 Welcome to the skies over Colorado for January 2021. Happy New Year everyone. I'm staff astronomer John Enzworth of the Cherrywood Observatory for Longmont Public Media and this month we're trying out a new microphone system. So hopefully audio is much better than has been recently. Sometimes things break. Astronomy news this month. Biggest story just recently is a possible signal of alien intelligence from Proxima Centauri. So this is the closest star in the closest star system to the earth. This is the best candidate we've had for an extraterrestrial message. In 42 years the wow signal was seen August 15th 1977 in Ohio State University's Big Ear Radio Telescope. Got a little graphic down here showing the Alpha Numeric printout. The current signals detected at the 64 meter Parkes Radio Telescope in Australia April and May 2019. Proxima Centauri is a red dwarf only four and a quarter light years away and using small probes and push from powerful lasers it could conceivably get things made on earth. Little robots of sort all the way over there in just 20 to 30 years. So that would be pretty impressive. We know that there are at least two planets in the Proxima Centauri system. And one of them is just a little more than the mass of the earth. The team has dubbed the signal BLC for breakthrough listening candidate one and they really emphasize word candidate. The scientific community stated that there's a 99.9 percent chance that this is a human signal. It is coming in a very narrow range of frequencies which we do not know of any natural cause for such a signal. And the frequency is rising over time as if the thing is approaching the receiver that there's a blue shift to this which would be something you'd expect something pretty good distance away and say another star system like Proxima Centauri. We'll keep an eye on that. It's not visible. Proxima Centauri is below the horizon. Here's the morning sky in the middle of January. And here's our nominal horizon and there is Proxima Centauri about as close to rising as it can get. You've got to get down to latitude. It's very close to the equator. I think it can be glimpsed from the Hawaiian islands. It's the southern part but not as far north as Colorado. China is analyzing weird substance found on the moon's far side. It is a glassy dark green color substance. You can kind of see this shimmery stuff right here. It may have formed from an impact of volcanic eruption, but they say that it has the consistency of a gel. This is very dry environment in a airless moon that would be pretty strange. Keep an eye on what they find. Finally in the news, Juno discovers sprites and elves on Jupiter. What does that mean? On the earth, sprites and elves are a visual component of what is called the global atmospheric electrical circuit. Thunderstorms pump charge in one direction. It spreads out over the entire earth in the ionosphere, which is a conductor. The charge leaks back down through all the clear air so there's a clear air very weak electrical flow. Then the earth itself is a conductor allowing the current to be pulled in and pumped up again by thunderstorm activity. And so these are very low light effects and very transient, very very short lived. You have to use very light sensitive cameras, high speed photography, and like that to catch these things. And they are very high in the atmosphere. You can see the the scale of a thunderstorm doing its business here. Blue jets, sprites, and elves. On Jupiter, the Juno spacecraft is seeing one of these events over in this part of the world. Your astro 101 lesson is something called the dark segment or the twilight edge. Lots of great names for this. This is the shadow of the planet earth. You have a very common name for this. You call it night time. But you can see the shadow of the earth after sunset and before sunrise on the opposite horizon from where the sun is vanishing or about to appear. This dark blue coloration here, the dark blue down here, is the actual shadow of the earth or where night is approaching you. Here is the moon and what is called the belt of Venus, this kind of reddish yellow region between the blue sky above and the blue darkness of night down below. When there is a lunar eclipse, light coming through this region right above the shadow, this thick part of the atmosphere, this reddish belt of Venus contributes to the overall coloration of the eclipsed moon. If there has been a lot of volcanic eruptions or many forest fires in the atmosphere of the earth on whole is very dusty in city then the moon will be very dark red or even a gray, almost invisible red. If the atmosphere is pretty clean then you'll get more of an orange light red coloration on the eclipsed moon. This guy above your backyard for this month. We begin the month January 6th with the last quarter moon in the morning sky. New moon occurs mid month. January 21st sees the first quarter and now just starting to back up from the very last day of the month we have the full moon on the 28th. Remember Halloween the 31st was a full moon it's going to slowly creep back to the calendars the months go on. The lunar cycle is just a few days short of the length of the month. The plants in the evening sky we have a lot it's all crowded into the evening sky pretty much with Jupiter and Saturn still very close together setting about two hours after sunset. If you remember we had the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn occur on the 21st of December and they will still be less than two degrees apart or less than four times the diameter of the full moon up to January 8th then they will separate a little bit more. Mars will be very high in the southern sky about 730 at the beginning of the month. Also in the evening we have Neptune which sets before 10 o'clock and Uranus which sets just after midnight. Mars sets up at the same time as Uranus and is getting dimmer as the month goes on. Finally Mercury emerges from the sun later in the month so we will have everything out there to see. So here's Jupiter and Saturn right after sunset. Mercury will join them and then pass them later in the month. Neptune is pretty high up in the southwestern sky. Here's Mars approaching the meridian sunset and Uranus nearby. Neither side at midnight all we have are Uranus and Mars low in the southwest getting ready to set. So pretty empty there's Uranus and Mars down there in the west. In the morning sky all we have is Venus and it is slowly sinking getting closer to the sun as the month goes on so it only rises about an hour before sunrise. And here's a morning view mid month 730 there's Venus low so not only is it getting closer to the sun the tilt of the ecliptic is keeping it closer to the horizon as well. Nothing really exciting happens with the sun except we are closer to the sun about January 4th January 3rd then we are any other time of the year and yes you heard me correctly we are closer to the sun in January and farthest from the sun July 4th if you remember back in the July monthly video. Sunrise January 1st starts out at 721 and backs up to 708 starting to get a little more light every day. Sunset goes from 446 to almost 520 and the out to the sun at local noon it gains about six degrees going from 27 degrees off the southern horizon up to 33 degrees. Your feature object this month down in the southwestern sky where all the actions happening with planets is the bright red star Aldebaran not to be confused with Mars. It is giant compared to our sun this is a two scale comparison but it's interesting it's just 1.16 times the mass of our sun so it is a red giant 66 light years away so the light is just about 66 and a half years old very close to zero magnitude so it is one of the brighter ones in the sky but it is bloated to 44 times the size of our sun and it may have a gas giant planet circling it. To find this there's Venus and Jupiter down in the southwest there are the Pleiades up above them we talked about those last year and over here is the constellation of Orion with three stars in the row making the belt and those point roughly towards Aldebaran not to be confused with Alderaan that's the slayers adopted homeworld. Your observing challenge this month take it back to meteor showers remember meteor showers are made up of pretty much grains of sand tiny bits of rock ices mostly left behind by comets polluting their orbit as a circle and we go through the orbit when the comet isn't there and we get all these little bits burning up in the atmosphere from the scone telescope this diagram shows the motion of the earth around the sun and the motion of the earth on its axis in the sunset you have quicker meteors catching up with the earth burning up in the atmosphere but you don't see as many as you do in the morning and the sunrise side which is kind of like looking out the front windshield and seeing the bug splatter against the glass that is meteors in the morning so your challenge is to look out and see or observe this year all the biggest meteor showers the best of 2021 there are many others that have high meteor per hour count which is right here 2060 for the 80 aquarids proceeds are 90 but the moon is interfering with those and that really cuts down how many you see the dimmer ones get lost in the moonlight so the eight aquarids in may proceeds in august and unnamed which is interesting to me that there's no one's named it in the constellation Ara and the southern torrents put these in your counter and go out and take a look it's trying the events near lawnmont January 21st at 7 p.m via zoom or some webcasting tool the super soaker sounding rocket experiment how to artificially create polar mesosphere clouds by Efren Azim from the lawnmont astronomical society they still not scheduling their open house observing nights little Thompson observatory may begin zoom meeting in january or experimenting with looking through the telescope over the web as this park memorial observatories has on their site they're close to the end of the year nothing as of this recording for further out Northern Colorado Astronomical Society January 7th Dr. Elizabeth Jensen will be talking about our sun is a star via webcast at nocoastro.org this planetarium has a archive of events they did last year running from september to december there's nothing announced probably because of christmas break for what's coming up in the new year but take a look at their site for what they will be bringing about and their observatory is in use for school itself but not for the public under my further reading kind of section get to start talking about desktop software i'm going to feature some of my favorites each month for the first part of this year we'll start with sky tools for these are not paid endorsements or commercials i will give you the prices for these products at the end we'll cover some free ones as well this is one that i've done beta testing for in the past so i know it pretty well and i use it almost exclusively to control the telescope and organize my evening so skytools 4 is the latest iteration of skytools this is the visual version of the software and you get to put in search lists or categories of objects it has a very extensive searching and list building tool then it'll organize a list by anything you want from the brightest the dimmest to the best time to view it to rising time to your best eyepiece so you don't have to change eyepieces between views whatever you wish has a very comprehensive night bar here showing you the period of darkness at night and the best observation period for the object that is selected its altitude above two atmospheres which is this point where the atmosphere really starts getting thick enough that you don't probably want to look through there with your telescope unless there's something you're really shooting for has a visual side tool for just you and your eyepiece in your telescope and it has an imaging side that brings in filters and exposure times and calculates an optimal pattern to look at objects you want to see in the night and the optimal time for filters the like it is a workhorse tool has fully integrated databases very extensive databases with objects both transient and permanent has smart planning organizational tools all the double stars are accurately depicted we've gone a great length to make sure those are solved with questions about specifications being researched and cleaned up in the databases has very powerful interactive atlas you can print star charts and find your charts from it it just starts with the listing side pretty powerful telescope control tools and up to the hour novice and supernova data and comet data at the low end the visual standard editions a hundred dollars the imaging edition which also gives you the visual standard edition and real-time observing is 200 and if a new version comes out you usually get an upgrade discount as well have any additions or corrections contact john is worth john is worth gmail.com this has been the skies over colorado for january 2021 keep looking up