 Welcome to the skies over Colorado from May 2021, I'm staff astronomer John Answorth of the Cherrywood Observatory, Little Thompson Observatory for Longmont Public Media. Let's pick up the news or read the list off last month. Perseverance and its helicopter took flight a few times. Remember the Mars 2020 rover Perseverance was launched 30th of July 2020 and landed 18th of February of this year in Jazeero Crater. Last time we had an artist's rendition of what it would look like and placed ready to fly and here it is on the ground, I think where the rotor is even turning. Called Ingenuity, the first flight occurred April 19th and now the fourth flight has occurred April 29th. This is a shadow of the rover flying down here at the bottom, taken from the helicopter. The helicopter itself. As time goes on they will try the more complex and more risky maneuvers that now proof of flight is definitely complete. There's the rover on the left and the rover lining site on the far right. We have lunar eclipse in the news, one that you can see almost from Denver Front Range and three or four columns. Better maybe out on the plains than up near the mountains, but we'll cover that just a little bit later. In this eclipse the moon barely enters the Earth's shadow. The Earth's shadow down here creates what is called the Umbra and we'll talk about that in a minute as well and it just is in for a few minutes before it begins to head back out into the Penn Umbra and then full sunlight. You won't see that part from Colorado though. The lunar eclipse is here and places on the shaded region here will have the moon go down at some point during the eclipse. Taking a look at the details for Denver, the partial eclipse you'll see a bite of the moon start way back at 3.45 in the morning, May 26th, and that's going to be our rough morning. The full eclipse begins at 5.11, maximum at 5.18, and the eclipse ends just a few minutes after it began at 5.25 am. Locally, civil twilight starts where the streetlights can turn off at 5.05 am and the sunrise itself begins at 5.37, right after the full eclipse ends, but at this point it's going to be very, very low in the western sky, if not behind my nose. James Webb Space Telescope is also in the news. Here's an artist's rendition of the full about segmented mirror. It's secondary mirror up here, the giant heat shield, since this operates in the infrared it must be kept extremely cold, and this backside is facing the sun, so that keeps the sun away, all the warmth away from the telescope itself. Originally, slated to cost $500 million, the estimate, as of January 2020, is now close to $10 billion. The major construction concluded in 2016, and then they found multiple possible failure points in the inspection and audit of the telescope, and so it's been undergoing modifications and testing ever since. The, at least in my recollection, the launch keeps getting pushed off a year or two, but now it's set to launch this year, October 31st, according to NASA. Early planning goes all the way back to the late 80s and early 90s, with a 2007 launch date, they got pushed back and pushed back most recently, 2019. Now it is much closer, just a few months away, in 2021. Not much to say yet about big star parties with the coronavirus still doing its thing. The Texas Star Party, one of the biggest ones in the nation, is canceled. In June, the Grand Canyon Star Party is going to go virtual in the beginning, or 5th through 12th. Cherry Springs Star Party, June 10th through 13th, is canceled. But maybe as vaccines roll out, we'll start to see some of these stay, and maybe some replacements will pop in. Your astronomy, your 101 topic for this month is lunar eclipse. And this is something that occurs between evening and morning, and that is a lunar eclipse. Here's a side view, a greatly exaggerated, completely out of scale diagram of the Earth, Sun, and Moon system. Since the Sun is a extended light source, meaning it's not a point, it has some size, the sunlight shines on the day side of the Earth, creating the day side, the back side, or the shadow side is night. And the shadow that is completely in the dark, or the portion to complete the dark, is where the Moon would see a total solar eclipse. It's called the Umbra, it's the darkest region, on either side is a penumbra. If you're on the Moon, you'd be seeing a partial eclipse of the Sun or a bite taken out of the Sun by the Earth's disc. This eclipse, like we said before, just barely inside this Umbra just for a few minutes. We don't get eclipses all the time because the tilt of the Moon's axis is tiny, five degrees. That five degrees is enough to make the Moon's shadow a little high. The Moon, the Earth's shadow, too high for the Moon. On one side, and we're reversing the other side of the orbit. It's only when the drift or different elements in the orbits bring the nodes around to line up with this zero point on the Lunar orbit that we can get eclipses. So we're beginning to enter a cycle where that can happen. For our eclipse, the Moon is moving through the Earth's shadow here. The inner circle is that dark Umbra, and it'll be a dark red or kind of brick color with a noticeably lighter northern side of the Moon. It'll be so close to the penumbra. All right, let's take a look at the sky above your backyard. May 3rd, we have the last quarter Moon in the morning sky pre-dawn. New Moon, May 11th. The Moon comes back after that into the evening sky, and there's a first quarter by May 19th. In May 26th, we have our full Moon ready for our lunar eclipse. The planets this month, in the dusk and the evening, Mars is kind of high in the southwestern sky sunset. It sets just a few minutes before midnight, about mid-month. Getting lower and lower as the Sun overtakes it. Also in the evening, Uranus is close to the Sun, but it will be merging into the morning sky in the next month or so. Venus, able to move temporarily quicker in the sky than the Sun seems to, from our point of view, is now visible low in the southwest after sunset. Mercury puts on a really good show this month, though. Moving even quicker by May 17th, it'll be at its greatest elongation at 22 degrees away from the Sun, and the angles of the ecliptic means it'll be pretty much straight up from the Sun, so this is a great month and a great few days on either side to try to catch Mercury with the naked eye. Taking a look at the sky, here's Venus just coming out of the glow, here's Mercury pretty high. It's just a couple days before it's best. Here's Moon. The Moon and Mars just a little bit higher. We're going to make a nice little pair on the night of the 15th. I'm either set at midnight, well Mars will be setting in the southwest just a few minutes before midnight, and nothing else is up in the sky that you can easily see with binoculars or the naked eye until Saturn rises about 1.30 in the morning. This is our empty midnight sky. We do have some Kuiper Belt objects, minor planets out here, Maki Maki and Haumea, but those you will not see in the backyard telescope. They're much dimmer than Pluto. Neptune is now rising about 3 a.m. and sits about halfway between Jupiter and the Sun at sunrise. The morning sky is pretty crowded with planets. Jupiter and Saturn are now clearly visible ahead of sunrise. By the time the Sun comes up, the Saturn has already made it to the meridian halfway point between east and west above the southern horizon. Taking a look at that, here's the Sun just start coming up here as Uranus too close to be seen. Neptune is out in the clear, Jupiter and Saturn being all a little more space between them. If you remember just back in the fall, these two made a very close conjunction in the evening sky. Looking at the Sun, we start the month with the 6 a.m. sunrise, which backs up almost a half hour to 5.34 by the end of the month. Sunset starts almost at 8 p.m. and backs up to about 8.20 p.m. So the length of the day goes from nearly 14 hours to 14 hours in about 45 minutes. The Sun climbs at local noon above the southern horizon from 66 degrees up to 72. Next month, June 20th, 21st will be when the Sun is at its highest altitude above the southern horizon. That will be the summer solstice in the beginning of summer. Our future object this month be the last what some people consider a planet that we have not yet covered. It is the former 9th planet is now classified as a minor planet, a Plutoid, a dwarf planet, a Kuiper Bell object. It's got a number of names. Discovered a little observatory from Flagstaff, Arizona by Clyde Tombaugh. This is following the work of astronomer Urbain Laverre and Christopher Lowell. Discovered on the night, February 18th, 1930. It has a fairly elongated orbit ranging from just 30 Sun Earth distances from the Sun all the way out to 49 of those distances for astronomical units. When it's at its closest, there's a number of years that it's actually closer to the Sun than the planet Neptune. They tilt to the orbit as such that they won't collide. Its year is 248 Earth years long with the day. It's 6.4 Earth days long and it is very cold there, but it is also a very small body. So here's the size of Pluto and its larger than a Charon. Here's our moon. Our moon is bigger than Pluto. A tiny fraction of Earth's gravity at its surface. It also has five small moons, Styxonix, Kerabos, and Hydra. And then you got the big one, a Charon. Your observing challenge this month is to go out and see the May 26th lunar eclipse and it's a challenge because of the increasing brightness of the sky as the eclipse settles in and also how really low the moon is. So here's true southwest, here's true west in the sky. And as the eclipse starts, you can see this orangey color with softwares drawing on there. You can see how low the moon is going to be. You're going to really want to be up at a high location. In the Longmont, a good location would be the hilly side on the west side of Skyline High School where, again, no snow. It's also a great place to do some tubing and sledding. Let's take a look at the astronomy events near Longmont and connect the star parties. Not many of these are doing much yet, but some are trying. The Longmont Astronomical Society continues its monthly streaming presentation. We get to Juno updated Jupiter, what's happening at the Great Red Spot by Fran Bengel, University of Colorado Boulder. So check out Longmontastro.org. May 21st would have been their telescope night for the public out at the Rapid Mountain Observing Site. Those seem to still be canceled. Nothing is mentioned on their site. A little Thompson Observatory is going to be close through June of this year. Then July it's normally closed for maintenance. So we'll see what happens in August, see what the numbers are looking like, and guidance from the CDC. You can schedule virtual visits, so you do take a look at starkids.org for details. Similarly, Angels Above, the Estes Park Memorial Observatory is trying to do small groups on under 12, no more than three a week, with reservations. So go to angelsabove.org for all the details and how to become a part of that. You can look through a telescope if everything lines up properly and the weather stays good. Northern Colorado Astronomical Society May 6th has a webinar speaker, Dr. Susan Metley, talking about the UAE in China at Mars via webcast. This planetarium, University of Colorado Boulder, looks like since the spring semester is coming to a close, they've ended their virtual programs from now for this semester. Similarly, the Observatory live shows seem to have ended for now, but keep an eye on it, see if they do anything in the summer or things get back more normal in the fall. Well, in this month, with another John suggests continuing on with a series of desktop software, go for another free one this time called Hallow Northern Sky Planetarium. There's a little screen shot of what it looks like zoomed in on the Trifid, maybe. On these, it's free. It also has a large number of add-on databases you can download, and those are free as well. There's some examples of what the star maps look like. Very accurate, maybe not quite up to the most modern graphical standards, but it's free. You can do mapping of other datasets and imagery within the software and do accurate simulations of what say Jupiter, its moons, and the shadows of the moons look like on a given night. So that's at hnsky.org slash software.htm. This is free and it's currently available for Linux and Windows. If you have any additions or corrections, contact me, John is worth at gmail.com. This has been the skies of the Colorado for May 2021. Keep looking up!