this video it's got a very intuitive set of controls across the top menus to pop in from the sides to give you a lot more functionality and even teach you about astronomy as a wide range of features imports current astral and comet data as some very carefully curated databases as many errors removed as is possible they have a complete space in astronomy pack 8 starting at $60 then through night enthusiasts pro and pro plus 8 which is what I use at $250 you get telescope control and other functionality that can help you with an observatory at programs that starry night.com this is not a paid ad if you have any additions or corrections please email me at John unsworth a gmail.com this has been the skies over Colorado February 2021 keep looking up