 Welcome to the skies of a long month. This is Staff Astronomer John Ennsworth of the Cherrywood Observatory for Longmont public media This is August 2020 in the news this month comments again Comment neil lies put on a great show in July. There are many Amateur and professional photographs of this on the internet. This is a picture I took from Southern Colorado in Miller State Park This is the visitor center parking lot at about 4 30 in the morning The comment itself is over here on the left. This is the planet Venus on the right This is the star cluster the Pleiades in the constellation of Taurus in the upper right This is taken by an iPhone. So it was that easy to get a shot It is now moving away from the Earth and Sun. It's still in the Western sky after sunset Though I could see it for a few nights about a week ago. I have not been able to catch it with the eyes of the last week Comet lemon is much dimmer. It's down around eight and a half magnitude Right now I've covered this as an approaching comet It is now moving past the star Arcturus in the constellation of Baotis Heading this direction through the sky That puts it high in the southwestern sky after sunset You can take a look at an update from last month's chart where it was coming up out of the Western horizon It's now going off up off the top of the screen It's best visibility will be August. This is a graph Taking into account the position of the comet's brightness and interfering effects like the moon So here's the moon at the beginning of September making it much harder to see. So throughout August It's gonna be the time to release with binoculars get out and try to find Comet lemon. Also in the news Announcement that astronomers can't quite pin down some very basic parameters Describing the universe and one is how smooth it is which is related to How fast it's expanding and its age? this is a piece of the data Taken by what's called the killer degree survey or kids Looking at the clumping of matter both dark matter and visible matter in the form of galaxies and such This project used a 268 megapixel what they call a mega camera I guess I would call a camera that big and Omega cam. Absolutely. This is Sitting on the 2.6 meter very large telescope survey telescope at the Sierra Power now in Chile took a look at 1006 square degrees of the sky looking for the clumping of galaxies in dark matter Here's the instrument and the telescope Cosmic Microwave background that's twice. Sorry Radiation clumping was measured most accurately by the European Planck mission this clumping among other things Gives us an idea of how big the universe is how old it is those are the same basically for Our purposes here, but the kids looking at the clumping of material after this Cosmic Microwave background radiation doesn't agree with the clumping that we see in this glow left over by the big bang That's surrounding us at the very edge of the observable space So 8.3 percent smaller than expected means the universe is smoother Instead of the universe being 13.8 billion years old give or take maybe as well as 12.6 billion years We also have a disagreement in other data that we can collect to look at the expansion rate of the universe They're kind of tilts towards this too. This is this is interesting, but they still have more data to analyze and They will be coming out with a more refined Set of measurements in the months to come other projects run by other countries We'll be coming out in the next few months to a year as well big star parties We're still having many things canceled because of the worldwide pandemic So some of the ones that we've covered for August that may have been going on Stealthy almost haven't summer star party in West Virginia the main Astro retreat So skancho on summer party star fest in Ontario the beckon wood Buffalo dark sky festival northwards star fest in Wisconsin are all canceled now The northern nights star festival in Palisade, New Mexico is still on for August 18th of 24 And that's not too far away Do contact them see if there's still a way to get in on the fun if you have the time and are so inclined Looking out in September and October the okie tech star party is a great one to go to in Canton, Oklahoma We're at the very end of the Oklahoma Panhandle touching Colorado It's actually pretty easy to jog from where this star party happens to the southern border of Colorado But it's going to be canceled ok via night Main black forest star program because the way you can get star party you're all canceled But looking at this later September and in October a bunch of things are still Possibly going to happen the Illinois dark skies Bootleg fall star party Idaho star party, Alberta star party hidden hollow Ohio Astronomy at the beach in Michigan Enchanted skies star party All possibly going on again take a look at sky and telescope.org Under the astronomy news they have a link for the 2020 star parties that is constantly being updated Your Astro 101 lesson for August Meteor showers These are grains of sand from the sky most of them if they're really big they can be a much more Significant rock that makes it down and hits the earth, but we're interested in what these meteors are And these meteors are grains of sand little specks of dust moving very rapidly many tens of miles per second Right, that's very fast They hit our atmosphere burning up due to friction So if you put your hands together and rub real fast you can feel the heat generated by this morning's bacon and eggs Turning into heat in your hands if you get fast enough you get an incandescent flash of light you would hurt a lot So these little grains of sand are burning up far above your head down to 50 miles or so Meteor showers are the same little specks of dust burning up in our atmosphere But they're associated with the orbit of a present or past Comet and it's gone around around its orbit over vast amounts of time Dropping these little particles leaving them in this big loop The earth goes through the old or present day elliptical orbit of this comet And we get a regular meteor shower. We have to intersect that stream of particles though And the reason that's this month's lesson is that the Perseid meteor shower is one of the more famous Meteor showers out there. It is visible from late July into late August or some Perseids occurring, but the peak occurs in the night of August 12th and 13th IFDs go out lay on the hood of your car or get on a lawn chair look east Late in the evening or in the morning. Look at these little Streaks of light coming away from a it looks like a single point in the sky if you can map them all back They're all parallel to each other just like railroad tracks But if you look at railroad tracks, they seem to converge to a point in the distance as well So it's the same radio phenomena If you have a shortwave radio or an AM radio You can tune to a dead part of the radio band We hear nothing but static and these do generate a little burst of radio energy So you can hear little whistles and pops due to incoming meteors I once went out to look at the meteor shower when I was staying in Florida for a summer Doing lightning research and it was too foggy and Hazy at night for me to really see much of anything But I did pick up some on the AM radio Let's take a look at the sky above your backyard if you go out To look at the moon and the beginning of the month. We are at full moon on the fourth You won't see the moon in the evening sky For about a few weeks because it'll be new moon on the 19th Then you'll have the crescent moon becoming the first quarter moon in the evening sky at the end of the month In the evening Jupiter and Saturn are up almost all night Just setting in the very early hours pre dawn Very bright in the southern sky They're about seven three-quarter degrees apart at the beginning of the month and they are Drifting just a little bit further apart eight and a half degrees apart at the end of the month On either side of midnight Jupiter and Saturn will still be visible in the morning Mars rises about three hours after sunset and it's up for the rest of the night Neptune rises two hours before Mars And Uranus about an hour and a half after Mars Putting this all together in a nice picture here at midnight middle of the month Jupiter and Saturn over here or southern sky just west of The meridian line dividing the east and west half of the sky There's mars way over here There's Neptune right in the center of the screen And Uranus over here in the east In the pre dawn Jupiter and Saturn like I said will set about two or three a.m In the southwestern sky In the southern sky Mars and Neptune are up high in the southeastern sky you have Uranus In the pre dawn sky Venus will be very bright And at the beginning of the month Mercury will be in the morning sky as well Then it'll sink down be too close to the sun to be visible for the rest of the month Looking at August 1st at 5 a.m Here's Mars up here on the meridian on the line dividing the sky In half east and west going right into the southern horizon point on the right There's Uranus There's Venus down here All right down here is Mercury With a glow of the sun beginning to encroach Speaking of the sun August 1st Sunrise as it is really at 6 a.m Sunset at 8 12 a day is about 14 hours 12 minutes long the end of the month We have bumped the sunrise four and a half hour to 6 30 And we've gone 45 minutes in time to 7 31 for sunset And down to just about 13 hours of Daylights or we've lost an hour and 10 minutes ish At noon the sun has gone from 70 degrees 68 degrees up in the sky at local noon Down to 58 so 10 degrees and if you go back to an earlier video we talked about measuring Distances in the sky That's your fist with your thumb on the outside of your fingers it arms length up and down So that's 10 degrees Near feature object This month will be Saturn last month was Jupiter that is Beautiful spacecraft taken image Everything's perfect. This would be more what you would see in binoculars Going out in your backyard That little dot right there is its largest moon Titan With a methane hydrological system. I guess you shouldn't call it hydrology because it's not water In methane cycle In a small telescope you might see this break in the rings called Cosini's division some of the banding on the cloud tops Of Saturn and a better view of the big moon Titan Your observing challenge will be another planet We're going to look for Uranus itself with a naked eye It's magnitude 5.78 If you have good eyes in a dark location No moon or anything or street lights to interfere and you've been outside for a while You can see theoretically down to about six six and a half magnitude The higher the number the dimmer the object some people have been known to see as dimly as seventh magnitude So it's theoretically within reach of the human eye I think I've glimpsed it myself a few times. That's why this is a challenge This is best in the last two weeks of the month because that's when the moon won't be this part of the sky Looking at our Eastern sky In the morning there's Mars up here And Pleiades are that little star cluster that looks like a dipper, but isn't And just about halfway between them A little bit towards the Pleiades is where Uranus is Give it a shot Your astronomy events near Longmont We're getting more Online options. So there are things to do With the astronomy clubs and astronomy Meetings around the front range on august 20th 7 o'clock p.m. Dark skies matter by Debra Price from Rebecca Dixon via zoom longmontastro.org Boulder County Parks and Open Space Star Party at Robert Mountain Is still canceled. It would have been august 22nd 8 30 p.m. And on Little Thompson Observatory Is decided to remain closed to public events through the end of the year Maybe around october There could be some zoom meetings coming on their normal meeting night Stay tuned to starkids.org for that Yes, this park memorial observatory Is going to remain closed to the end of september angelsabove.org Northern Colorado Astronomical Society will have Carly Howlett time to return to Pluto August 6th at 7 15 p.m. Via webcast go to nocoastro.org Decided to add the fisk planetarium I don't know how I missed them in the previous months the University of Colorado Boulder They do not have showtowns from above. I wanted to create that slide and you can keep an eye on Their possible opening up the colorado.edu slash fisk I have no confirmation of this but maybe when theaters open they will be comfortable in opening as well If you look at the regal app They think they're going to be opening up around august 21st so That's conjecture upon conjecture Related to that the somersbosch observatory. They have free open houses every friday evening 8 p.m. 9 p.m. During the CU summer sessions I looked over the site it I don't see them saying that they're closed Are canceled. Maybe they just assume everyone knows and isn't going to try but you can certainly go to colorado.edu slash sbo And see if you can go there and take a look through their Telescopes if not contact someone there and find out when they're going to open In the further reading section I said last month that we would do apps this time Far and above and beyond everything else sky safari pro Which can be pretty expensive 20 to 40 bucks and there are add-ons you can purchase Additional databases and special tours and things inside but none of those are critical to the operation of the thing but for ipad and iphone it is Just amazing In fact, it is is pleasing to look at sky so hard pro as it is the night sky With fewer bugs if you're inside Stellarium Is free and it's also available on other all of the platforms. I'm assuming skyside pro would be on the android platform as well Be very surprised if it isn't Observer pro. I only know of again on ios world It allows you to create lists of things you want to see search for a few lists of objects and also pull in forecasting data See how clear will be darker will be and how much twinkling of stars You might encounter if you go out in the next day or two Scope nights is another really good one and that too has a separate source of weather data So that's what we're getting to next month. We'll take a look at now only what those apps do But also websites and other sources you can go to To predict whether it'll be clear before you hop in your car and drive out in your dark sky location You pull out your telescope or binoculars If you have any additions or corrections contact johnansworth at gmail.com This has been the skies of our long month for august 2020 Keep hooking up