 Welcome to the skies over Colorado for October 2021. This is Staff Astronomer John Insworth of the Cherrywood Observatory, volunteer at the Little Thompson Observatory for Longmont Public Media. In astronomy news this month we get a brand new view of Mercury close up. This is courtesy of the Beppi Colombo craft pictured here. This is in its initial traveling configuration and eventually it will become two separate craft. It made its first flyby of Mercury. This was October 1st, so just a few days ago. It will enter orbit ultimately December 25th, 2025. These two link probes are linked currently. This launched originally in 2018. It made a few flybys of other planets to begin to enter this orbit. They made a flyby of Earth in April 2020, Venus in both October and August of 2021, and now it's first flyby of Mercury. It'll next return to Mercury June 20th 2022. This is your best image right up here to the crafter visible on the camera. Astronomers and planetary scientists have found evidence that supervolcanoes have occurred on Mars. We knew that volcanism was a big part of the Martian past. Olympus Mons is the largest volcano known in the solar system. These eruptions occurred over millions of years. Here are the craters in the Arabian Terra. These are filled with a layered rock. There's evidence of long-term ash release and millions of tons of ash similar to what we see on Earth in the Toba, Indonesia eruptions around 74,000 years ago and the Taupo, as I said that correctly, New Zealand eruptions are 340,000 years ago. We can even see evidence of the prevailing winds on Mars and how that shaped the ashfall. Pretty interesting. In our final news story for this month, we have mapped out a supernova cavity carved in spaces helped new stars to form. So this particular supernova in our galaxy occurred about 10 million years ago. This is a close-up of its shockwave of compressed gas and dust and little knots of new stars forming the torus molecular cloud. This image is courtesy of the European Space Agency. Cleared out a bubble in space 250 light-years wide. You can see its location in a rendition of our galaxy. This is a little graphical bubble around it. We've mapped from our sun's position in a side view of bubble in this region and some of the compressed gas and dust around the edges. So putting together some of the finer structure in star formation regions in our galaxy. Pretty interesting stuff. Star deaths help star births. All right, let's take a look at big star parties. I did a quick glance at these and they do seem to be going. People are definitely more open to open-air events even with the delta variant going around. So we have a number of star parties in Maine, Pennsylvania. The biggest one for us is the Okeechech star party occurring here at the beginning of the month in Canton, Oklahoma. We have Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, fall astronomy day occurs on October 9th. That's largely an internet thing. In November there's two more listed but it does get harder to get deep winter star parties because it becomes quite uncomfortable for the general public to go out and see these things and participate in these events. So pretty much spring and fall are the big times, summer the night times are pretty short and you often have a lot of humidity, bugs, and other unpleasant things. So I got one cleaned up link here for where you can check these out yourself. You can click on the links and see what registration might be needed and if they are still happening. Your Estro 101 lesson for this month is covering what the harvest moon is. You may have heard the harvest moon mentioned in the last week or two. We actually just had it. This is the full moon that occurs closest to the autumnal incronox just a few weeks ago. There are names, traditional names for full moons each month. If it occurs, the harvest moon occurs closest to the September full moon. The corn moon gets renamed the harvest moon. If it occurs closest in October, the hunter's moon gets called the harvest moon. Another neat feature of these full moons is because of the geometry of the sky at this time and the nearness to the incronox, where you normally see the moon rising about 50 minutes later each night, 45-15 minutes later. That's the delta difference. In northern latitudes like Europe and Canada, the moon rises only 10-20 minutes later for a few days around full and at mid-latitudes it's about 25-30 minutes. The moon to the casual observer seems to be coming up at just about the same time and staying up throughout the entire night giving the same amount of illumination each evening. Just for fun, here's a graphic from the Farmer's Almanac. Old Farmer's Almanac, that's different, of the wolf moon, snow moon, worm moon, pink moon, flower moon, star ring moon, buck moon, sturgeon moon, corn moon, hunter moon, beaver moon, and the full cold moon in December. These can vary regionally. There are different traditions and different names from around the world, so this is just one sort of North American centric list. There is no real astronomical reason for any of that. All right, October is sky above the Europe backyard. We start the month in a new moon, nothing out there to see. By the 12th, we have our first quarter moon in the sky, so pretty quickly you'll start seeing that sliver down in the southwestern sky. Last year we had a Halloween full moon, and this year it is backed up to the 19th, with the closest lunar phase to Halloween being third quarter moon, which won't rise till later in the evening, so you won't really see it as much this year. For the planets, just after sunset, low in the southwestern sky, rising about three hours after sunset is Venus, not a very bright show. Mars is too close to sea, so nothing to see there, but just after sunset Jupiter and Saturn are putting on a great show in the eastern sky. Saturn rises at three, Jupiter at four, and Neptune comes up at five, so all three are visible in the sky in the evening. So here's Venus down in the southwest, followed by Saturn on the eastern side of the meridian, Jupiter and Neptune right after sunset. On either side of midnight, Jupiter and Saturn of course are still up, but they're low in the western sky by that time. Neptune is past the meridian, and Uranus is rising at nine, it's halfway up in the eastern sky at that time. Here's this particular moment, mid-month, there's the moon coming up, there's Saturn low in the southwest, followed by Jupiter, Neptune, and there's Uranus. In the morning sky, Neptune is very low in the southwestern horizon, Uranus is west of meridian at dawn, and Mercury is still too close to sea, so in the morning sky, if you do get up really early, there isn't much to catch. The big show is happening in the evening, there's Mercury, but it's really lost in the sun's glow still. I have the sun's illumination turned off in the software just to show you the stars. What's the sun doing this month? Well at the beginning of the month, it's rising about 7am, by the end of the month it's closer to 7.30am. The sunset starts just about 6.45pm and backs all the way up to about 6pm at the end of the month, so the day length is dropping from 11 hours 45 minutes down to 10 and a half hours. At noon, the sun is sinking from 47 degrees down to 36 degrees above the southern horizon, so we are definitely getting into that fall and then winter mindset. Our future object is kind of an unusual one, this is called Herschel's Garnet Star, you can see this with the naked eye. You have to be able to find Cepheus, the kid's house shaped constellation, Cepheus, the king up in the northern sky, and right below the base of the house is Nussefi and it is a star that puts out about 100,000 times more light than ours, but deep in the red portion of the spectrum for its peak emission. It's 2,800 light-years away, but you can see it with your naked eye. It's such a big star that if it was in our solar system, all the planets inside the order of Saturn would be inside the star itself. Looking at a big picture here, we've looked at the summer triangle in the past and the constellations of that, there's Cygnus with Danib, there's Altair and Vega for the summer triangle, right above them is Cepheus to the north and right below the base is this bright red star zooming in and it's right, it's now upside down of the house pointing downward. Once you're away from the horizon, there really isn't an up and down in the sky. Your Colorado Observing Challenge is to participate in the International Observe the Moon Challenge. This is run by the Astronomical League, you can go, if you don't want to look up that big crazy link right there, you can just search for Astronomical League Observing Challenge Moon in any favorite search engine and find this and they just call on people to go out and observe the moon, just go out and look at it with your eyes or get neighbors and friends out to look at the moon some evening later in the month. You can get a little more technical with it and they give you some guidance on trying to estimate the moon's illumination or percent of the face of the moon is lit and go further trying to sketch the moon with your naked eye. They ask for observations to be made between October 15th and 22nd so you're going from full around the full moon to just beyond. The deadline for submitting your observations or your activities to their site is November 22nd so do take a look at that kind of fun to do. Let's take a look at astronomy events near Longmont. Things are somewhat back to normal for some reason I could not find a speaker from Longmont Astronomical Society. Their meeting comes up October 21st starting at 6.30 because the Delta variant they've gone back to Zoom only. They do have their outside observing back beginning at 5.45 p.m on October 15th. They won't tell you where unless you register. I think you have to sign some waivers and read their COVID instructions. Well Thompson Observatory is remaining closed through the end of the year. USS Park is still allowing small groups reservations only and some more COVID restrictions you can read on their site. Northern Colorado Astronomical Society October 7th has a speaker Dr. Joseph Pace. Pace messed that up I'm sure. Monsters in the universe new insight into black holes. Good details on their site. Fisk Clonitorium has reopened and they have shows listed that you may purchase tickets for and instructions on parking. And their observatory has opened most Friday nights. Now that school has begun again in the fall you can look at details there at their site. Since we ran out of software to talk about that I have personal experience with for desktop applications I've decided to do for a few months here. Historical missteps in astronomy in about 30 seconds. So this month's first misstep is an understandable one. It's the geocentric model. This goes all the way back to Greek astronomy and philosophy. Around 500 BC is the first records of that. Plato and Aristotle solidified this model and it got refined a little bit around 240 BC when Aristothenes made measurements of the shadow cast noon on the summer stulstice in latitudes in the north and south of each other. And that angle of the shadow gave a very accurate representation of the result for the size of the earth. So the spherical earth became a known thing. So we had a spherical earth being orbited by all these other bodies including the sun. They knew that the moon, Mercury and Venus, could go in front of the sun. So they had to be in a circle closer to us than the sun. The other planets, the superior planets, went behind at times. And it wasn't until almost 2,000 years after that came on the scene. That's a long time. The Copernican system was introduced in the day Revolutionibus orbium colestium. My Latin is rusty. In fact, I don't know Latin at all. But this is translated as the revolutions of the heavenly spheres. Galileo Galilei, December 1610, helped solidify this with many observations after. But the fact that Venus went through phases really could only be explained with a sun-centered solar system with a planet that is going around it from our point of view. Any additions or corrections or suggestions, please email me at gmail.com. Put in the subject line something about the astronomy program here and I will be able to pull that out of all the spam that I get. This has been the skies over Colorado for October 2021. This stuff is trying to make Trondheim's worth, urging you to keep looking up.