Steve’s Virtual Planet

Series - Full Moon Names

This is the title page for the “Full Moon Names” collection. This series will contain a growing number of posts under the topics of ethnoastronomy, mythology, and history.

In-the-sky.org has a good introduction to Full Moon Names as well some brief history on lunar calendars and the almanacs that introduced traditional names to the American lexicon.

There are two long running almanacs with astronomy sections and they are easy to mix up - the “Old Farmer’s Almanac” since 1792, and the “Farmer’s Almanac” since 1818. Both have great online references for Full Moon events and the traditional names that go along with them.

Look for this month’s post on the July’s Full Buck moon.

Published 1-17-24; Updated 10-17-24

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International Moon Day 2024

Today is the 55th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing and humanity’s first steps on another world. As NASA posted this week, from “One Small Step, One Giant Leap” … “In July 1969, Apollo 11 astronauts Neil A. Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Edwin E. “Buzz” Aldrin completed humanity’s first landing on the Moon. They fulfilled President John F. Kennedy’s national goal, set in May 1961, to land a man on the Moon and return him safely to the Earth before the end of the decade.”

Since 2021, today’s date has been set aside to commemorate this monumental achievement. At that time, the United Nations General Assembly declared July 20 as International Moon Day in recognition of the first human landing on the Moon. The U.N. said “The celebrations will also consider the achievements of all States in the exploration of the Moon and raise public awareness of sustainable Moon exploration and utilization”. The 2024 theme is “Illuminating the Shadows” to bring further attention to the missions to the lunar south pole.

This is now a global commemoration with various sponsors already involved. There are also events in Washington DC to celebrate the achievement and also to promote exploration of the Moon by the global space faring communities. With quite a number of countries now participating in lunar exploration, this event serves to bring additional focus on this international cooperation.

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T CrB is going Nova! - Pt 1

As of 2024, stargazers are possible on the verge of witnessing a fairly rare event in the night sky called a “Nova”, which literally means “new star”. In this case, the star is known as “T Coronae Borealis” or TCrB for short; there is a star chart in that link to help you find it. As luck would have it, the constellation CrB is right overhead in tonight’s sky around 10:00 EDT.

This is a fairly rare type of nova event in that it’s a process between both members of a binary system, made up of a red giant and a white dwarf. The pair of stars interact about every 70-80 years when hydrogen gas is pulled from the red giant and “piles up”. That leads to a condition on the white dwarf’s surface where a thermonuclear explosion occurs. At that time, the visual magnitude of the pair will brighten from the normal value of 10-10.8 to about 2.0. That’s about the same brightness as Polaris, The North Star. So, this nova event will be visible to the naked eye and roughly located between the bright stars Arcturus and Vega.

The Oxford dictionary defines Nova as “a star showing a sudden large increase in brightness and then slowly returning to its original state over a few months”. The star will brighten due to eruptions of the star due to different effects however it settles down to repeat the cycle. So, its not the same as a Supernova or Hypernova in which the star self destructs as a result of the complete explosion of the star.

As for T Crb, there is a growing anticipation that it will soon erupt once again, as the previously recorded bursts have recorded. The last time this occurred was 1946 (78 years ago), before that it was in 1866 (80 years previous). You can check the status of the magnitude of T CrB on the SpaceWeather site in the right hand side bar.

I will be posting more information and web links in the coming days. So, keep an eye on this site and both eyes open to the sky for this unusual event.

Updated on 7-11-24

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Series - The Constellations

“The Constellations”, a series on the 88 modern day constellations with details on the major stars & deep sky objects, mythology, and history of these wondrous patterns in the night sky.

updated 2-24-24

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Full Moon - December

For December, the full moon is referred to as the Cold Moon by many North American indigenous peoples. This year, the full moon will appear on the evening of December 26. It’s the first full moon after the winter solstice.

You can start exploring how various cultures have celebrated the full moon with this article at Wikipedia. The top section of that same page has more technical details of the Moon, its phases and the basics of eclipses.

The Old Farmers’ Almanac (first printed circa 1792) web site has a detailed list of alternate names of the December Full Moon with their Native American origins. On the other hand, there is also a site called merely Farmer’s Almanac (first printed circa 1818) and it also has lots of details about alternate names for the event as well as some historical connections to the traditions of Colonial Americans.

Enjoy the Moon glow!!

Posted in Archeoastronomy | No Comments »

Planning on Venus - pt2

In part one of this post, I described the basic use of Sky View Cafe for planning your viewing of Venus. I hope you’ve already had a chance to see our sister planet off in the west after sunset. It’s been a lot fun showing people how Venus goes through phases, something that most folks don’t know!

In this post, I’ll describe the use of an ephemeris, which by definition, is a chart or table of times at a regular interval with the positions of objects in the sky.

Our fine friends at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory have been generating these data sets for some time, as it turns out. This data has been published on the AstroPixels website in a multi-part table where you can get all the fine details for Venus for each day. You can use this table to plan your sighting of Venus in advance (AstroPixels has charts for the sun, moon and the other planets as well ).  The columns in the list give you the main numbers - date, RA/Dec, Visual Magnitude and phase Illumination.

Once you get the feel of the empheris data layout, the next step is to get the details for Venus’ position for the day you want. You can find the azimuth and altitude numbers for each hour & minute of the day using the SkyViewCafe Sky tab. You can work the time setting back and forth, then place the pointer over Venus to get the Azimuth and Altitude on the info band at the bottom. Then, you can determine where to look by the compass bearing, then the angle up from the horizon.

Finally, I suggest making yourself a planning sheet. You can print the web page(s) but that tends to produce a lot of paper. Better yet, you can copy and paste the text from the web page into a work document. If you use the mouse to select a portion of a table, then copy, this places the text into a clipboard space you can paste into a new document of the work sheet. You can clean up the page by reducing the font size and expanding the margins so it all fits. When you have a nice neat list of items in your table, print it out as a field reference.

Happy “plan it” hunting!!

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Planning on Venus - pt1

Our sister planet Venus has returned in the western sky for Spring 2023 into July 2023. She will be with us for a number of weeks. This post will be the first one to discuss observing Venus this summer but the topic has been a favorite of mine for a while now. I first discussed the phases of Venus earlier and you might want to revisit the links on that previous post. Today, we’ll start by just finding Venus using our naked eye vision.

When planning your viewing of Venus, it’s helpful to use some kind of tool ahead of time to give you an idea where to look. You can start with a graphic view using one of my favorite tools - Sky View Cafe. For the task of spotting Venus, I first open the Sky tab, then select “Horizon - 45 Span” from the options. This reduces the size of the view of the sky, magnifying your field of view. Move the view to the west by dragging it with a mouse or by selecting a specific direction. Venus will be in the northwest for the coming weeks and arcing back up and south as the summer progresses.

Give the graphic view of the sky a try online first. You can roll the date and time back and forth and thereby determine when you will get the best line of sight from your vantage point. Also study how the twilight darkens the sky day by day. Once you get an idea where Venus will be in your field of view, then you can adjust the time and direction of this graphic view.

Good luck in your search. I’ll be back for a second post with some more suggestions. We’ll find an ephemeris so you can see the progression of Venus day by day. I’ll be working through that set of steps in part two. Using that data, we can begin to further explore the phases of Venus through a small telescope, just like Galileo did!

Updated May, 2023

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Astronomy Links

Update - The astronomy links page is now behaving. I had my highly skilled “technical staff” get on the case and they correct(ed) that little annoyance. Enjoy!

Clear skies!

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Back again. Star gazing again.

Yea, yea, yea, I know. I’ve been slack but I had to take a hiatus from all of my astronomy stuff. Nevertheless, I’m back here on Steve’s Virtual Planet (SVP)!!

The really big news from here is that Fernbank Science Center and Observatory has reopened this summer and I am back on staff finally. So, I am really glad to be back on that scene and I’ll press on optimistically and start writing updates again.

Anyhow, another autumn and hopefully more stargazing (and moon gazing, too)! Certainly more blog entries with some new series planned. Also planned is an expansion of the section on archeo-astronomy and ethno-astronomy (I’ve been researching). And I hope for a revival of an older blog I had elsewhere on Space Weather and Solar Dynamics. That will be a future focus here at SVP.

Stay tuned and check back now and then!

Clear skies! (hopefully)

Steve

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Solar Cycle 25

If you appreciate some nice sunshine, you might also be interested in how our solar system’s central star behaves over the short term. We refer to these solar cycles to describe the periodic and repeating characteristics of our sun. The changes taking place in our sun repeat over time in a roughly 11 year cycle. Hence, the term.

These cycles have have been tracked for over 400 years, ever since the early Galilean days of the Scientific Revolution. We are now in Solar Cycle 25 and the current activity of our sun is under close and detailed scrutiny. Using a fleet of satellites and solar telescopes, we watch our closest star like a hawk, in every wavelength available.

Tune in to NASA’s Space Weather monitoring site and spaceweather.com for day-to-day (literally!) updates on the fascinating life of basic, run-o’-the-mill star in our very neighborhood.

And keep on eye on Steve’s Virtual Planet for future articles on Solar Dynamics such as this trip down memory lane that links to details about the 1859 Carrington Event.

Keep shinin’!!

First published Feb 1 , 2021 Updated Sep 23, 2024

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