 Welcome to the Skysault for Colorado for October 2020. I am Staff Astronomer John Enzworth of the Cherrywood Observatory and Longmont Public Media. In the news this month, you might have heard that there's life on Venus. Well, maybe. That's always my answer, isn't it? Venus is a very inhospitable place for life. At the surface, temperatures reach up to 900 degrees Fahrenheit. You can get melted lead. Those temperatures easily, it is geologically active. There are volcanoes and evidence of large lava flows. Up above, sulfuric acid clouds and rain. Surface pressure is almost 100 times Earth's or the equivalent of going about 3,000 feet down into the ocean. It's crushing. So you'd be melted, burned, it's all carbon dioxide, so it'd be suffocated and crushed in the environment of Venus. But, to quote Jurassic Park, life finds a way, maybe. Greaves and company use the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in Hawaii and later, this was verified by the Atacama Large Millimeter, Submillimeter Array in Chile. They discovered phosphine. It's a simple chemical that under our current understanding of how this forms, it's always associated as a life byproduct or we manufacture what happens through industrial processes. And this would be up in the upper atmosphere at a layer that isn't as hot and nasty as the areas near the surface. It's about 31 miles up, 50 kilometers. And it's about where the atmosphere is, similar to Earth's surface atmosphere pressure. Concentration of this phosphine, which has about 20 parts per billion on Earth when you're sniffing it. It smells pretty bad, it's like garlic or rotten fish, but you have a phosphate and some hydrogen in a very simple molecular combination like this, but it doesn't like to form easily naturally. It takes a lot of energy to do so, but life does do that. Further, ultraviolet light from the sun would break it down pretty quickly in the atmosphere. Oxygen in the carbon dioxide would break it, phosphate much more happy with the oxygen in the same with the hydrogen, make some water. Looking at lightning, volcanoes, or even meteors as possible sources just don't give you the concentrations that we find. So it is very dry at 50 kilometers up on the atmosphere of Venus. It could be a mistake, but again we have two different telescopic systems looking at different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, detecting what looks like a phosphine chemical signature. Scientists are looking for a non-life related way that this could form in the crazy and very unfamiliar environment of Venus's atmosphere. Stay tuned. Last month we talked about aeroscebo being damaged. The assessment continues on what happened. They don't assume that the other cables are safe and they haven't even gotten to the broken cable portion yet to figure out what made it break, but other instruments are operating and the cleanup process and rebuilding process is expected to start relatively soon. The next solar cycle is beginning. The sun goes through a roughly 11 year cycle and if you look at the north, south, magnetic polar orientation of the sunspots, they switch every cycle. So it's actually a 22 year cycle until you're back to north being north and south being south geographically. This is solar cycle 25. We are still in a period of very low sunspot activity overall. Back in 2014 during solar maximum there were a fair number of spots, solar minimum the solar face is blank. And they look at the north, south orientation of the sunspots back in second 24 and then 25 starting here in 2020. I can see that the new orientation for the sunspots is beginning to dominate what sunspots do form. All right, let's take a look at big star parties, kind of good news now, October and November star parties other than the Enchanted Skies Star Party in New Mexico are continuing either as planned or reduced numbers or also including an online component. You just have to look at each site's information, but Dawson Springs, Kentucky, New Jersey, Eastern Sierra, Dark Sky Festival, Jasper, Dark Sky Festival are all going on in October, it's up in Alberta. And in November the Deep South Star Gaze, Sandy Hook, and Duffin Valley Star Party in Furnace Creek are continuing. Take a look at the sky and telescope news page 2020 star parties. The numbers are decreasing because as you get into the fall and winter it's less of a party and more of a shiver fest in most places. So October, our Astro 101 component this month is when you're looking at planets, superior versus inferior planets. Superior does not mean it's a better planet, inferior means it's not as good of a planet, it's all in its relationship to Earth's orbit. So here is Earth, you're there, Mercury and Venus are the planets inward towards the Sun from our place in the solar system, which means that they are only a certain limited angle in the sky away from the Sun at maximum, we call that greater elongation, the greatest Western elongation occurs in the morning, greatest Eastern elongation occurs in the evening. The planets beyond us, Mars, Jupiter, etc. go all the way around the sky from our point of view. So you have opposition, conjunction with the Sun on the backside here. So looking at Mercury and Venus, Mercury's orbit is smaller, it's closer to the Sun than Venus, so Mercury's greatest elongation is less than Venus's. You can't see their orbit looking up in the sky unless you trace out the pattern that they make against the background stars over time, or get a planetarium program and speed up that clock a lot, you can see them zooming around, doing a little diagram like this, you can see what they're limited to, they're along the ecliptic, the path of the sun in the planets, they can be a little bit of either side, and they are never further from the Sun at a certain angle. Mercury can get up to 28 degrees away from the Sun, and it takes about 70 days to go from the morning to the evening sky. Venus can get up to 47 degrees away from the Sun, and it takes about 140 days to go between the morning. Alright, the sky's above your backyard for October, take a look at the moon. We start and end the month with a full moon, that's October 2nd and October 31st. Notice I got a blue color here because even though the term blue moon has kind of shifted meaning over time, the most popular usage of blue moon is to label the second full moon within a calendar month. October has 31 days, so that increases the possibility that that could happen this month, and it does, being the second and the 31st. First quarter is October 10th, New Moon is the 16th, and first quarter is the 23rd. So for Halloween night, it'll be under a big full moon, which occurs on a Saturday, so everything is perfect for this Halloween. Looking at the planets, going out into the evening sky, the dusk in the evening, Mercury is very, very low in the west early in the month, and then really quickly becomes too difficult to see in the glow of the sun, and does not emerge in the morning sky until next month. Jupiter and Saturn are up until late after midnight, they are highest in the south right after sunset, they begin the month 5 degrees apart, and that distance between the two planets in the sky widens to about 8 degrees at the end of the month. Looking at sunset, here's the sun just below the horizon here, here's Mercury extremely low, it's on the bottom side of the ecliptic, the path of the Sun and the Moon planets, this green line, and so it is just about impossible to see, and very quickly, too close to the Sun. Here's Jupiter at sunset, almost on the meridian, the highest point in the path that anything takes going across the sky, here's Saturn right behind. And either side of midnight, of course you've got Jupiter and Saturn with a deep southwest setting, Neptune is really great to see this month as is Uranus, they're both up high all night long, Mars too is up all night and very bright. This is its best appearance in magnitude since the great oppositions of 2003 and 2018. So going out at mid-October, at midnight, here's that highest point in the sky, the meridian, that things travel from east to west to achieve, and there at midnight is Mars high up, there's Neptune over here and Uranus up here. Get out your telescope or binoculars and you can go after these items of the night. In the morning sky all we have is Venus, it's beginning to sink into the sun's glow next month, but this month it's still coming up three hours before sunrise. It'll slightly dim as the month goes on, but it's very noticeable in the morning sky. So here's the sun just about to come up, the path to the Sun and the planets is a green line, the red line is the Earth's equator extended up into the sky, so it's called the celestial equator, and there's Venus super bright. Maki Maki, one of the dwarf planets in the Kuiper Belt, the far outer solar system is over here, but you're not going to see that with your backyard telescope. The sun rises at almost 7 a.m. at the beginning of the month, changing to almost 7.40 in the morning at the end of the month, so the days are definitely getting shorter, and the night's getting longer, 6.41 p.m. for a sunset at the beginning of the month, backing up to 6 o'clock, and you lose about an hour and 15 minutes of daylight. The sun's altitude at local noon drops from 47 degrees to 36, not as great as it did in September, but it's still very significant. Our feature object this month will be the next planet up all night, Uranus, which are a lighter blue greenish color, binoculars, again a little dot, and a small telescope, no ideal conditions, maybe a big telescope because you can see some of its moons. I don't, I don't think I've ever seen moons, even in my 11-inch. Colorado Observing Challenge this month, we started this series back in the spring in March. We talked about the zodiacal light in the evening sky. Now, a good time to look forward, the morning sky right around October 15th. This is Venus here, this is the glow. And so the reason it's good to see is because at the spring and fall times, this ecliptic is almost perpendicular to the horizon. So this glow is lifted up where you can see it most easily. Astronomy events near Longmont, take a look at the front range area. Some things are starting to come online, at least online. Longmont Astronomical Society, October 15th. We'll have the talk. You can almost touch the stars by Tom Field. That's via Zoom, go to longmontastro.org. Their open sky night at Boulder County Parks, Rabbit Mountain is still canceled and is canceled in November as well. Little Townsend Observatory is still closed through the end of the year, but take a look at their site. The presentation is given on the third Friday of the month via Zoom. So take a look at starkids.org. Estes Park Memorial Observatory still says they're closed through September. I don't see any update for October. Check their site to see if anything online or in person is returning. Northern Colorado Astronomical Society. We'll have a webinar with a featured speaker, Dr. Kevin France, from a cereal box to a 757. You know, just have to go see what that is. That sounds really interesting. It happened October 1st, but you can see the archive at nocoastro.org. Fisk Planetarium is starting to do weekly programs every Wednesday online. It's called Dome to Home Virtual Programs. Take a look at colorall.edu-slash-fisk. But their observatory, I believe, is still closed for now. All right. In my further reading, I said I would talk about these clear sky charts or the astronomical forecast charts and kind of break it down for you. My absolute favorite is cleardarksky.com. This just extended out an additional about a day and a half, two days from what it used to do. So it was Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday through the weekend that I'm recording. And basically, you have an hourly breakdown. And then in the rows, you have the information you need to know whether it's worth going out. Just to give you a reference, the red lines are midnight, each night. And start with darkness on the bottom here. There's daylight. So obviously, you're not going to see much unless you're out for bright planets or the moon. Or if you have special filters to cover in the front of your telescope, you can look at the sun. There's nighttime here, but with the moon near full, the nighttime is pretty bright, too. When you don't have a moon there, you've become much darker blue shading. Cloud cover. Darker blue is better. Again, little whiter colors or brighter colors mean clouds are moving in. This does not count for smoke from forest fires. This is just moisture-forming clouds. Very clear through the weekend here. Transparency is how hazy it might be. I think high clouds or a serous layer would count in this as well. Seeing is how much the stars are twinkling. Darker is better. Let more steady star images. The whiter, again, is more twinkling. So you're not going to get this clear detail on planets. If you're trying to take pictures, they'll be slightly blurry. Down here, this is brand new. Gosh, they're really improving this quickly. This is smoke. And I'm sure the blues here are clear. And then the whiter colors or tan colors are more smoke, and then the really dark colors are very thick smoke. Fantastic, guys. Then you've got wind. Dark blue would be calm. Whiter would be more windy, so your telescope might shake around. Humidity, very dry when the temperature is high. But at night, it gets more humid, and you might get dew on the front of your telescope, also making the night not as fun. You see that the cooler temperatures, the relative humidity goes up. It's related. In the daytime, when the temperatures are high, your very low relative humidity. Another one is 7-timer. It's very similar, only it uses a pie chart for how cloudy it will be. It uses dot size and shading for how blurry twinkly the stars are. Transparency, it stacks these little bars up showing less transparency. And you've got temperatures in Celsius, and this time they didn't put out humidity. But instability, windy signal, you can get little lightning bolts if it might be some convection in the area. Excellent tools, especially if you're going to go out with your equipment, drive some distance, set it all up, and then find that it's cloudy, you've wasted an evening or so. Good to know before you go. Do you have any additions or corrections to make? You can email me. Jenianswithagmail.com This has been the skies over Colorado for October 2020. Keep looking up.