 Welcome to the skies over Colorado for January 2022. Welcome to a new year. I'm Steph Astronomer, Jenningsworth of the Cherrywood Observatory, volunteer at the Little Thompson Observatory for Longmont Public Media. In our astronomy news, I've got good news. The James Webb Space Telescope is in great shape. Successfully launched on Christmas Day at a weather delay at the last few minutes, but they got it up and as of January 8th, I kind of held off and recorded here because of the craziness of the holidays, but I could also check in with this telescope. Everything is deployed. The heat shield is out. The last piece of the mirror snapped into place. They had 178 release mechanisms and all of them worked. Nothing could have failed or would have been over. 50 pieces were deployed. The sun shield was deployed within the first week after launch and it's on its way to the L2 Lagrange Point 2, 1.5 million miles from Earth, which is out behind the Earth in a stable spot and gravitationally created by the Sun-Earth-Moon systems. So yeah, it's going to orbit an empty spot in space and it'll be there in about one month from launch. They expect about six months of calibration, instrument testing and tuning. They've got the telescope's mirror shape perfect. Then we should start getting science from it. This is just great. Caught in the act. A star caught blowing up. This is an artist's conception of a red giant star near the end of his life. We don't really know what that looks like. Not that close. But a team of astronomers at Hawaii telescope gathered data on this red giant in the summer of 2020. It was very large and so it was very bright. We could see it in another galaxy. When it blew in September, it got the designation Supernova 2020 TLF. The original star was about 10 solar masses, kind of a low end of what can blow up. It's about 120 million light-years away in the galaxy in GC5731. They were able to piece together a lot of observations of that star. It started in January 2020 by the Swift Observatory all the way up to the present. And they saw that it increased its light output in the last four months of its life. So they're going to study the data and look to see what they can glean about a star in the last months, weeks and hours of its life. It's going to be really interesting. But unknown before, we now know that stars give off red flags right before they blow. Spray-painting asteroids. Asteroid collision with Earth can be really bad. Even a small one, a few tens of feet in size, came in over... Oh boy, I don't know any of the Russian towns. Cheshire? Yeah, I'm just making it up. A few years ago and shattered tens of thousands of windows. People were hurt by flying glass, a few walls were knocked down just by the shockwave of this thing detonating over the city that punctured ice in a nearby lake. Yeah, quite a dramatic event. A lot of people have dash cams in Russia and so we got many perspectives and many images of it. But bigger ones, things that are maybe greater than a half a mile, 0.6 miles or one kilometer long could be civilization ending disasters. And we believe we understand the orbits of about 40% of them and we know that they're there. So that's a lot more than we need to hunt and find. If we were to find one, that is going to make a collision with Earth in the next few centuries because we can determine these things out many centuries. Astronomer found that we could coat it with lithium or sodium metal to increase its reflectivity and would just take about two pounds of the stuff or an asteroid like that to make it shinier. The reflected light actually imparts momentum. Yes, light has a push. There's even proposals to make a light sail form of propulsion for spacecraft and you would tack your way around the solar system just like a sailboat does on the ocean. So you calculated that if you had an asteroid about 164 feet in diameter you could actually deflect it over almost 2,000 miles if you had about 30 years of lead time. So if you figure these out, if you can find everything that might hit us you can prepare for a mission to make an asteroid shiny and save the Earth. Big star parties. Well this time I dug a little deeper and I did find a few. Not many in the depths of winter and you can see these three are all in Florida. So January 8 and 22, Big Lagoon State Park Deep Sky Gases Winter Star Party in Scout Key, Florida. January to February beginning and in February Orange Blossom Special Dade City, Florida at the end of February. Your Astro 101 lesson for this month is to talk about supernovas versus a nova. Eventually I'll get into details of supernova and actually what's going on there but basically a star, a large star, greater than 9 to 10 solar masses. You can see our earlier example is right on the edge. Use up their nuclear fuel. They operate through nuclear fusion, sticking things together. Hydrogen and then two hydrogens make helium and helium makes heavier materials. All the way up to iron. When that happens the star blows up. It's this size. A nova is actually created by two stars. One that has already ended its life and created a white dwarf. And one that is beginning to end its life, swelling up to the red giant phase. And the atmosphere expands to the point where it crosses the midpoint gravitationally between the two bodies. And so the atmosphere starts falling down onto a disk of a creating material around the white dwarf. The white dwarf is then picking up material, getting denser and denser and denser until it's finally dense enough for nuclear fusion to occur. But it's on the surface of the object so it explodes outward, letting off a tremendous amount of light, blowing away that extra material or so. And then it doesn't do much to the other star. This material keeps falling and building up again so these can actually repeat. You can get nova that keep occurring. So a supernova, one time end of a big star's life, a nova, two stars or more interacting with each other in an interesting way. This guy's above your back yard for this month. The new moon occurred right after the new year began. January 9th is our first quarter. 17th gives us a full moon and the third quarter occurs on the 25th. If you remember back a year and a half, Halloween, we had the full moon on Halloween 31st. So we've now seen the phases of the moon drift back from the 31st to occurring on the 17th. Just after sunset this evening, this month we had Mercury low in the southwestern sky. It sets about 1.75 hours after sunset, almost 2 hours. I'm going to bring this up again in the challenge for this month. We also have Saturn and Jupiter and Neptune in the sky after sunset. I don't know why the AM after is white, but oh well. Saturn sets at 6.30, Jupiter at 8, and Neptune's high in the sky in the south setting later in the evening. On either side of midnight, we have Neptune visible in the southwestern sky, and Uranus is visible low in the eastern sky. Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, and Uranus. At midnight, Uranus is low in the western sky, and there it is. That's all there is. In the pre-down sky, Venus actually returns. It's been in the evening sky for a long time. It's switched over to the other side of the sun from our point of view, and it's rising about an hour and a half before sunrise. Mars is also low in the eastern sky, rising 2 hours before sunrise. So as the sun is coming up, you should be able to see Venus emerging, and Mars is a little red glow, a little higher up. You've got to be looking kind of close to the sun to catch the shot. Not much is happening with the sun. It's near the lowest point in the ecliptic, and it's not changing its altitude very much. It's going from 27 degrees to 33 degrees. So the length of the day is not changing very much at 9.5 hours to 10 hours, 10 minutes. It has increased time. At the beginning of the month, rising at 7.21 a.m., and then at the end of the month, 7.08, the sun sets at 4.46 and backs up to 5.18 at the end of the month. Our feature object this month is going to be the International Space Station. When it's up and passing across the sky, it is very obvious. This is a time-lapse photo, so it shows it as a streak of light, but it really is just a moving bright dot star-like object to our eye. It can get as bright as negative 6th magnitude, much brighter than Venus, which peaks at negative 1.5, but not as bright as the full moon, which is a logarithmic scale, so negative 13 is a lot brighter. It takes 6 minutes to go across the entire sky, and you can get apps like ISS Spotter on your phone. You can get Sky Safari Pro that I've talked about before that I'll send you a notification, pop up on your screen, or you can go to spotthestation.nasa.gov to click on your hometown. I did that for Longmont for January. You can kind of see some of the occurrences. The maximum height doesn't always go directly overhead, so when it's only 9 degrees or 15 degrees, you may not catch it. There may be trees, buildings, and things in the way that tells you where it appears on the horizon, where it's going to disappear, and how high it is between those points. So these that are 39 degree, 77 degree, and 72 degree would be probably good ones to look for. It's kind of crazy to see this little dot in the sky. I think there's a whole bunch of people in that dot. Your observing challenge brings us back to Mercury. Many people have never seen Mercury in the sky. I've only seen it a few times in my life, and I caused a stir on an airplane once. When I was flying down to Houston from Oklahoma City, I looked out the other side of the plane and saw Mercury. I was trying to get everybody to look out the window and see Mercury. It was very easy to see clear above the haze on the ground, and the flight attendants told us all to sit down. That was pre-911, so it would probably be more trouble if I did it now. So to do this, probably best right around January 12th to 14th, to find Saturn, which is pretty easy in the southwest after sunset. It's pretty close. Mercury is going to be coming up here night after night, up to there, and then night after night after this, it goes back down this direction. That's the greatest elongation. And you should be able to see Mercury definitely dimmer, but shining there to the lower right of Saturn. Let's look at astronomy events. Well, with Omicron COVID out there, a lot of things still are not in person yet. By January 20th, Longmont Astronomical Society will have on via Zoom Dr. Joe Pacey, monsters in the universe, new insights into black holes. The Longmont Astronomical Society's outside viewing. I don't see anything listed. Usually be around the middle of the month, sometime that time of night. I don't know. This is kind of extrapolating from the past, but there is nothing listed. Little Thompson Observatory is still closed through February 28th. Part of the visits after December 31st are possible, but not probably not. SS Park Memorial Observatory is still allowing small groups. Take a look at angelsabove.org for details on how to get a time for your group to go. Northern Colorado Astronomical Society had their talk on January 30th. Yes, I delayed it to making this till the 8th, so we've missed that one, but you can look on their site to see if the archive is there. But it was Dr. Kathy Olken, NASA's Lucy mission first to the Trojan asteroids. Fisk-Pontarien is set to reopen January 27th. The school gets going again with limited capacity. Check their site for details, and they're going to post the spring 2022 schedule for the summer's Bosch Observatory very soon. This is coming soon on their site. And finally, our historical missteps in astronomy in 30 seconds or so was a son made of coal, and other theories. Before we figured out that there were two more nuclear forces and began to give birth to nuclear physics in 1925, and the solution was satisfied everybody by 1939 that the sun operates in a nuclear fusion. There was a big question in science to see what makes the sun shine. One was that the heat of meteors and asteroids falling into the sun keeps heating it up. Well, that doesn't work well, and it also doesn't match why the Earth isn't being pelted continuously by these things. And when they did the math of what could be happening, it was just way, way too little energy. Another one that helped pretty well was the gravitation to get heat from the compression of the formation of the sun. So you had a big gas cloud initially that then shrunk down and is still shrinking. That could actually give you about 20 million years of heat, give or take, and so that was pretty good. But another one that rolled around out there, though, was that maybe the sun is made of coal. When you do the math on that, you only get about 5,000 years of light, which is pretty insufficient, and you also have to explain how can you have combustion without an oxygen source. So nuclear fusion fixes that and gives us a 10 billion-year life span of the sun, and we're somewhere around the 5 to 5.5 billion-year point. If you have any additions or corrections, contact me at Germansworth at gmail.com. This has been the skies over Colorado for January 2020. Keep looking up.