 Welcome to the skies over Colorado for June 2021. I'm staff astronomer John Enzworth of the Cherrywood Observatory, Little Thompson Observatory, and Longmont Public Media. We have some quick news this month. First, we have a possible false planet. It's a very interesting planet and a very interesting star system. This is Bernard's star. This is a very close star to our own stellar system, Sol, only six light years away. It's technically the fourth nearest star outside the three in Alpha Centauri, but since the other three are in the same system, this is pretty significant. It's a few billion years older than our Sun. With its own intrinsic velocity through space and its nearness to Earth, it is the fastest moving star through the nighttime sky, moving about 10.3 arc seconds per year. The planet, though, is estimated to be about 0.4 astronomical units. That's the Earth Sun distance of 93 million miles from Bernard's star. It would still be much colder than Earth because Bernard's star is such a cool, small, dim star. This planet was estimated at three times Earth's mass with a year of about 232 days, Earth days. This is an artist's rendition of what this planet might look like with a very dim and very red star up in the sky. Jack Lubin, graduate student at the University of California, Irvine, thinks that stellar activity might be mimicking a planet orbiting Bernard's. Using the hobby Eberle telescope in the McDonald Observatory in Texas, combining 856 days of spectrographic observations and 20 years of prior observations, thinks that this planet may not actually be there and is making that case. China makes it to Mars. Of course, we've covered the goings-on of NASA. Mission to Mars recently with helicopter and all. The Zhu Rong rover now has landed in Utopia, Plametia on May 17th. That's 518 mountaintown in the morning. It was announced after the fact. We were kind of surprised that they were doing it. Bit of a secret there. We have the latitude and longitude of its landing location and there is a rover that they are deploying. So, more science from Mars can't be a bad thing. Up in the International Space Station, I wouldn't say near-miss, but a near catastrophe occurred where some object moving at high velocity hit the Canadian robotic arm. This, there is a hole in that, what's called the Canada arm 2. This could have been a meteor, could have been space debris from another satellite or a fragment of one coming through. Relative velocities for objects in orbit can be pretty fantastic. As you can see over on the right here, it did puncture a hole through the insulating heat resistant material around the arm, but now the communication systems or mechanical components inside seem to be damaged. They do have some missions planned with this in the near future and they think those will proceed as normal. We have seen holes appear in the solar panels from similar impacts. There are already plans for Canada arm 3 that were started in 2019. I could not find the deployed date for that or launch date for that. All right, let's take a look at big star parties in the age of COVID, at least in the time coming out of the age of COVID. The Grand Canyon Star Party in Arizona here at the beginning of June is still planned to be virtual, so check out Google that. Bryce Canyon Festival is going ahead in person, June 9th through 12th, so they are probably looking at the CDC guidelines for people being able to be near each other in an outside setting, but the Cherry Spring Star Party is cancelled. In July, the Green Bank Star Quest is cancelled. The Sangre Star Festival, West Cliff, Colorado, is gone virtual and Golden State Star Party and Table Mountain Star Parties from California, Washington respectively are cancelled. Hopefully we'll see this start turning around pretty quickly. Your ASTRO 101 lesson for this month comes from Bernard Starr and that is discussing briefly proper motion. All the stars in the galaxy are moving and moving very quickly, but being very far away, we don't really notice most of those motions except for cases like this. Stars are traveling around the galaxy, all orbiting around the central core in the black hole there, like swarms of bees. They're basically moving together, but they do have some of their own velocity, their side to side where they're faster or slower than the crowd. His example, we can take a look at the Big Dipper over time. Going back 50,000 years, the Big Dipper was only vaguely recognizable. Presently, the Big Dipper looks like this. These teal arrows show the motion of each individual star and 50,000 years from now it'll look more like the bottom picture. These are large timescales and humans living only about a hundred years. We don't really notice this. Let's take a look at the sky above your backyard for this month. We start the month with a last quarter moon, June 2nd in the morning sky, new moon on the 9th, first quarter in the evening sky, June 17th, and if you're planning on some camping and hiking at the end of the month, you'll have lots of moonlight to help you with a nighttime hike. Okay at the planets, faster Venus is rising up in the southwestern sky week to week month to month right now, so with its gaining altitude it is staying up longer after sunset and becoming more visible. It may look like an airplane coming in for an eventual approach and landing at Denver if you look in the southwestern sky. It is now setting about two hours after sunset. Mars on the other hand is moving slower around the sun than we do, so we are passing it and it is sinking in the southwestern sky and is now setting about three hours after sunset. Venus and Mars will pass each other in the coming months and then Mars will vanish behind the glow of the sun. Taking a look at the evening chart, there's a sun just going down, there's Venus emerging from the glow, Mars not too far above, on this particular night of the 15th moon will be just above them. Around midnight, if you stick strictly to midnight, the only thing you'll see in the nighttime sky is Saturn, which rises around 11 p.m. would be very low in the southeast sky. If you take a look at that chart, we are pretty much planet-free for anything that you can see with binoculars or a telescope because you can't see Pluto easily, here's Saturn just coming up. In the pre-dawn sky, Jupiter and Saturn are putting on a great show. Saturn, as I just said, rises about 11 and Jupiter is only an hour and a half behind it at about 12 or 13 in the morning. Neptune is now rising about 1 a.m. and Uranus rises about 3 a.m. Mercury is pretty much impossible. I'd put on a great show last month, but now it's down in the glow of the sun once again and coming out in the morning sky already. Remember, it goes all the way around the sun every 88 days. Here's our busy morning sky right at sunrise. Here's Saturn way over here already past the meridian, this line from south to north dividing the east and western half of the sky from each other. There's Jupiter, Neptune, Uranus, and Mercury too close to the sun to be seen. Sunrise and sunset time do not change much this month at all. June is the month where the sun is moving more along the east-west axis than it does the other months of the year. Sunrises and sunsets are virtually unchanged. The altitude of the sun is the same. It goes from 72.5 up to a maximum of 73.7. On June 20th, the summer solstice. Summer begins at 9.30 p.m. Mountain time on the 20th. On that day, we have our longest day at 14 hours 59 minutes, just about 15 hours of daylight with the sunrise at 5.32 a.m. and sunset at 8.31 p.m. Our feature object, we've gone through everything in the solar system planet-wise, so let's take a look at the sun itself. It's about 8 minutes 19 light seconds away from us. It's a G2 type 5 spectral type star and it's about a half degrees in diameter, which is very similar to the size of the moon. Making eclipses interesting with solar eclipses being anything from a deep total to an annular where the sun is visible all the way around the moon, the maximum eclipse. At 432,000 plus miles radius, that makes its diameter just about 110 times Earth's diameter. You can also put about 1.3 million Earths inside the sun to fill it. It's definitely the biggest thing around. It easily can swallow all the planets and have lots of space left over. At the surface, which is the photosphere, which is still close to a vacuum, but it looks like a surface to us, gravity is 55 times Earth's. The maths of the sun is 333,000 times that of the Earth and our solar system is 29,000 light years from the galactic gore. It's middle-aged. It's 4.6 billion years old with about 5 billion years to go depending on when you kind of consider it to have died. It will swallow up as a red giant, swallowing mercury venous and probably Earth at a much later stage. As it ages, it is getting 1% brighter every 100 million years. Your Colorado Observing Challenge will go back to Bernard Starr again because you can see it from here. You do need at least a small telescope or binoculars to do so. Middle of the month, June 15th, if you go out at 1.22 a.m., it's right on the meridian and right above the equator. So it's well placed. Down in the southern sky, you'll see the teapot of Sagittarius and the fish hook of Scorpius. And this constellation is called Ophiuchus. It kind of looks like a big house, like a kid's drawing of a house. Here's the roof. If you go off of the roof, maybe have a little eave right here. We're going to zoom in on this eave. There's the eave right there at the edge of the roof. And using this little bright star right above this joint in the eave, we're going to make some imaginary shapes here. That's a nice triangle up to it. And then it's going straight horizontally over from the corner of the roof. There's Bernard Starr, a very dim red. It's this little dim red one up here, not the bright one down here, but this really reddish one. Because it is such a cool small star, the reddish color will be very noticeable. Taking a look at astronomy events near Longmont. Well, we're still coming out of COVID, like I said earlier, so things are still canceled. June 17th, probably, if I've got their pattern correct, figuring from last month's meeting, Longmont Astronomical Society probably will have something online, but nothing is on their site at the time that I put this together and I'm recording this video. But what is on their site is the first live public star night under the stars with telescopes out at the Boulder County Parks and Open Space Rabbit Mountain Star Party. This is July, not June, July 16th, from 8.15 to 10.15. They do want you to register, so there are a limited number of slots. So things are not quite normal yet, but definitely a step in the right direction. Little Townsend Observatory is closed through June 2021. They still have virtual visits being offered, so take a look at starkids.org for that. SS Park Memorial Observatory is still not having public star nights, but they are having small groups by reservation and all the details are located at angelsabove.org. Northern Colorado Astronomical Society on June 3rd will have a webinar speaker, Ron Hernek, talking about meteorites, a collector's perspective. That's a direct copy and paste from their site, so I spelled his name incorrectly. It's on their site. The Fisk Pontarium, now that they're in summer, seem to have both their live events and observatory events on hold for now. So if you are curious, you can check out coloraw.edu-sbo or coloraw.edu-fisk to see if anything is starting up in the summer. And finally, looking at desktop software, my suggestion list. Another freebie that's really good quality is Cartier Duceil and Starchart. I'm looking directly at their description on their own website. The program enables you to draw star charts making use of the data in many catalogs of stars and nebulae in addition to the position of planets, asteroids, comets that are shown. You can make different star maps. You can color different things. Everything is configurable to make the map look the way you want it to. Here's some examples of sections of these star charts. You can plot positions, orbits of things, date and time stamp them. For instance, comets or asteroids you're interested in looking at over a month. And the URL is kind of a mess. So if you do Cartier Duceil in Google, you'll get it right away. It is free and available for the Linux, Windows, and macOS platforms. If you have any additions, corrections, any comments to make, send an email to johninsworth at gmail.com. Put in Skies Over Colorado in the subject line so I can find it easily. Again, this has been the Skies Over Colorado for June 2021. I'm Steph S. Trenomer of Johninsworth. Keep looking up!