January Night Skies 2010

JANUARY 2010

Night Skies

Over TANZANIA

We ended the Old Year and began the New Year with two amazing eclipses – the partial lunar eclipse on New Year’s Eve and Friday 15th January’s partial solar eclipse. These two are the only eclipses that we are going to see for a long time to come. We will have to wait for more than one and a half years to see the next total lunar eclipse on June15 2011 and even longer, nearly four years, for the partial solar eclipse of November 3 2013.

The remaining three eclipses this year will not be visible for us. These are: the Partial Lunar Eclipse of June 26, the Total Solar Eclipse of July 11 and the Total Lunar Eclipse of December 21. We will be missing out on a whole lot of fun and excitement this year. But if you have access to the Internet, most of these will be followed live from where they are occurring.

The most notable event for 2010 is the gathering of planets in the night skies from May to August, when Venus, Saturn, Mars and Mercury and Moon dance around each other in the skies changing places along the ecliptic – the path marking the flat plane in which all the planets are orbiting the sun. During these mid-year months you will be able to observe the movements of planets and enjoy changing patterns as they wander about in a sky that normally shows very constant well known patterns of stars called constellations. Indeed the term ‘planets’ was coined by Greeks since it means ‘wanderers’ in that language.

Jupiter bids farewell this month while Mars enters the evening skies. Mars is closest to Earth on 27th January while it is in exact opposition to the Sun on 29th when it rises in the east exactly while the Sun is setting in the west. It will become a brilliant red star shining at magnitude -0.8. Remember that a lower magnitude number represents a higher brightness.

Saturn is also within reaching distance already this month. Towards the end of January, tt rises in the still “early” night around 10 pm. It is a bit faint and can be distinguished by its sharp steady pinpoint light, as opposed to twinkling that you will observe when viewing stars. When too close to the horizon the planets can also show some twinkling due to refraction variations in our atmosphere so allow at least an hour before you make the judgment for a planet. Through a telescope Saturn’s ring system are still seen as a line but it gets thicker as the ring system continues to tilt towards us over the coming months.

The eastern and northeastern skies are full of most fascinating stars and constellations. The Orion (Hunter) constellation is the most easily recognizable when facing east soon after sunset. You can easily make out its rectangle with the red giant star Betelgeuse in its lower left corner and triple stars of its belt. Sirius the Dog is an in inverted dog-shape below and to the right of Orion while the V (or A) of Taurus can also be easily recognized north of Orion while eastwards. To the north you will be able to recognize the Perseus and the W-shaped Cassiopeia. Perseus contains the variable star Algol whose regular dimmings every 2.87 days can be followed easily with the naked eyes. For our location the best minimum is on 24th January at 9:39 pm when it will dim to magnitude 3.4 instead of its normal brightness o 2.1. In light pollution free skies away form city lights our eyes can see stars to magnitude 6 so you should be able to discern the changes with your naked eyes since a brightening from magnitude 3.4 to 2.1 corresponds to nearly four times increase in brightness.

In the same area, just below Perseus constellation and the Square of Pegasus (see sky map) lies another very interesting object, the Andromeda Galaxy which in dark skies can be seen as a faint patch of light. It is a spiral galaxy similar to what our own Milky Way galaxy is believed to be. It breaks the record for naked eye viewing since at two and a half million light years away it is the farthest object that humans can see with their eyes alone.

Milky Way with its myriads of stars dust and nebulae sweeps across the sky from south east, (grey region in the star map) through the region of Sirius, through Gemini, towards Taurus, through Perseus and ends in Cassiopiae in the northwest.

At dawn the south and north direction pointers, the Southern Cross and the Big Dipper respectively are upright so can easily be used to orient yourself accurately.

The International Space Station will make fly brightly over our skies on 27th, 28th and 29th January flying slowly from north west to south east on all three days. On 27th it will be seen from 08:21 pm to 08:26 pm rising to 18 degrees in south west skies. On 28th it will pass over our skies with as an extremely bright object of magnitude -3.3, from 07:07 pm to 07:12 pm. It will be in the north east skies rising to a maximum of 51 degrees, passing close to the red star in Orion constellation which is a Red Giant star knows as Betelgeuse. On 29th the bright ISS will be seen from 07:29 pm to 07:33 pm rising to 21 degrees in the south west.

ntjiwaji at yahoo dot com

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