Weather permitting, Jupiter will be easy to see all month. It reached opposition late last month but will still be nearly at its biggest and brightest of the year. The Moon will begin to appear in the eastern sky around 4PM tonight with Jupiter coming above the horizon a little to the North (left) as it starts to get dark, by 5:30 -6PM (UTC 01:30-02:00). It will be hard to miss, being the brightest object in that area. It will be up most of the night, appearing to trail the Moon’s path, and it will be highest in the sky around midnight. Jupiter will be large enough to show detail through even a small telescope with its banded surface and four easily visible moons so we’ should be out on the front porch with ours after dinner.

Tomorrow morning as I walk out our side door (South) on my way to the car to go to work, I’ll be looking for Sirius, Procyon, and Betelgeuse; the Winter Triangle (white lines in the image). Jack’s been pointing it out along with Orion (red in image) and his faithful companion Sirius, the constellation encompassing the star of the same name,  in the mornings (yellow/green in image). It will probably be too light when he leaves for school from now on due to daylight savings time.    

Except for locations South of New Zealand and Chile, the Winter Triangle is prominent in our sky approximately from December to March. Yes Virginia, it is referred to as The Summer – or Great Southern - Triangle in the tropics and on the Southern Hemisphere.  To find it, it’s usually easiest to spot the 3 stars in Orioin’s belt and work from there.

The reason Sirius and Procyon are so bright is because they are the closest of all the distant stars at 8.6 & 11.4 light years away respectively. This means the light we’re seeing from them tonight left those stars around the time our boys were being born.

The e-mail declares that tonight, the night of Aug. 27, the planet Mars will come closer to Earth than it has in thousands of years, thereby offering spectacular views of the Red Planet. The commentary even proclaims that Mars will appear “as large as the full moon”.

The problem is that the “Aug. 27″ reference was for Aug. 27, 2003, the night when Mars made a historically close pass by Earth @ 34.6 million miles. Although the Hubble Space Telescope used the opportunity to make some great images of Mars, to the naked eye Mars appeared as nothing more than a bright star, not at all like the full moon.

FWIW it is impossible from the Earth for Mars to ever appear as large at the moon, but I’m sure we’ll be seeing this email again in the future… maybe next time with a video.

Isn’t technology wonderful?

Relative to any fixed location on Earth, a total eclipse of the sun is a rare event. I remember watching the last one visible from the continental U.S. in 1979 from the sidewalk in the front yard of our Piscatway, NJ home – through a piece of green welder’s lens my Dad handed to me. I had no idea of the significance or rarity of the event at that time as that was his last one & the next one won’t happen for us here until 2017.

The longest solar eclipse our generation will see until 2032 will occur in part of the Western Hemisphere on July 21 and on July 22, 2009 in the Eastern Hemisphere. It will be only a singular occurrence with the difference in dates being caused by our International Date Line. Those of us in the United States will not experience this eclipse first hand, but in this Information Society, live coverage should be scheduled to be broadcast and relayed primarily from China and Japan. I’ve been checking CNN, but haven’t found anything yet.

More information about this eclipse is available at NASA’s Eclipse Web Site.

As close as it is to the Sun, the surface never sees direct sunlight since thick clouds always cover the entire surface. It’s the reflection of Sunlight off of this cloud-base that is responsible making Venus not only the brightest natural object in our nighttime sky but also bright enough to be seen in the middle of the day.

When Venus is in position between the Earth and the Sun (inferior conjunction), it makes the closest approach to Earth of any planet. It reaches inferior conjunction, on average, every 584 Earth days (5 Venutian Solar days) with a recent occurrence on 29 Mar 2009 (± 2 days) ¹ It has since ”passed” the Earth in it’s orbit around the Sun and went from being visible after Sunset to now visible before Sunrise.

Like our Moon, Venus exhibits “phases” but only in telescopic view. This could only be possible if the planet orbited the Sun and this discovery in the 17th century by Galileo supported the unfathomable 16th century Copernican heliocentric, or Sun-centered, idea that we are not the center of the Universe (although I know a few who’d probably still argue that point to date ;) ).

A couple of Carl Sagan Astronomy Videos on YouTube:

1. Pale Blue Dot 
2. The Cosmic Calendar

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We learned very early on, in English classes of all places, that Thoughts (ideas) are things. But it is being conscience of the space between them that differentiates us from the other mammals. If you say something negative to me, I can choose to be offended and react violently or I can choose relative indifference and accept your opinion as yours. My decision is “in the gap between the thoughts”, where other animals instinctively react.

If the above example seems to “airy” or “pseudo-scientific” for you, let’s take something solid in our observable surroundings, say a block of lead. We’ll all agree that although it “looks” solid, it is been repeatedly shown through the Scientific Method to be a mass of moving molecules with space between them.

As we further break this structure down, we find atoms; protons, electrons, neutrons, and croutons all orbiting each other with the same precision of a solar system and let’s not ignore the space between them. [Apologies for the high-school physics/chemistry here, but it's foundational.]

Quantum Physics deals with this composition with names like quarks, bosons, & leptons. On this sub-atom level, there is no difference between the particles that make our block of lead different from a block of gold. It is the information and organization of these particles that makes the difference – again the space between.

If we can’t tell the difference between lead and gold on the sub-atomic level, could it be that we’re just standing too close to the trees to see the forest from our current perception of things Astronomical? Put another way, What if you could look back from far enough away so as not to see the space between the planets?

Let me interject here with a postulation that if you were able to remove just one of these sub-atomic particles of quanta from our sample structure, you would change it’s organization, and consequently its properties on our observable level. You might then make this analogous to removing just one human life energy from the face of the planet before its time, and begin to see the importance of every individual & the ripples our actions as a life-force create in the cosmos.

Biogeneticists are discovering in their work unraveling the double-helix structure of DNA that the mutagen & disease activities may actually be occurring in the space between the base pairs and not with the molecules themselves.

Einstein’s research on a Unified Theory was an attempt to unify the General Theory of Relativity (gravity as a property of the geometry of space and time – or spacetime) with that of electromagnetism and I think it is what led to work on a Theory of Everything. An excellent explanation of why our use of Mathematics may or may not be sufficient in understanding our perception of space is given by Mario Livio.

Maybe someday we’ll consider understanding pre-BigBang history – the creation of our world ex-nihilo (“our world” here being the entire cosmos, not just this particular ball of mud).