by Glenn Hirsch
Tuesday and Wednesday at MB.
First, sunset of the planets, one-by-one sparkling in the denser air against that incredibly beautiful azure twilight before sinking into the weeds of a nearby hill. Mercury flashing fire defied the murk and then tiny Saturn against a blue sky, how marvelous to see the planets this way! Venus a blazing UFO in the arms of Taurus, paired with feisty Mars in the same binocular field. On Tuesday, Venus, Mars and the crescent Moon arranged in a perfect square, with Beta Tauri creating the fourth point of a mystic message to Earth.
At someone's suggestion (Jeff Crilly?), I then watched the dark side of the crescent Moon occult two stars, and seeing the Moon's proper motion against the background of stars, I realized for the first time (!) that while the Earth's rotation gives the impression that the sky is "sinking," I could see the moon climbing "backward" up into the sky. As the lunar shadow gobbled each star, they winked out in such a flash that I sucked in my breath ... hearing cries of "there it goes!" around me. Finally the moon itself set, a giant soap bubble wobbling in unsteady air.
I then got down in the dust aiming my dobs at what most of you have seen, Omega Centauri in the south, the largest globular cluster hovered only a few degrees above the horizon exactly mid-way between two distant hills. Peeking under a curtain for a forbidden part of sky, at a latitude too low for Messier, I thought of ancient astronomers who saw the sky full of gods, and here I was literally on my knees.
Then a comet, stars and globular cluster in one glance. Ikeya Zhang is within 2° of M13 this week, and on Wednesday arranged in a neat triangle in one binocular view with Eta Herculus shining at 68 light years, and globular cluster M13 at 23,000 light years. Ikeya Zhang is speeding away from us, it's tail blowing ahead and blocked from our view, to return in just another 400 years or so. But I swear I saw it move! Measured against a background star, I returned to it throughout the evening as it creeped a little closer.
Then an existential moment ...star hopping through Ursa Major in search of 'red dwarf' Lalande 21185. Red dwarfs are stars 10% to 50% the size of the sun (they comprise 80% of all stars in the galaxy!) At 8 light years, Lalande 21185 is the fourth nearest star to the Sun and almost 200 times dimmer. It's a speedy little dude with a radial velocity of 86 km/s toward us which will bring it only 4 light years from us in 22000 AD. Like Arcturus, it's not traveling with the disk of Milky Way, but is streaking through it, bobbing up and down and perhaps carrying at least two Jupiter sized planets as part of its system... if so would mark the closest extra-solar planets to our own.
Anyway, I finally found it. A completely nondescript speck... but that speck was IT.