January Skylights
Planetary Skylights
The New Year kicks off with a bit of a planetary party in the evening twilight sky. I say party, more of a gathering really as no food or drink, or presents were involved and of course all planets adhered to relevant covid rules. Those planets at this alleged party include Mercury, Venus, Saturn and Jupiter. An unseen guest, Pluto, is also present below Mercury and Venus, but you wouldn’t know it.
Venus rapidly drops down to the SW horizon by the end of the first week in January and is lost by the second week. Mercury gains in altitude and is best placed from the 4th to the 12th some 6–8 degrees above the SW horizon. On 4 Jan a slender crescent moon sits to Mercury’s left at 4.30pm, roughly 35 minutes after sunset about the time you need to view. Mercury will be visible until into the third week of January.
January is the final month to catch Saturn visually, although telescopically it is already too low and not a valid object to target. On the 13/14th Saturn lies just over 3 degrees upper left of Mercury and is above the crescent moon on the 4th. Jupiter is located a little higher in the SW, but is slowly sinking towards the horizon. Again, if viewing through a scope, do so early in the month as soon as twilight deepens. Note the banding across the disk and Galilean moons.
In the dawn sky Mars is visible low in the SE all month. View around 7–7.30am. It is joined by Venus from mid-month, which skips from an evening object to a morning one in just a few days. Venus will be a brilliant object to the left of Mars. A crescent moon joins them on the 29th around 7.15am.
New Year Meteors
The year starts with one of the more prolific meteor showers, the Quadrantids, active between 1–6 January. The short-lived shower peak normally falls over the night of 3rd/4th, with best rates witnessed in the small hours, 2–4am. Peak zenith hourly rates can reach 100 plus per hour, but actual observed rates by an individual will be substantially less – you can’t look everywhere at once! Quadrantids are often fairly swift, producing occasional yellow–green fireballs, and appear to radiate from the now defunct constellation of Quadrans Muralis, which was removed from sky charts in 1922, but used to lie at the junction between Hercules, Bootes and Ursa Major. This position in the sky is located low to the N at the time of the peak, so do not concentrate on this aspect if viewing. The viewing should be excellent – weather permitting – with the crescent moon setting early on the evening of the 3rd.
The James Web Space Telescope
Hopefully by the time you read this, one of the most important scientific projects ever attempted will have overcome its first hurdle and have been safely launched into space on 22 December. Originally conceived in the 1990s, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), but delay after delay, for too many reasons to go into fully here, has seen a long and tortuous gestation period and the launch date slip from 2007 to almost 2022.
Inevitably delays cost money and the price tag has soared from $3 billion dollars to almost $10 billion. NASA’s rigorous safeguard and checking regime for deployment really pushing the boat out here, as this is a one-shot deployment mission, no going up to tinker with, or modify as in the case of HST, this has to work from the get-go.
What then do you get for $10 billion? Well for a start JWST is by far the largest and most complex space telescope ever launched, with a segmented mirror equivalent to 6.5 metres (Hubble is just 2.4 metres). Each of the 18 x 1.32 metre hexagonal beryllium sub-mirrors is coated with a layer of gold to maximise reflectivity. Six of the mirrors fold away, so that JWST fitted into the launch rocket vehicle. All of these mirrors have to deploy and then be aligned using sophisticated actuators so that 18 mirrors become just one. The secondary mirror, which is itself 0.74 metres wide, sits at the apex junction of three articulated booms and will be deployed ten days after launch. The whole telescope observatory is shielded by a tennis court-sized kite-shaped sunshield comprising five separate membranes all kept taught by a management system of motors, pulleys and wires.
Project managers have learned the lessons from HST mirror issues, and the JWST mirror has already undergone rigorous full deployment procedures in environments very similar to those the scope will experience. Unlike HST which was placed in low Earth orbit for servicing purposes, the JWST will be deployed at what is known as Lagrange point L2; this is 1.5 million km from Earth on the far side of the Moon and is where gravity from Earth, Sun and Moon are balanced out. At this point JWST can sit and do science with minimal corrections.
The science JWST will be doing is ground-breaking, and should revolutionise astronomy over its projected ten-year life span (hopefully). Initially JWST will concentrate on these programmes: Exo-planets and Disks; Galaxies and Galactic Mediums; the Large-scale Structure of the Universe; Solar System Observations; Stellar Physics and Types and Populations; the Interstellar Medium and Super Massive Black Holes, and Active Galaxy Nuclei. Consider just the Exosolar planet programme: JWST should be able to detect signs of a ‘life supporting atmosphere’ around a planet at distances out to 30 light years or more; the implications of any such discoveries will have a profound impact and may answer one of the great questions – are we alone?
Before any science is undertaken, however, the JWST has many obstacles to clear and will still be doing so for much of January: a 30-day, extremely tense period for engineers and scientists directly and indirectly involved in the project. Following a six-month commissioning phase, science observations will begin in earnest in the coming summer. Keep tabs on the media as JWST will be at the vanguard of scientific space exploration for the next decade, perhaps a momentous one!
May I wish you all a very Happy New Year. (Whether we will be able to make the most of it remains to be seen.)
Mark Dawson,
Whitby and District Astronomical Society
WDAS usually meets in room H1, Caedmon College, Normanby campus (Whitby College). New members most welcome.
www.whitby-astronomers.com
email: spanton33@talktalk.net
.
Planetary Skylights
The New Year kicks off with a bit of a planetary party in the evening twilight sky. I say party, more of a gathering really as no food or drink, or presents were involved and of course all planets adhered to relevant covid rules. Those planets at this alleged party include Mercury, Venus, Saturn and Jupiter. An unseen guest, Pluto, is also present below Mercury and Venus, but you wouldn’t know it.
Venus rapidly drops down to the SW horizon by the end of the first week in January and is lost by the second week. Mercury gains in altitude and is best placed from the 4th to the 12th some 6–8 degrees above the SW horizon. On 4 Jan a slender crescent moon sits to Mercury’s left at 4.30pm, roughly 35 minutes after sunset about the time you need to view. Mercury will be visible until into the third week of January.
January is the final month to catch Saturn visually, although telescopically it is already too low and not a valid object to target. On the 13/14th Saturn lies just over 3 degrees upper left of Mercury and is above the crescent moon on the 4th. Jupiter is located a little higher in the SW, but is slowly sinking towards the horizon. Again, if viewing through a scope, do so early in the month as soon as twilight deepens. Note the banding across the disk and Galilean moons.
In the dawn sky Mars is visible low in the SE all month. View around 7–7.30am. It is joined by Venus from mid-month, which skips from an evening object to a morning one in just a few days. Venus will be a brilliant object to the left of Mars. A crescent moon joins them on the 29th around 7.15am.
New Year Meteors
The year starts with one of the more prolific meteor showers, the Quadrantids, active between 1–6 January. The short-lived shower peak normally falls over the night of 3rd/4th, with best rates witnessed in the small hours, 2–4am. Peak zenith hourly rates can reach 100 plus per hour, but actual observed rates by an individual will be substantially less – you can’t look everywhere at once! Quadrantids are often fairly swift, producing occasional yellow–green fireballs, and appear to radiate from the now defunct constellation of Quadrans Muralis, which was removed from sky charts in 1922, but used to lie at the junction between Hercules, Bootes and Ursa Major. This position in the sky is located low to the N at the time of the peak, so do not concentrate on this aspect if viewing. The viewing should be excellent – weather permitting – with the crescent moon setting early on the evening of the 3rd.
The James Web Space Telescope
Hopefully by the time you read this, one of the most important scientific projects ever attempted will have overcome its first hurdle and have been safely launched into space on 22 December. Originally conceived in the 1990s, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), but delay after delay, for too many reasons to go into fully here, has seen a long and tortuous gestation period and the launch date slip from 2007 to almost 2022.
Inevitably delays cost money and the price tag has soared from $3 billion dollars to almost $10 billion. NASA’s rigorous safeguard and checking regime for deployment really pushing the boat out here, as this is a one-shot deployment mission, no going up to tinker with, or modify as in the case of HST, this has to work from the get-go.
What then do you get for $10 billion? Well for a start JWST is by far the largest and most complex space telescope ever launched, with a segmented mirror equivalent to 6.5 metres (Hubble is just 2.4 metres). Each of the 18 x 1.32 metre hexagonal beryllium sub-mirrors is coated with a layer of gold to maximise reflectivity. Six of the mirrors fold away, so that JWST fitted into the launch rocket vehicle. All of these mirrors have to deploy and then be aligned using sophisticated actuators so that 18 mirrors become just one. The secondary mirror, which is itself 0.74 metres wide, sits at the apex junction of three articulated booms and will be deployed ten days after launch. The whole telescope observatory is shielded by a tennis court-sized kite-shaped sunshield comprising five separate membranes all kept taught by a management system of motors, pulleys and wires.
Project managers have learned the lessons from HST mirror issues, and the JWST mirror has already undergone rigorous full deployment procedures in environments very similar to those the scope will experience. Unlike HST which was placed in low Earth orbit for servicing purposes, the JWST will be deployed at what is known as Lagrange point L2; this is 1.5 million km from Earth on the far side of the Moon and is where gravity from Earth, Sun and Moon are balanced out. At this point JWST can sit and do science with minimal corrections.
The science JWST will be doing is ground-breaking, and should revolutionise astronomy over its projected ten-year life span (hopefully). Initially JWST will concentrate on these programmes: Exo-planets and Disks; Galaxies and Galactic Mediums; the Large-scale Structure of the Universe; Solar System Observations; Stellar Physics and Types and Populations; the Interstellar Medium and Super Massive Black Holes, and Active Galaxy Nuclei. Consider just the Exosolar planet programme: JWST should be able to detect signs of a ‘life supporting atmosphere’ around a planet at distances out to 30 light years or more; the implications of any such discoveries will have a profound impact and may answer one of the great questions – are we alone?
Before any science is undertaken, however, the JWST has many obstacles to clear and will still be doing so for much of January: a 30-day, extremely tense period for engineers and scientists directly and indirectly involved in the project. Following a six-month commissioning phase, science observations will begin in earnest in the coming summer. Keep tabs on the media as JWST will be at the vanguard of scientific space exploration for the next decade, perhaps a momentous one!
May I wish you all a very Happy New Year. (Whether we will be able to make the most of it remains to be seen.)
The New Year kicks off with a bit of a planetary party in the evening twilight sky. I say party, more of a gathering really as no food or drink, or presents were involved and of course all planets adhered to relevant covid rules. Those planets at this alleged party include Mercury, Venus, Saturn and Jupiter. An unseen guest, Pluto, is also present below Mercury and Venus, but you wouldn’t know it.
Venus rapidly drops down to the SW horizon by the end of the first week in January and is lost by the second week. Mercury gains in altitude and is best placed from the 4th to the 12th some 6–8 degrees above the SW horizon. On 4 Jan a slender crescent moon sits to Mercury’s left at 4.30pm, roughly 35 minutes after sunset about the time you need to view. Mercury will be visible until into the third week of January.
January is the final month to catch Saturn visually, although telescopically it is already too low and not a valid object to target. On the 13/14th Saturn lies just over 3 degrees upper left of Mercury and is above the crescent moon on the 4th. Jupiter is located a little higher in the SW, but is slowly sinking towards the horizon. Again, if viewing through a scope, do so early in the month as soon as twilight deepens. Note the banding across the disk and Galilean moons.
In the dawn sky Mars is visible low in the SE all month. View around 7–7.30am. It is joined by Venus from mid-month, which skips from an evening object to a morning one in just a few days. Venus will be a brilliant object to the left of Mars. A crescent moon joins them on the 29th around 7.15am.
New Year Meteors
The year starts with one of the more prolific meteor showers, the Quadrantids, active between 1–6 January. The short-lived shower peak normally falls over the night of 3rd/4th, with best rates witnessed in the small hours, 2–4am. Peak zenith hourly rates can reach 100 plus per hour, but actual observed rates by an individual will be substantially less – you can’t look everywhere at once! Quadrantids are often fairly swift, producing occasional yellow–green fireballs, and appear to radiate from the now defunct constellation of Quadrans Muralis, which was removed from sky charts in 1922, but used to lie at the junction between Hercules, Bootes and Ursa Major. This position in the sky is located low to the N at the time of the peak, so do not concentrate on this aspect if viewing. The viewing should be excellent – weather permitting – with the crescent moon setting early on the evening of the 3rd.
The James Web Space Telescope
Hopefully by the time you read this, one of the most important scientific projects ever attempted will have overcome its first hurdle and have been safely launched into space on 22 December. Originally conceived in the 1990s, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), but delay after delay, for too many reasons to go into fully here, has seen a long and tortuous gestation period and the launch date slip from 2007 to almost 2022.
Inevitably delays cost money and the price tag has soared from $3 billion dollars to almost $10 billion. NASA’s rigorous safeguard and checking regime for deployment really pushing the boat out here, as this is a one-shot deployment mission, no going up to tinker with, or modify as in the case of HST, this has to work from the get-go.
What then do you get for $10 billion? Well for a start JWST is by far the largest and most complex space telescope ever launched, with a segmented mirror equivalent to 6.5 metres (Hubble is just 2.4 metres). Each of the 18 x 1.32 metre hexagonal beryllium sub-mirrors is coated with a layer of gold to maximise reflectivity. Six of the mirrors fold away, so that JWST fitted into the launch rocket vehicle. All of these mirrors have to deploy and then be aligned using sophisticated actuators so that 18 mirrors become just one. The secondary mirror, which is itself 0.74 metres wide, sits at the apex junction of three articulated booms and will be deployed ten days after launch. The whole telescope observatory is shielded by a tennis court-sized kite-shaped sunshield comprising five separate membranes all kept taught by a management system of motors, pulleys and wires.
Project managers have learned the lessons from HST mirror issues, and the JWST mirror has already undergone rigorous full deployment procedures in environments very similar to those the scope will experience. Unlike HST which was placed in low Earth orbit for servicing purposes, the JWST will be deployed at what is known as Lagrange point L2; this is 1.5 million km from Earth on the far side of the Moon and is where gravity from Earth, Sun and Moon are balanced out. At this point JWST can sit and do science with minimal corrections.
The science JWST will be doing is ground-breaking, and should revolutionise astronomy over its projected ten-year life span (hopefully). Initially JWST will concentrate on these programmes: Exo-planets and Disks; Galaxies and Galactic Mediums; the Large-scale Structure of the Universe; Solar System Observations; Stellar Physics and Types and Populations; the Interstellar Medium and Super Massive Black Holes, and Active Galaxy Nuclei. Consider just the Exosolar planet programme: JWST should be able to detect signs of a ‘life supporting atmosphere’ around a planet at distances out to 30 light years or more; the implications of any such discoveries will have a profound impact and may answer one of the great questions – are we alone?
Before any science is undertaken, however, the JWST has many obstacles to clear and will still be doing so for much of January: a 30-day, extremely tense period for engineers and scientists directly and indirectly involved in the project. Following a six-month commissioning phase, science observations will begin in earnest in the coming summer. Keep tabs on the media as JWST will be at the vanguard of scientific space exploration for the next decade, perhaps a momentous one!
May I wish you all a very Happy New Year. (Whether we will be able to make the most of it remains to be seen.)
Mark Dawson,
Whitby and District Astronomical Society
WDAS usually meets in room H1, Caedmon College, Normanby campus (Whitby College). New members most welcome.
www.whitby-astronomers.com
email: spanton33@talktalk.net
.
Planetary Skylights
The New Year kicks off with a bit of a planetary party in the evening twilight sky. I say party, more of a gathering really as no food or drink, or presents were involved and of course all planets adhered to relevant covid rules. Those planets at this alleged party include Mercury, Venus, Saturn and Jupiter. An unseen guest, Pluto, is also present below Mercury and Venus, but you wouldn’t know it.
Venus rapidly drops down to the SW horizon by the end of the first week in January and is lost by the second week. Mercury gains in altitude and is best placed from the 4th to the 12th some 6–8 degrees above the SW horizon. On 4 Jan a slender crescent moon sits to Mercury’s left at 4.30pm, roughly 35 minutes after sunset about the time you need to view. Mercury will be visible until into the third week of January.
January is the final month to catch Saturn visually, although telescopically it is already too low and not a valid object to target. On the 13/14th Saturn lies just over 3 degrees upper left of Mercury and is above the crescent moon on the 4th. Jupiter is located a little higher in the SW, but is slowly sinking towards the horizon. Again, if viewing through a scope, do so early in the month as soon as twilight deepens. Note the banding across the disk and Galilean moons.
In the dawn sky Mars is visible low in the SE all month. View around 7–7.30am. It is joined by Venus from mid-month, which skips from an evening object to a morning one in just a few days. Venus will be a brilliant object to the left of Mars. A crescent moon joins them on the 29th around 7.15am.
New Year Meteors
The year starts with one of the more prolific meteor showers, the Quadrantids, active between 1–6 January. The short-lived shower peak normally falls over the night of 3rd/4th, with best rates witnessed in the small hours, 2–4am. Peak zenith hourly rates can reach 100 plus per hour, but actual observed rates by an individual will be substantially less – you can’t look everywhere at once! Quadrantids are often fairly swift, producing occasional yellow–green fireballs, and appear to radiate from the now defunct constellation of Quadrans Muralis, which was removed from sky charts in 1922, but used to lie at the junction between Hercules, Bootes and Ursa Major. This position in the sky is located low to the N at the time of the peak, so do not concentrate on this aspect if viewing. The viewing should be excellent – weather permitting – with the crescent moon setting early on the evening of the 3rd.
The James Web Space Telescope
Hopefully by the time you read this, one of the most important scientific projects ever attempted will have overcome its first hurdle and have been safely launched into space on 22 December. Originally conceived in the 1990s, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), but delay after delay, for too many reasons to go into fully here, has seen a long and tortuous gestation period and the launch date slip from 2007 to almost 2022.
Inevitably delays cost money and the price tag has soared from $3 billion dollars to almost $10 billion. NASA’s rigorous safeguard and checking regime for deployment really pushing the boat out here, as this is a one-shot deployment mission, no going up to tinker with, or modify as in the case of HST, this has to work from the get-go.
What then do you get for $10 billion? Well for a start JWST is by far the largest and most complex space telescope ever launched, with a segmented mirror equivalent to 6.5 metres (Hubble is just 2.4 metres). Each of the 18 x 1.32 metre hexagonal beryllium sub-mirrors is coated with a layer of gold to maximise reflectivity. Six of the mirrors fold away, so that JWST fitted into the launch rocket vehicle. All of these mirrors have to deploy and then be aligned using sophisticated actuators so that 18 mirrors become just one. The secondary mirror, which is itself 0.74 metres wide, sits at the apex junction of three articulated booms and will be deployed ten days after launch. The whole telescope observatory is shielded by a tennis court-sized kite-shaped sunshield comprising five separate membranes all kept taught by a management system of motors, pulleys and wires.
Project managers have learned the lessons from HST mirror issues, and the JWST mirror has already undergone rigorous full deployment procedures in environments very similar to those the scope will experience. Unlike HST which was placed in low Earth orbit for servicing purposes, the JWST will be deployed at what is known as Lagrange point L2; this is 1.5 million km from Earth on the far side of the Moon and is where gravity from Earth, Sun and Moon are balanced out. At this point JWST can sit and do science with minimal corrections.
The science JWST will be doing is ground-breaking, and should revolutionise astronomy over its projected ten-year life span (hopefully). Initially JWST will concentrate on these programmes: Exo-planets and Disks; Galaxies and Galactic Mediums; the Large-scale Structure of the Universe; Solar System Observations; Stellar Physics and Types and Populations; the Interstellar Medium and Super Massive Black Holes, and Active Galaxy Nuclei. Consider just the Exosolar planet programme: JWST should be able to detect signs of a ‘life supporting atmosphere’ around a planet at distances out to 30 light years or more; the implications of any such discoveries will have a profound impact and may answer one of the great questions – are we alone?
Before any science is undertaken, however, the JWST has many obstacles to clear and will still be doing so for much of January: a 30-day, extremely tense period for engineers and scientists directly and indirectly involved in the project. Following a six-month commissioning phase, science observations will begin in earnest in the coming summer. Keep tabs on the media as JWST will be at the vanguard of scientific space exploration for the next decade, perhaps a momentous one!
May I wish you all a very Happy New Year. (Whether we will be able to make the most of it remains to be seen.)
