 Welcome to the skies over Longmont, May 2020 for Longmont Public Media and Staff Astronomer John Ennsworth. I'm going to take you into the news and the skies. Well, we're back to Beetlejuice again. This is your third update on Beetlejuice. If you recall from previous months, we were concerned the Beetlejuice is a star up in the upper left from your point of view, not Orion's point of view, the upper left corner of Orion that was dimming, dimming, dimming through the fall into the winter. And some people are concerned that it might blow up. Well, it's not. There's where Beetlejuice is located in the constellation of Orion. And it is back to its full brightness and even some measurements have taken it beyond 100% of normal brightness. Pretty much back to normal. The dust is cleared, nothing to see here except a star that you can see very clearly because it's one of the brighter ones in the sky. Not covered here, but something that's been in the news in astronomy is Oumuamua. This is the first interstellar traveler that we have observed. It is a very elongated, rocky body that we figured out its orbit. We determined that it was traveling between the stars. So its velocity was so high that it zipped past the sun and is now heading out of the solar system and in a few thousand years it will be technically outside the solar system. We are still trying to look over the data that we got from it as it passed. If you've ever heard of the book or the book series because there are some sequels by Arthur C. Clarke, rendezvous with Rama, it really matched the trajectory and shape of the spacecraft in Rama. So that got people excited for a little bit. Then we noticed that it is accelerating a bit as it heads out and that got people excited again. What? Rock accelerates. Well, a rock that is comet like does that has some ices, gases, frozen inside of it that warmed up when the rock got close to our sound, its jets could give it a little extra kick. Astronomers have looked at a number of different scenarios that could cause this acceleration and that's the best one and it's very plausible. So once again, sorry, probably not a spacecraft. Another neat mystery solved or at least hypothesized by I wouldn't say solved. How did this thing form? It's very elongated, we don't see things like that in our solar system, nothing that extreme. Astronomers modeling this hypothesized that something that is larger than Earth sized body might have swung around its own star or maybe another star and its travels between the stars in a really close approach. Tidal forces and the heat of this star would have melted this body completely or mostly then tidal forces would further stretch that molten material out which would then fragment, cool into a whole bunch of these elongated large rocks. So that means that Oumuamua may not be one of a kind, maybe many elongated previously melted bodies traveling between the stars. Last month we talked about a comet coming in atlas, 4,000 year period, it would get very close to the Sun, a quarter of the average Earth-Sun distance away. We believe it's part of a comet that broke up over 5,000 years ago that one of its sibling pieces created a great comet, but we believe that its potential might be brighter than Venus as it gets close to the Sun, close to Earth. That closest date is about May 23rd, its path will be down through the constellation Perseus and past the Pleiades and the constellation Taurus, bright red star Aldebaran, this is all to the upper right of Orion but now getting kind of low in the western sky in the evening, but big yellow capital letters there, it's breaking up. Hubble and other telescopes have shown that it's fragmented in at least four pieces, maybe more, maybe some of those other things. Historically when we see comets break up like this, that's pretty much the end of them. They've given up most of their gases and dust very rapidly and there just isn't material to make a big coma, the head of the comet and the big long tail that would put on a beautiful show. Sorry about that, we've lost that one. There's another comet called Swan out there and it's looking pretty good too but it's very close to the Sun, so you'd have to be sort of a skilled observer to pull that one off. An update on big star parties, well the Texas star party was on last month but they have now decided to cancel it, that's May 17th to 24th in Fort Davis. Looking often to June because we do have to kind of plan ahead, the Royal Astronomical Society General Assembly, I think I can see you there, sorry about that, June 5th through 27th is now canceled but the boot, leg, spring, star party in Illinois is still at this point on. Grand Canyon Star Party has been canceled on mid-late June, Bryce Canyon Astro Festival is still on and the Rocky Mountain Star Stair, one that we could get to in Gardner, Colorado at this moment is still on. I encourage you to Google those if you're interested in going to one or take a look to theskymtelscope.org 2020 Star Parties Update page because like everything else, news continues to change very rapidly. For your Astro 101 lesson this month, we're going to ask what is a constellation? If you look carefully there you might see something very familiar, yeah, coming right down to the horizon there, a very clear dark location, that is the Big Dipper. There's the handle and the three, there's the ball right there and that's not a constellation, ah, I will do sorry, there's the Dipper though, no one knows that shape. This is actually a constellation of Ursa Major, the big bear. This convenient pattern of bright stars inside this easy further only to pick out even when there's a fair amount of light pollution or hazy clouds is an astrism. There's a number of constellations that have more recognizable sub-patterns in them than the original official constellation itself. Here's more of what is considered part of Ursa Major, you've got the legs back here, you've got the front end of the nose of the bear, and you've got the front leg of the bear there, there's the bears back, bears along the tail, anyway bears don't have long tails, well they do if you need to get them up in the sky, you have to take them by the tail, you've got to swing them around for a while and let them go, stretches the tail out. There's an artist's picture of what the bear looks like, that's the actual constellation of Ursa Major. Four constellations, there are a lot of other stars nearby, they're all considered part of Ursa Major, you can see these faint lines here exactly the same as state boundaries or national boundaries are in the U.S. You can walk to a state boundary and also having a marker there, there isn't a line of dirt or in the grass that says hey you've walked from Oklahoma into Kansas, it's just an arbitrary demarcation of leaving things in the sky. 88 constellations in all are officially recognized by the International Astronomical Union, and that was done back in the 20s, late 20s. But if a new star flares up here or our comments traveling through here at this moment, it's said to be in Ursa Major even if it might not be near the official constellation itself. Take a look at the sky above your backyard for May 2020. We have the moon at the beginning of the month, actually the very end of April was at first quarter. Full moon is May 7th, last quarter May 14th, you can see very clearly one week apart. And then due to the fact that it isn't exactly a week, it's about 28 days for the moon to go through its cycles. May 22nd is the new moon, and then we actually squeeze in another first quarter moon on the last day of the month, May 30th. The planets are now beginning to change, we're seeing some good shifting in the planets position from our first briefing a couple months ago. In the evening sky, venuses begin to sink towards the sun. To be more accurate, it's moving between but off the line of the sun and the earth. So it's called an inferior conjunction, not that we think Venus is inferior, it's just generally between the sun and the earth, a superior conjunction when Venus is on the other side. Only Venus and Mercury have an inferior and superior conjunctions with the sun. Mars and outward are always beyond us and can travel all the way around the sky. So Venus is sinking and the sun is overtaking Venus at the same time. It's the super bright object still in the southwest sky, in the western sky, you can't miss it. I actually got a phone call from a friend who said, I see something, it looks like a hovering helicopter in the west. Yeah, that's just Venus, super bright. Venus is even then given, especially when it's low in the western sky, clearance to land at airports. Back in the day, radio contact wasn't essential. You don't want to give Venus clearance to land, that would be bad. So at the beginning of the month, it stands 36 degrees above the horizon. Remember that from last month's, after 101, that's a fist, at arms length is 10 degrees, so 10, 20, 30 for 3, and then about 3 fingers is 5 degrees, so that's about 3 fists and 3 fingers up off the horizon. By the middle month, it's down to 25 degrees, and then by the end of the month, we lose it. It'll be gone in line with the sun up in the daytime. In the right conditions, you can see Venus in the blue sky, but it's just close to the sun. If you're interested in seeing Mercury, it's always very close to the sun and is the innermost planet. It is quite a challenge to get it in a glare of sunset. You really don't get Mercury by itself in a dark starry sky, because the sun needs to be further down below horizon and Mercury will have set by then. But on the 21st, Venus and Mercury will be right next to each other, so Venus is so easy to see. The night before or the night after, the night of the 21st, if it happens to be cloudy, is the time to go out, look for Venus and look for a bright but much dimmer, steady light, or not twinkling light near Venus. It's a general rule because planets have some angular size in the sky. They don't twinkle as easily as stars do. For the most part, they're always true. Planets don't twinkle as stars do. Mercury beginning a little higher in the sky, its best view will occur at the beginning of next month. Uranus is lost in the glare of the Sun this month. If you did happen to catch it in a small telescope or binoculars last month, good for you. It's gone for now. It'll be back in the morning sky in a month or so. You know, set at midnight, not much is up. But in the pre-done sky, we still have our trio, Mars, Saturn, and Jupiter. Neptune is emerging from the Sun's glare, but it's a tricky object to find. Again, the binoculars or telescope is needed for that. At the beginning of the month, you can see in the constellation Capricorn, Capricorn is Jupiter on the right, Saturn, and then Mars closer to the Sun, where the Sun is going to be coming up. That won't change you very much in the months. Just go out in the morning sky and take a look for those three. At the beginning of the month of May, sunrise is pretty much 6 a.m. By the end of the month, it's about 5 30 in the morning. Sunset is just before 8 p.m. I guess that's the howl just before the howl of the Sun goes down. By the end of the month, it's just before 8 30. So we go from about 14 hours of daylight, almost to 15 hours of daylight. At noon, local noon, the Sun will be 65 degrees above the southern horizon, and then by the end of the month, it'll be up to 72. You can see its climbing rate is slowing as we get close to June. June will be when the summer solstice occurs and the Sun no longer gains height. It holds steady for a while and begins to drop again. Our feature object this month will be Ursa Major itself. I've already used it as an example of a constellation. I'm going to show you up at the top here is the same map of Ursa Major and the Big Dipper. The green line on the left is the path of the Sun and the planets, and the dot in the center is the North Star Polaris. As we put the night into motion, you can see the entire sky is turning around the North Star like a clock. There comes sunrise. You can see the Sun pop up here in the east. There's Big Dipper down the bottom. Everything here is a circumpolar constellation for our location here along the mount. We're 40 degrees north of the equator. So this angle between the North Star and the true horizon is 40 degrees as well. What's neat is when you find the Big Dipper, you can get the bowl there. The last two stars in the bowl opposite of the handle and in the direction stuff would pour out of the spoon or the dipper point to the North Star Polaris, which, as we just saw on the map, is directly above the North Point on the horizon. And it doesn't matter what time of night or what time of year you go out to see this phenomenon. The two stars here are pointing really close to the North Star. Go through the night one more time, but the earth spin. The North Pole of the earth is just pointing this direction in space right in the center here, which is at less than a half degree, less than one full moon width away from the true North Point in the sky. And so those pointer stars at the end of the bowl still pointing in and everything up here within 40 degrees or so is always up. Never sets. Now the neat thing, if we go from 40,000 years in the past to about 70,000 years in the future, all the stars in space have their own velocity and they can wander around kind of like bugs and bees in a swarm. And so as we go right now, there's present day and there's 70,000 years in the future. You can see how the shape of the dipper has changed over time. Let's go back to 40,000 BC, present and then in the future and see it kind of warp interestingly and all the other stars moving around a little bit as well. If anybody's around 70,000 years from now, you can tell me if this is how it works. Your observing challenge for this month is the full moon, which occurs in the beginning of the second week of May, but you can do this every month right around full moon time. Is the time that people think that the moon is coming up much larger than it is high in the sky. There's many different possible explanations for this illusion, but it actually is an illusion. Due to how the atmosphere deals with light traveling through it, the true size of the moon is a tiny bit, one and a half percent smaller than it is when it's high up overhead. But due to this illusion, people swear that it's bigger and my favorite explanation goes to this optical illusion over here that these like railroad track pattern here. And your brain says anything that's sitting on the tracks here must be close to me. So it's a small thing to fit between train tracks. But anything that's off in the distance over the horizon must be gigantic, so your brain fills that in. So same thing in the sky as the moon's coming up at your brain says, hey, it's behind the mountains, behind the trees, behind my neighbor's house, behind that part of the distant town if you're up on a hill. So wow, that must be something big. So it just attaches big to it and you're happy with that. One of the tricks you can get to trick your brain into not falling for this is to turn your back on the moon, bend over, put your hands down on the ground and look from between your legs, kind of like you're almost doing a handstand. You're about to do a somersault. Looking upside down at the moon, your brain loses its references. It doesn't really automatically know what's up literally. And so the moon will look normal sized and kind of small again. Remember, from last month the moon is only half of the width of your pinky finger at arm's length in angular size in the sky. Let's find the events near Longmont for May. The Longmont Astronomical Society has a planned solar viewing event at the Lewisville Public Library from 10 a.m. to noon May 30th and that is still on as I record this. Again, check longmontastro.org if you're interested in going to see if there are any modifications to that. Likewise, that evening 8 30 p.m. to 10 30 p.m. at the Longmont Astronomical Society and Boulder County Parks working together in the Star Party at Rabbit Mountain beginning at 8 30 p.m. running at 10 30 p.m. And if exciting things are happening, people may stick around longer. That is also still on for now. Check the website longmontastro.org. Little time to observatory. It's going to be closed through June, July is it's normally closed because nights are short and days are long. It's very hot. So that's usually the month that they're closed for maintenance improvements and cleaning for the next year. They will remain closed through the end of July. Check starkids.org. Brought dates on that. As this Park Memorial Observatory is closed at least until June 1st. Check angels above.org to see if they open in June. Northern Colorado Astronomical Society May 7th. They're going to have Robert Arne speaking on night scape photography via webcast. That's something you just get from the comfort of your home. It's 6 15 p.m. at nocoastro.org. If you have any additions or corrections, comments or suggestions, you may reach out to me at johnonsworth at gmail.com. If you have any meetings club outings or observing nights that you're aware of, I'll take any submissions that you've got. Love to include. This has been the skies of a long month. For May 2020, I'm Staff Astronomer Johnonsworth. Keep looking out.