The days are getting longer, which means the nights are shorter and there is less time for stargazing, so catch it while you can.
What is happening up there now? Venus! Venus! Venus!
Look for the goddess of love and beauty in the west just after sunset. She is dazzling, just like a show girl from Las Vegas. You do not even have to wait until it gets completely dark to see her. She is the brightest object up there besides the Sun and the Moon. She will grace our sunset skies as the “evening star” for the rest of the spring and most of the summer. Of course, you know that she is a planet, not a star.
As it gets darker, look for another bright object high overhead. It is a planet too, and almost as bright as Venus. Jupiter is what you are looking at, the king of the gods. If you have a small telescope, be sure to check out its moons. There are four you can easily see, but it has about 72 total plus thousands, maybe millions, of moonlets. These are small chunks of rocks that orbit Jupiter. Watch the four moving night after night around the planet. Jupiter is in the constellation Gemini, and you can see the twins, Castor and Pollux, nearby.
Low in the southwest, the constellation Orion and its bright stars are slipping into the sunset glow. We will have to wait until next fall to see them again in all their glory.
Order out of chaos
Do you ever wonder why we see constellations up there? The stars are randomly scattered across the sky, and it all looks two-dimensional to us, but some are close and some are far. When we look at Orion, we are not seeing a real hunter but just a chance grouping of stars.
Have you ever heard of pareidolia? It is a tendency of our brains to impose patterns where there are none. Seeing animal shapes in the clouds would be another example. Star constellations are a result of pareidolia too.
Some people say the world is basically chaotic and would be incomprehensible to us if our brains did not dumb it down. That way we can make some kind of sense out of it. Now that is an interesting idea and a little bit scary too. It is just another thought to turn over in our heads on a sleepless night.
Last month I wrote about a comet headed our way that might be the biggest and brightest of the year. I hate to tell you this, but it got too close to the Sun and blew up. Here is the whole story.
Comets come from a distant region of space called the Oort Cloud. Named for the Danish astronomer Jan Oort, it is home to billions maybe trillions, of comets. Every now and then, for whatever reason, a comet or two falls out of its distant home and heads towards the Sun. Once they start their journey there is no turning back, but it takes thousands of years for them to get here.
Astronomers call comets “dirty snowballs”. Basically they are bits of rock and gravel held to gather by ice. As they get close to the Sun they heat up and that ice starts to let off gas, giving them tails of vapor. This particular comet is called a Sun-grazer by astronomers. It got within 100,000 miles of the Sun. That sounds like a long ways, but remember that the Sun is almost a million miles across.
All that heat from the Sun and its immense gravity was just too much for the little comet. Do not worry, there are plenty more where that one came from, and we will get to see another one in a year or two, maybe.
Jupiter and Venus have a date coming up, and we can watch. Stay tuned for the details next time.
