The Race Track of the Sky
In today’s blog post, I’ll be describing my experiences learning and observing the night sky directly. This part of astronomy has always been my weakest, as I could never remember what was what, and especially with constellations I just could not see the shapes and patterns. However, after spending a fair amount of time at the Gilbert Rotary Centennial Observatory, I’ve been steadily learning the various celestial bodies in the sky. I can now tell where Venus, Jupiter, Mars, Gemini, Orion, and Polaris are. With Venus, it’s usually the very first celestial object to show in the night sky because of how exceptionally bright it is, so I can tell where it is right away. Jupiter is also one of the brightest objects in the sky, so it’s easy to find. Mars is a little dimmer than everything else because of its red color, but at the beginning of the night its still one of the first things to appear. With Gemini, I still can’t see its “shape”, but I can tell where it is. This is because Mars currently forms a triangle with Castor and Pollux, which are the brightest stars of Gemini. Along the same line, I can’t identify the “shape’ of Orion, but I can now find Orion’s belt because of how easily identifiable those 3 stars in a straight line are. I can also find Polaris, better known as the North Star, because it’s the brightest star in the general North direction.
I’ve also been shoring up my knowledge on the night sky by reading Nightwatch by Terrance Dickinson. It’s been really helpful to me, as it goes pretty in-depth to the mechanics of how things move throughout the sky. I’m not done with it yet, but I’m sure that I’ll know a lot more by the time I’m done.
One of the things that concerns me regarding my knowledge of the sky is how it’s never constant. In just a few months, the layout that I recognize will be completely gone. This is because everything is really far away from each other in reality, and thus all move in different directions at different speeds (This is where the name of this post comes from, as one of the other volunteers at the observatory described the sky as a racetrack for celestial bodies). With the planets especially, they get their name from the Greek word for wanderer, so they are exceptionally hard to track down. Hopefully I’ll still be able to recognize things later down the road when it’s all different. I know that I’m still inexperienced with viewing the night sky, but when I think about how much I’ve learned in just these last 2 weeks it assures me that I will be a lot better at the end of my project.
I’ve attached a picture I took a few nights ago. In it, you can see both the moon and Venus (I was also trying to get Mercury in the picture but it went behind a bunch of clouds right before I took the picture so I had to leave it). It may look like this photo was taken pretty early into the night, but it was actually when it was pretty dark outside. The reason it looks bright out is because I set my camera to take a long exposure, to better capture the features on the moon. This does result in more light being taken in from the sky however, leaving it looking brighter. In the picture you can clearly see the very slim crescent of the moon the was present at the time, but you may be wondering why then the rest of the moon is visible. This is because of the phenomenon called Earth shine, where light reflected off our planet barely lights up the part of the moon which would normally be pitch black. I think it’s cool how what would normally be invisible is visible in enough detail to where you can even see the lunar maria, which are the dark, low plains on the Moon’s surface. The reason Venus is so bright is because it’s completely covered in thick clouds, which makes it really good at reflecting the Sun’s light, resulting in a very bright object in the sky.
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