 Welcome to the skies of a colorado for December 2020. I am staff astronomer John Answorth for Longmont Public Media. Astronomy news this month now it starts outside. The Aerocebo telescope is lost. Let's start this plan here. This is the moment of its collapse. The first cable broke on August 10th, the 2nd November 9th. Throughout much of this time period microphones could pick up cables snapping and breaking inside mammoth towers holding up that 900 ton platform. Snapping and breaking accelerated until it just kind of took off completely failed. December 1st, 7.55 a.m. how did we go time? This is drone footage. They could hear it going quicker and quicker so they had a drone up filming at the moment that this really started. So eventually what remains isn't enough to hold anything up. Here's a picture of the observatory in better times. This is after I think it's in the 90s it was refurbished. The platform greatly increased in a way. This is seen in a number of movies. Golden Iron 95, Species in 95, Countdown to 97. Looks like a possible play-working or screen television movie in 2003. Maybe it's science. Episode 2004, I call it Brilliant, Countdown to 97. That was actually on science stages and special effects in the actual observatory. Samples of asteroid Wagu, or not Wagu, but Wagu, have arrived in Japan. Sample Mission, the Hayabasu-2 capsule landed in the Limura Coheridaria. That's a tough name this time, Australia. What's the asteroid November 2019? The parent ship is continuing on, visiting two other asteroids, hopefully in 2026 and 2030. There's an all-sky view of its re-entry. You can see the street of light when it may be seen from China's Qing, E5. Plected lunar samples, about four and a half pounds of material. Taken off to return to Earth in the surface of the moon. It's dark with its service module. Left moon December 3rd in the moon. Christmas Star, actually on the first day of the winter, the winter solstice. Jupiter and Saturn are going to be fantastically close together. We're going to talk about that in just a moment down below. I have given public talks at the Indian Council Observatory in Berthick, Colorado, where I postulate that a triple conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn back in the D.C. years might have stirred the three wise men, or the major, on their trip to Israel. As you can see it, that would fit that way. Star of Wonder. December Star Pirates, they're arcane, which is pretty normal for December. It's just very cold. Hard to get people out to stand in the sky on a night. So we'll watch the history tour of Megane Archer in the spring. The Astral 101 awesome today goes back to Jupiter and Saturn talking about conjunctions. These are things close together in the sky. In English, it's a way to connect sentences, coordinate words, and back it. In the sky, it's anything else but close. There's no real definition that has to be just so many degrees apart. If you look up and say, wow, those things are close, then they'll seem like convention. The sky, rather back here, they don't. We get on December 8th, the last quarter moon in the morning sky, mid-month, the new moon. A day after winter begins, the first quarter, and we're right there in the middle of the four moon, which is what we had for Halloween as well. We will have the four moon right at the end of months for a while, because it took us a while for that phase to process back through the calendar. Six months ago we were waiting to have anything in the evening sky at all, and now just about all the planets are in the evening sky. During the seven, of course, are the big stars. They'll be not stars, but really star-type stars. Set in about three and a half hours after sunset, they start on two degrees apart, at the beginning of month, they end up on six arc minutes apart on December 21st. In the evening, one arc minute is, and you look at the way you do time, the degree being an hour. There are 60 arc minutes in the degree. Four moon is about 30, roughly, arc minutes across. This is about one-fifth of the diameter of the moon. We have about 14 degrees about the southwest horizon. Through a telescope of no power, you can get them in the same view. We haven't seen Jupiter 7 pass this course and be visible in the at-time sky since 1226. Miles will be high in the second sky at about 830, December 1st, high in the second sky, 7 in the end of the month, getting it all together. Also, in the evening sky, we have a Neptune 74 movement, going to 7 after matters. And putting it all together, December 21st at 4.45pm is closest approach, so get out there as the sky is darkening. We won't be able to see Jupiter, but Jupiter is set on the clouded light there. There is the murdering, separating the eastern west halves of the sky, and Neptune is just approaching it. The moon at night is almost first quarter. Miles is up here, and the moon is just a little bit further down. A lot of things to look at if we have a telescope. This is a similar telescopic image, as you can see, because everything is labeled, the moons of Jupiter, the moons of Saturn. The moon, our moon, is filled with this entire form, this edge-to-edge here. So by a half degree, you can see that they are very close together, amazing. We can say at midnight, we have Neptune crossing the moon, and then later, Uranus, and then there in the southwestern sky, later on, later over here. In the morning sky, pretty dawn, we still have Venus putting on ice, sure, rising out two hours before sunrise. What's interesting about Venus is that it will pass behind the moon, December 12th. This is called an application, which you can think of it as an eclipse, because one body is going to have to put on another, just like the moon coming in the sun, but upon an occultation in size, the difference is so great. Mercury is still visible, low in the southeast sky. For the first few days, the moon and man has been long with the sun by December 25th. Difficult to see, but pretty dawn sky here is Venus, but maybe beginning its descent to the horizon. But with the sun over this time period, December 1st, sunrise is 7.02 am, and there's another 7.21 am by the end of the night. The longest night, shortest day of the year is when the winter begins on December 21st, at 9.28 am Mount Standard Time. The day is only 9 hours, 21 minutes long, if we sun 26.8 degrees above the sun in the horizon at Mercury. You see, sunset goes from 4.35, 4.36, then begins to be by 4.45. A feature object, or phenomena at this time, will be the aurora. This is an ideal picture, long-term exposure, and a very northern location, probably Alaska, I'm guessing. It was actually forecasted to be visible, the method of recording this, December 10th, so I'm going to go out and look at the site that I talked about in just a few minutes. It's called spaceweb.com, and you can see forecasts for the region where you might be able to see aurora. Could happen again at any time December 1st, the sun is getting even more active. It's changing from one sun's bright side up to the next. What causes aurora are particles, first particles coming from the sun, and that's probably the solar beam. It's the Earth's magnetic field, and it's further down beneath the spots in the north and south pole. The aurora in the north are the aurora boreals, the aurora in the south are the aurora australias. With the solar flare, and that's probably putting a mass ejection with extra energy floating down, we're not going to push this blowing wind in the atmosphere. Really, these particles are making the atmosphere light up, similar to a neon tube, or a fluorescent tube. It pushes them actively further equated both sides, so to lower latitudes a lot. So, while you can see things even here in color, that's better in Canada, northern Europe, and northern Russia. The Colorado Observing Challenge goes back to the Occupation of Venus. This is kind of how it would look. This appears at 229 p.m., and appears after moon sets. We're going to see it on that side of it. It'll be in the daylights in the sky of the moon, a different little arc of the moon visible in the arcades. We'll see Venus on one edge, and we'll look out. This is a simulation in software of the actual event. Let's see the label for Venus. It'll be challenging, as it will for the moon. The stronger events, nearly all night, December 17, would have been the all-night astronomical society's moon, but right now they don't have anything listed for December, so they might be taking the night off for the holidays. Same thing for their outdoor viewing, which will happen in the 19th, and that's not happening either. The time-temperature remains closed through early April. Still looking for a way to put a broadcast meeting out in the red. That has been postponed past 8th of January. It's just part of our juncture remains closed through the end of the year. Well then, power of astronomical society on January 7th is in its own list. It's 6.15 pm. Dr. Elizabeth Jateson will talk about our sun as a star via webcast. You can see our power taking system there. This part time did do live events around September 16th, December 9th, where they've taken the moon to birth now. So we won't be doing anything for the next month or so, and the free open house Friday evenings they can, are closed for now as well. Finally, we're going to my further reading section, where I'm going to cover theoretical websites. NASA.gov is just a great place to go for a tremendous amount of educational material, as well as permission information about stories, interesting videos and pictures. I just, you can search this forever and it's always being updated, always being used and navigation being improved throughout times. Mentioned earlier, space rather than a column. Here, thanks to Soho, you can see the sun any moment you want. So if you wake up in the middle of the night afraid of something something's happening to the sun, you can go here and take a look. I think it was this little number of active area that took off that we just had, but the dimmed meters are coming here, so you can also take a look in the middle of the shower. This video, Space.com is a fantastic place for mission news and strongly news in general. Both NASA and Space.com would be great places to go if you hear some strange claim about NASA that's going to hit the earth or the sun is going to hit us with something. If you're concerned about that, you can come here and look for truth. Skyintelscope.com is the website associated with the famous magazine. It's been around for 75 years now. It's observing news, observing tips, how to buy a telescope, all sorts of great information. Similarly, Strongly.com maybe aimed more towards the amateur. Two different items in Skyintelscope, but they take a little more pains and explain some of the basics before going further. Again, observing information, photos, videos, blogs, a fantastic site. If you have any additions or corrections, please email me to answer with a gmail.com. This has been the skies over Colorado for December 2020. Keep looking out!