 Welcome to the skies over Longmont for September 2020. I'm staff astronomer John Itzler for Longmont Public Media. In the news this month, we have a comment again but it's one we already talked about. Comment NEOWISE C2020 F3 discovered by NASA's near-Earth object wide field infrared survey explorer is moving away from the Earth in the Sun heading out and getting dim, losing its tail, becoming a challenging object for astronomers. But as it passed, the Hubble Space Telescope took a series of images and combined those images to try to get a glimpse down inside the nucleus of the comet. There's a zoom in on that. You can see a bright spot. It's gas, fresh gas, being emitted from the rubble pile, dust, all being illuminated by sunlight. This is not giving off light itself. It's just shining by reflecting sunlight. Pretty neat. Little shadow. You can see a hint of right there. The Aerocebo radio telescope in Puerto Rico was damaged. It was built over a natural sinkhole. It began operations in 1963. It was the largest radio telescope for over half a century. China came on with its fast dish with 500 meter aperture. It's a big dish in 2016 surpassing this. But one of these upper cables broke in a relatively calm day. A tropical storm had passed a few days earlier but it fell and cut through the delicate dish. Obviously the telescope is not being used now and they are assessing the damage to see what repairs can be made. You might have heard in the news that an asteroid is going to pass close to the earth the day before election day. I think it's more alarm than it is something to be more than casually curious about. This is called Asteroid 2018 VP1. It's very small. That's probably the most important takeaway. It's 6.5 feet. It's about as tall as a human and it really doesn't pose a threat to earth. The planetary defense coordination office says there was a 0.41 chance of it entering the planet atmosphere. If it did it would disintegrate. Anything made it to earth's surface. 70% of the earth is ocean and a lot of the rest of it's wilderness. So yeah not something to worry about. Back to big star parties. One star party from last month did occur. In September the Illinois Dark Sky Idaho Star Party were trying to go on. They have now canceled. But some of these are still on the books. Bootleg Fall Star Party in Illinois. Alberta Star Party in September 18th of 20th is going to be online. So that's something you can take a look at for wherever you are. Hidden Hollow in Ohio in person. Astronomy at the beach in Michigan it will be online. So that's something again you could probably participate in. So go search for those and see what they offer at their sites. As we get into fall and winter there are fewer star parties. We're sort of running out but at least three of them in New Jersey. Eastern Sierra Dark Sky Festival. We had Jasper Dark Sky Festival in Alberta. Are still all planned to be on and there are two in November that for now are still a go. In the best place to find out what's happening is go to skyintelescope.org and look at the year news 2020 Star Party updates. Your Astro 101 lesson for September 2020. We might as well talk about rocks from space. Meteors and beyond. Meteors are these little streaks of light that you see in the sky at night that can occur any night at any time. We talked last month about meteor showers. There's a bunch of them happening at once. All seem to come from a radiant point in the sky that names the shower. But what a meteor needs are three things. You need a rock, a grain of sand, a speck of dust or something larger. High speed and it needs to hit an atmosphere and burn up or at least become very hot due to friction. That's a meteor. Meteoroids are a rock out in space. A meteorite is a rock that's landed on earth that you could pick up. And since you can get some good money for selling a meteorite, you can remember the difference between meteorite and meteoroid by all right. I found a meteorite. I'm annoyed. It's only a meteorite. Sorry that was bad. There are also asteroids. These are larger bodies usually traveling around the Sun in their own orbit. Most of them in the solar system are located between Mars and Jupiter, but there are asteroids out to the outer reaches of the solar system and in the inner planets. Asteroids near earth and crossing earth orbit are called Apollo asteroids. Our final item in the rock in space category are comets. These, like I said earlier, are rubble piles or collections of dust and frozen ices and gases. And as they get close to the Sun, their orbit carries them in to the inner solar system. The gases vaporize shooting out of jets like we saw with neo-wise. That carries some dust away. The gas easily ionized actually interacts with the solar magnetic field where the dust trails away from the Sun. It always is pointing away from the Sun, so as the comet's coming in, the dust tail is behind the comet like you would expect as the comet is moving away from the Sun. It's actually moving into its own tail. Let's take a look at the sky above your backyard this month. In the dusk in the evening, we have Mercury back. It goes around the Sun in 88 days, so it switches sides of the Sun very regularly. This month it is very low in the West in the early month and then low in the Southwest by the end of the month. In the twilight it will take some work to get a view of Mercury, especially with binoculars. Jupiter and Saturn are up until late after midnight. They're up all through the evening. This is a great time to go out and see them. They're very obvious. Coast together, they draw your attention to the sky. They're highest in the South after sunset. In telescope, they're growing slightly smaller as we move away from them as we travel faster around the Sun than they do. In the very beginning of the month of September, just after sunset, here's the glow of the Sun down here on the very right of the frame. There's Mercury really low close to it. Here's the halfway point in the sky, connecting the South point to the Zenith, the directly overhead point in the sky, and into the North. And to the left here are Jupiter and Saturn. At the end of the month, there's the Sun down here. Mercury's gotten a little further away from the Sun, but it's still very low in the Southwest. Jupiter and Saturn are a little closer from the Meridian. On either side of midnight this month will be both Neptune and Uranus, challenging things to look at, but that was the challenge previous month. Interesting little fact from Sky and Telescope is that this month, Neptune is almost exactly four light hours away. So when you see the light of Neptune, it is four hour old light. The light from the Sun is about eight and a half minutes old. It gives you an idea of the scale of the solar system. Uranus is in the constellation Aries, and Mars rises a couple hours after sunset and ends up for the rest of the night, so it's almost up all night like Neptune and Uranus. Going to about September 15th out at midnight, here's Jupiter and Saturn getting ready to set. Up near the Meridian, high over the southern sky is Neptune, and in the southeastern sky a little higher up is Mars and Uranus. In the pre-dawned sky we just have Venus left. It rises about three and a half hours before sunrise. It's leaving us behind, and so it is dimming as the month goes on. If we go out just before sunrise, again about September 15th, there's the Sun just about to rise, the Moon happens to be being close to new at this point, and Venus is located very obviously up here in the constellation Cancer. Let's take a look at what the Sun is doing and the length of day. At the beginning of the month the Sun is 58 degrees above the horizon at local noon and drops to 47 degrees up. We are definitely heading towards winter. Sunrise at 628 at the beginning of the month, and then almost 7 o'clock a.m. at the end of the month. The sunset starts at 730 at the beginning of the month and is back at 642 at the end of the month. On Tuesday, September 22nd at 730 a.m. we experience the autumnal Inconox. Fall begins, and contrary to popular belief, the day is not exactly 12 hours long. It's 12 hours 8 minutes long. That's because our orbit is not a perfect circle, and there's something called the equation of time that figures into us going faster and slower different parts of our orbit. But it's close. Denver and Longmont are about 40 degrees north latitude. If you take 90 degrees minus that 40, that gives you the altitude of the Sun because the Sun is right on the equator in the sky right above the equator on the earth. Our feature object this month will be Neptune. We looked at Uranus last month. It's a beautiful picture of the planet, but in binoculars this is much more what you'll see. It looked like a star. Slightly blueish in nature. You get a telescope out. It may look like a very small disk. It's blueish. That may or may not be one of its moons. Not really sure. It is not one of the more picturesque things in the sky to see, but it's one of our bigger planets so it's worth hunting for. Our Longmont Observing Challenge for September will be the Andromeda Galaxy. You can see a galaxy with your naked eye. Well, the Milky Way is a galaxy too, and there are a couple of us. You can glimpse in a dark sky. If you let your eyes get adapted to the dark. But this is the big one. Magnitude 3.44 overall. It is 3 degrees wide which makes it about 6 degrees wider than the diameter of the moon. About that big in the center. And to see this, you go out now in the late evening when Mars is up in the eastern and southeastern sky. Look to the southeast. High up you'll see this big square. It's called the Great Square of Pegasus. There's a horse, a flying horse here. And over here is the galaxy right there. A way to find it. I'll draw some markers here. There's Mars, a couple above Mars. A little bit to the right. You'll see the big square. Go off the upper left corner of the square. Go one star, two stars. Make a right turn, one hop, and you'll see a little fuzzy patch there. And again, if you need to look a little off to the side and think back to that location. See that fuzzy patch? You're looking at light that's about two and a half million years old. Two and a half million light years away. That is on a collision course with our galaxy. But it won't be here for about five billion years. So don't panic. All right. Astronomy events near Longmont are still kind of skimpy and a lot of things are closed and canceled, but we'll do our best to grab a few here. The Longmont Astronomical Society, September 17th, is having via Zoom David Elmore talking about forensic astronomy and the dating, figuring out the date and time of Ansel Adams' Moonrise picture taken at Hernandez, New Mexico. I've seen articles on this. It is pretty amazing. They are detectives sleuthing their way through clues in the picture and shadows and things like that to figure out when he was out there taking that photo. But there open observing night under the stars at Rabbit Mountain is still canceled. Would have been September 19th. The Old Thompson Observatory is still closed through December 31st, but they're going to try to possibly get some Zoom meetings and speakers, maybe even some views through the telescope via Zoom or other online tools in October or maybe November. So check at starkids.org for that. Estes Park Memorial Observatory is close to the end of September. Check out Angels Above for programming that might resume. Northern Colorado Astronomical Society, by the time this is recorded, has already had Dr. Angela Collier talk about how to do galaxies, get their shapes. Check out their archive on their website, nocoastro.org. The Fiske Planetarium and Summer's Bosch Observatory are both closed for now. Check out their websites for possible opening times or events. As promised, we're ending with the John suggests for the reading. The further reading is this month, Weather Lists. If you want to go out and look, you don't want to pack your telescope or plan a big drive and clear your schedule to head out into a dark sky only to find clouds. The website skippysky.com.au of Australia is a fantastic site for getting future satellite images. ClearDarkSky.com lets you pick a spot on the earth where you want to observe. It will show you hour by hour sky conditions, temperature, humidity, precipitation, if it's going to happen, and even how much twinkling you'll see in the stars. We covered Observer Pro and Scope Nights apps last month for their observing assistance and they have weather functions built into them. Website 7timer.info is another great one that generates an hour by hour forecast for you. The app ClearOutside does the same thing and if you really want to get into future satellite image maps and you don't mind clicking a little bit and exploring, tropicaltibbits.com. Go to the forecast model section. I like the GFS. Click on the upper dynamics button down at the bottom. That's confusing. And choose in the drop-down, simulated infrared satellite. Then you can scroll forward and backward in time and watch future clouds pass your location. Over the next few months we will detail how some of these sites work. I'll kind of come up with the tutorial and get some screenshots of a site or two each because you really need to be able to see through the atmosphere to enjoy the night sky and the astralen mirror in me and the meteorologist in me both like to work together. If you have any additions, corrections, any suggestions, please email me at gylonsworth at gmail.com. This has been the skies over a long month for September 2020. Keep looking up!