StarWatch for the greater Lehigh Valley
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JANUARY  2023

JANUARY STAR MAP | MOON PHASE CALENDAR | STARWATCH INDEX | NIGHT SKY NOTEBOOK

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1376    JANUARY 1, 2023:   2023: A Great Year For Observing
The year 2023 will prove to be an interesting time for viewing the heavens both in the day and at night. The most important event of the year seems obvious, the October annular eclipse visible across the Southwestern US. The East Coast will see a partial solar eclipse, but there is also a summer occultation of Antares. If you enjoy watching meteors, this year could not be better, with the Lyrids (Max., Sun., April 23, 21h EDT—3-day moon), Perseids (Max., Sun., August 13, 03h to 10h EDT—26-day moon), Orionids (Max., Sun., October 22—8-day moon), Leonids (Max., Sat., November 18, midnight—5-day moon), and Geminids (Max., Thurs., December 14, 14h EDT—2-day moon) all visible without any substantial interference by moonlight. The North Taurids—last quarter, South Taurids—new moon and Ursids are also free of damaging moonlight. Then there are the planets which have been visible for months, transiting across the autumnal sky. At present they are beginning to gather in the west after sunset, waiting to play with each other and the crescent moon in the upcoming months. Their interactions will make for some great horizonal astrophotography at dusk. Also, watch out for Venus which will make a spectacular comeback in the spring and summer sky, reaching greatest eastern elongation (visible in the west after sundown) on June 4, setting in the northwest at 11:45 p.m., EDT. In this article, I have emphasized occurrences that are taking place in the day or the evening hours when most people are awake, and generally have enough time to make an observation. * On October 14, 2023 the moon's secondary shadow will bathe the entire continental US, most of Canada, all of Mexico and Central America, and most of South America. However, in the US along a narrow strip of land starting in southwestern Oregon, northern Nevada, south central Utah, diagonally across New Mexico, and near the Mexican border across western and southeastern Texas, enthusiasts will witness a ring of fire as the smaller moon is completely silhouetted against a slightly larger sun. * The Lehigh Valley will witness a partial solar eclipse beginning at 12:05 p.m. with the sun almost 40 degrees above the horizon. Maximum eclipse occurs at 1:20 p.m. with the sun nearly 41 degrees in altitude and about 25 percent of the solar disk obscured by the moon. The partial eclipse will end at 2:36 p.m. with the sun at an altitude of 34 degrees. * The occultation of the moon and first magnitude, red supergiant Antares will happen on the evening of Thursday, August 24. At 10:52 p.m. the unlit southwestern limb of the moon will occult this bright star. There should be enough earthshine still visible on the unlit western half of the first quarter moon to allow it to be glimpsed, slowly sneaking up on the Alpha star of the Scorpion. Short focal length telescopes will almost ensure the earthshine portion of the moon will be seen. Unfortunately, the moon will be only seven degrees above the southwestern horizon when the occultation happens. * The first of many interesting close encounters takes place this week on January 3 with the moon and Mars. About 45 minutes after sundown (5:15 p.m., EST), look to the east for the waxing gibbous moon to be just over 2 degrees from the Red Planet. Binoculars will increase your enjoyment. As the year progresses, look for numerous articles in this column that will follow these wonderful astronomical events. Happy New Year to all. Ad Astra!
 

1377    JANUARY 8, 2023:   Older Than Our Planet
There is no question that I like things that are old. For a while it was old books because their engravings made interesting historical slides for the astronomy lessons that I taught in class and at the Allentown School District Planetarium, now called The Learning Dome. I could also "hear" the thoughts and ideas of writers long deceased as if I were in a private conversation with them. Then it became fossils. Instead of dealing with something that might have been 100 years old, I was holding in my hand something that had lived millions to hundreds of millions of years in the past. I was less interested in trilobites, crinoids, and the like, but I was absolutely fascinated by petrified wood because of its beauty. Created as living, organic material, it got buried rapidly in a flood or volcanic eruption and was slowly replaced by quartz-SiO2 and other minerals in solution over millions of years in an anaerobiotic (devoid of oxygen) environment. The impurities provided the vibrant colors which made the agatized wood so stunning. * I also had a penchant for coprolite, better known as petrified dinosaur dung. Yes, dinosaurs pooped big time, if you recall one of the scenes in Jurassic Park. Some of it became petrified, just like their bones and teeth. I have a beautiful red-brown marbleized piece that I would bring into my classes to have my students identify. I'd take along some alcohol swabs and tell them that "Sometimes if you try to taste the rock, it can help identify it." Eat s**t and die took on a brand new connotation when my pupils found out what they had really tried to taste. Incidentally, just in case anyone is wondering, there is no flavor to coprolite because the organic material has been completely replaced by silicates. * Then there was always the question of how much did I pay for that fossil? "What!" one kid literally screamed in an Allen class. "You spent 95 dollars for a rock!" "Yes," I said out loud to my students, and to myself, I exclaimed that "It was worth every penny spent" for just that new piece of insight that I had conveyed to my learners. Yes, some "rocks" are valuable. * Then one day I was at Bey's Rock Shop in Bally, PA, and there was a meteorite for sale, a small, 459.4-gram, iron-nickel Canyon Diablo specimen from near Winslow, Arizona. It was found near Meteor Crater where a 160-foot-in-diameter meteorite had carved out a nearly one-mile-in-diameter crater some 500 centuries in the past. By far this space rock was the grungiest, ugliest, shabbiest, worn-out looking specimen of the thousands of beautiful mineral samplings that Jim and Jeanne Bey had on display for sale that day, but it fit wonderfully into the palm of my hand. As the one-pound metallic rock rapidly sucked additional heat from my already cold body on that frigid winter's afternoon, it dawned upon me that I was holding something as old as the solar system itself, 4.5 billion years of age, older than anything that could be found upon the Earth because our planet recycles its surface crust. * As the Canyon Diablo meteoroid slammed into Earth's atmosphere, parts of it broke away from the main mass before it impacted and was vaporized by the heat generated in its sudden deceleration by the ground. Some pieces that were not turned into a hot gas were also thrown from the crater upon impact and had lain hidden in the ground for nearly 50,000 years before the crater was thoroughly investigated during the late 19th and 20th centuries. I had thought to myself, "What would it be like to have been in existence for the entire duration of the solar system, to have been forged in its turbulent creation, to have wandered in and out of the gravitational fields of the planets, or to have witnessed the first light from the newly born sun?" Man, I was hooked, and the rest is just ancient, very ancient history. Ad Astra!
 

1378    JANUARY 15, 2023:   New Term, New Opportunities
It was only a moment ago in the geologic sense that I found myself contemplating going back to classes in the spring term and wondering what lay ahead during those next four months. That is happening this week for Moravian University students, 20 of whom will be taking my astronomy class in Room 106, Collier. At Kutztown University, where I went to school, I always looked forward to my Earth and Space Science and Geography classes because that is where my degree in Secondary Education was headed. What I feared most were English classes, interpreting literature, and especially writing. I'll say that again, especially writing, as I pen my 1378 StarWatch column, and after editing two national convention proceedings, and several newsletters, one which was also national, The Reflector. * I had the absolute good fortune of falling in love with Susan, an English teacher, who has coached my writing ever since we first started dating in the fall of 1978. We married in '82. Back then, we only argued about commas, misplaced modifiers, prepositional phrases, and the like. Today, we still argue about commas, misplaced modifiers, and prepositional phrases, but it has been a really good marriage of two kindred spirits who have very different ways of understanding and exploring the universe in which we live. * Susan was afraid of science classes, of not measuring up, of not being able to understand the quantitative aspects of the lessons. I am sure that a few of my students that I will meet on Tuesday evening have similar feelings; but fear not, you will be successful. Here were Susan's thoughts about science classes some 40 years later while sitting in my lab at Moravian one late spring afternoon in 2018. Ad Astra!

[In Astronomy Lab 106]
 

1379    JANUARY 22, 2023:   What's Green, Flies, and Has a Tail?
What's green, flies, and has a tail? Could it be comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF)? And you thought that it might be a green-eyed cat named Emerald leaping over a sofa while chasing a phantom green laser beam. Yes, there is a comet in the morning sky at present, and it is already binocular, and may even become a faint naked eye object by early February; so it's time to begin thinking about viewing it sometime after the moon is full on February 5. That should be when the comet is at its brightest and in the evening sky right after dusk. * Comet names in the 21st century, like C/2022 E3 (ZTF), can be quite a disappointment. A century ago, this comet would have been simply named after its co-discoverers, Frank Masci and Bryce Bolin and called Comet Masci-Bolin, like Hale-Bopp became known, when it was discovered on July 23, 1995 by Alan Hale and Thomas Bopp (d. 2018). Timewise, Alan Hale saw it first, followed less than an hour later by Thomas Bopp. Comet Hale-Bopp also has a more official name, C/1995 O1. * Today, it is usually the telescope, camera, or the observing program that gets the credit for a comet's discovery because they are almost always imaged electronically and then discovered via a computer program before being verified by humans, in this case Bryce Bolin and Frank Masci. * Let's first dissect the name of this soon-to-be-seen comet to understand it better. The letter "C" stands for the fact that this interloper takes over 200 years to orbit the sun. In fact, the last time it came around Sol may have been about 50,000 years ago when Neanderthals and Cro-Magnon men and women were traversing about the European and Asian landscapes or this may be the first time the comet has entered the inner solar system, pushed inward from the Oort Cloud by the gravity of some long passed star that came within a few light years of our sun. The letters A, B, C, D, E, etc. stand for half months. The first half of January is listed as "A," the second half of January "B," and so on. The E3 means that it was the third comet discovered during the first half of March (E). The discovery year was 2022 and the (ZTF) stands for the Zwicky Transit Facility which has a large digital wide-field of view camera located at the Palomar Observatory in southern California. It records the entire Northern Hemispheric sky every two days as it looks for transient phenomena like asteroids and comets that might strike our planet, as well as supernovae. * I first observed C/2022 E3 (ZTF) on the morning of January 16 just before moonrise. It certainly was not spectacular from a suburban locale and not green because of its faintness, but it was visible. My rule of thumb is that if I find something faint, then I have to go back and find it numerous times to verify its authenticity. I performed that experiment four times, and as my eyes became better adapted to my suburban backyard conditions, I was able to delineate a short, stubby tail. C/2022 E3 (ZTF) was closest to the sun on January 12, and it will be closest to Earth on February 1. It may be a faint binocular object right now, but keep those green fingers crossed because comets normally brighten more significantly after perihelion, and certainly as they approach Earth. I'm hoping that it will be an easy binocular target by early February. Stay tuned for more information in subsequent StarWatch articles if this comet blossoms. Ad Astra!
 

[January Star Map]

[January Moon Phase Calendar]
 

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