What's In The Sky - February 2020

Clear February nights present some great stargazing opportunities. Be sure to bundle up and keep warm while you get outside for some stargazing fun!

Here are a few of Orion Telescopes and Binoculars' top picks for February stargazing:

New Moon

February 23rd should be one of the best nights for deep-sky viewing as the New Moon phase will provide the darkest night of the short month. Use Orion Broadband Filters to enhance your view.

On the evening of Monday, February 9th, Mercury (orbit is shown as a red curve) will reach its widest separation, 18 degrees east of the sun. With Mercury sitting above a nearly vertical evening ecliptic, this will be the best appearance of the planet in 2020 for Northern Hemisphere observers. The optimal viewing times fall between 6 and 7 p.m. local time. Viewed in a telescope (inset), the planet will exhibit a waning half-illuminated phase. Image credit: Starry Night.

Mercury High In The Sky

On February 9th, Mercury will be at its greatest eastern elongation, meaning it is at its greatest separation from the Sun. Mercury will be at an altitude of approximately 16 degrees when the Sunsets at 17:34 PST, making it an ideal time to observe this tricky target.

Planetary Lineup Get up early on President's Day, February 17th, to see a lineup of three planets and the Moon. At dawn, the crescent Moon and Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn will form a line spanning about 39 degrees in the southeastern sky.

Before sunrise on the next day, February 18th, viewers in North America can watch the Moon occult Mars! Better yet, try snapping a sequence of high-magnification pics of the event.

Betelgeuse In The News

Betelgeuse has been in the news lately since dimming down to a magnitude of around 1.5, the lowest brightness in more than a century. The red supergiant is normally variable, but the unusual dimming has brought up the question of whether a supernova is imminent. Betelgeuse is close enough that if it went supernova it would be brighter than the full moon, a spectacular astronomical event. However, the consensus is that this probably won't be happening soon. The best estimate is sometime in the next 100,000 years, so it is more likely that this variability is normal, and we've still got a few millennia before the light show.

It may not be as flashy, but if you want to see a supernova now astronomer Koichi Itagaki discovered a supernova on January 12th. Located in the galaxy NGC 4636 in the constellation Virgo, it should be visible with a 6" or larger telescope. Referred to as SN2020ue, it is currently at magnitude 12.1 and should be visible under dark skies at around 60-100x magnification as a dim star just outside of the galaxy's core.

Galaxies M81 and M82 in Ursa Major - 5 x 300 Second LRGB Image by Insight Observatory.

Bright Galaxies

In late February, bright galaxies M81 and M82 will be about as high in the sky as they will get for North American stargazers. From a dark sky site, these galaxies are visible with a 50mm or larger binocular, but we suggest you use a large telescope to chase these galaxies down just off the leading edge of the Big Dipper asterism. Many observers consider M81 & M82 the best pairing of visual galaxies in the sky!

If you would like to receive image data of galaxies such as M81 and M82 and other deep-sky objects taken on the Astronomical Telescopes for Educational Outreach (ATEO), please visit Insight Observatory's Custom Image Data Request form.

All objects described above can easily be seen with the suggested equipment from a dark sky site, a viewing location some distance away from city lights where light pollution and when bright moonlight does not overpower the stars.

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What's In The Sky - June 2019

Get ready for summer stargazing! With the weather warming up, June is a great time of year to enjoy relaxing evenings under starry skies with your telescope or astronomy binoculars. Here are a few of Orion Telescopes and Binoculars' top picks for June 2019 stargazing:

Jupiter at Opposition

Jupiter shines brightly in the constellation Ophiuchus during June and will be in opposition to the Sun on June 10. Around the same time is also its closest approach to Earth, making it an ideal time for observation. Use a SkyQuest XT6 PLUS Dobsonian along with the 10mm Plossl eyepiece and Shorty 2x Barlow lens that comes with it to get views of the largest planet in our solar system at 240x magnification! Or, pair it with the Orion StarShoot 1.3mp Solar System V Imaging Camera for an affordable planetary imaging system!

M13 - Great Globular Cluster in Hercules imaged on ATEO-1 by Insight Observatory.

Summer is the Globular Season!

Globular star clusters are densely packed balls of stars that are concentrated toward the center of the Milky Way. June skies offer some of the finest globular cluster viewing opportunities. While you can detect most globular clusters in 50mm or larger binoculars, a moderate to the high-power eyepiece in a 6" or larger telescope offers the best chance to resolve individual stars. In the constellation Hercules, look for M92 and the “Great Cluster” M13. In Scorpius, look for M4 and M80. The constellation Ophiuchus is home to six globulars – M10, M12, M14, M107, M9, and M19. Can you spot them all?

The Virgo Cluster

A treasure trove of galaxies can be explored if you point your 6” or larger telescope toward the Virgo Galaxy Cluster. The Event Horizon radio telescope array released the first image of a black hole in April, of the supermassive black hole in M87. While the black hole might need an Earth-sized radio telescope array to resolve it, the galaxy itself can be viewed with more affordable equipment. Aim your telescope at M87 in the constellation Virgo and start scanning the surrounding night sky. How many galaxies can you see?

Summertime Star Party

Take advantage of the New Moon on June 3rd and the galaxies and globular clusters visible to put on a star party! Not only will the dark skies of the moonless night provide great opportunities to see fainter objects more clearly, but the warm June weather will make it easy to enjoy starry sights all night long with friends and family.

Swirling Spirals

Around 10pm in mid-June, two glorious, face-on spiral galaxies M51 and M101 will both be in a great position for viewing and imaging. Look for M51, the Whirlpool Galaxy, to the southwest of the star Alkaid at the end of the Big Dipper's "handle". Scan the sky to the northeast of Alkaid to find M101, the Pinwheel Galaxy. Under very dark skies, these distant galaxies can barely be detected in smaller telescopes, but a 10" or larger reflector will reveal much more impressive views. If you're viewing from an especially dark location, try to resolve the delicate spiral arms of M51 in a 10" or larger telescope.

M101, M27, and M51 were imaged on ATEO-1 by Mr. Daniels 8th-Grade Students from the Plymouth Community Intermediate School, Plymouth, MA.

Gems of the Summer Triangle By 10pm in mid-northern latitudes, the Summer Triangle, comprising beacon stars Vega (in Lyra), Deneb (in Cygnus), and Altair (in Aquila), will be fully visible above the horizon. Several celestial gems lie within its confines, including the Ring Nebula (M57), the Dumbbell Nebula (M27), open star cluster M29, and the visually challenging Crescent Nebula (NGC 6888). To catch a glimpse of the elusive Crescent, you'll almost certainly need an Orion Oxygen-III Filter in a larger telescope.

Summer Sky Challenge Discovered in 1825 by the German astronomer Friedrich Georg Wilhelm von Struve, NGC 6572 is bright enough to be seen in a humble 60mm refractor telescope from a dark sky site; but it is very, very small! At only 8 arc seconds in size, it takes a lot of magnification to distinguish this from a star. The easiest way to find it is to look in the target area for a green star. NGC 6572 is one of the most intensely colored objects in the night sky. Some say this is green, and some say it is blue; what do you think?

All objects described above can easily be seen with the suggested equipment from a dark sky site, a viewing location some distance away from city lights where light pollution and when bright moonlight does not overpower the stars.

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Home Is Where the Converged Galactic Core Is

Arcturus is the bright, reddish star that can be seen during the summer months, currently, at an altitude of about 40° (or, about 4 fist-widths) from the western horizon at sunset, and from about sunset until around 2:00am, when it sets below the western horizon.

Arcturus is the brightest star in the constellation, Bootes - the 'herdsman'; the brightest star in the northern celestial hemisphere, and the fourth brightest star in the skies of Earth. Its name comes from the ancient Greek, meaning, "Guardian of the Bear"; Arcturus appears to be trailing the constellations, Ursa Major and Ursa Minor (the 'Great Bear', and the 'Little Bear', respectively). It can easily be located by following the arc of the handle of the Big Dipper, just out into the nearby, celestial blackness - just remember: "Arc, to Arcturus"; and, there Arcturus sits, alone.

This 'red-giant' star, is about the same mass as our Sun, but it is nearly 200 times more luminous. This is because of its enormous size, with a diameter of 22,000,000 miles. Our Sun, "Sol", currently, has an average diameter of 864,000 miles, making Arcturus nearly 26 times the size of the sun, but - it is also 217,000,000,000,000 (217 trillion) miles from Earth, or about 37 light-years distant, accounting for its apparent, relative diminution to our sun. Arcturus is nearly twice as old as our Sol, at around 7.1 billion years.

Red giant stars are stars that are in the later stages of stellar evolution: briefly, they have exhausted their supply of the fuel that sustains them at their cores - Hydrogen. They are still consuming the remaining H in their outermost, gaseous shells by thermonuclear fusion, but have lost so much of their original mass that their surface temperature drops, significantly, and they become so, "swollen", that their remaining 'bulk' is gradually extended into the surrounding space. One day, about 4.5 billion years from now, our own Sun, currently a yellow-dwarf star on the Main Sequence Diagram of Stellar Evolution (also called the Hertzprung-Russell Diagram), will begin its final journey through the red giant phase, as its own nuclear furnace starts to cool down, to begin the journey to its final state - a tiny, hot star, known as a white dwarf.

Though Arcturus is 37 light-years away from our Solar system, its relatively feeble light output was used as a switch, to turn on the lights at the Chicago World's Fair, in 1933, by converting that radiation, using a photoelectric-effect process, combined with a telescope, into electrical signals and, thereby, 'tripping the switch that turned on the lights at that fair! Though this trick could have been accomplished using almost any other sufficiently bright star, Arcturus was chosen, for the fact that its light takes almost 40 years to travel the distance to Earth, through space, and, the last time that the World's Fair was held in Chicago, was 40 years prior.

One of the more interesting things to me about Arcturus is that, though it is one of the many, more familiar stars of our Milky Way galaxy - it is not, originally, from 'here'; it is, literally, an 'alien' star -- from another galaxy! Now - hold on, let's not let our imaginations get the best of us here...

But, how do we know, that, our old pal, Arcturus is actually a 'rogue visitor', from some other, far-off galaxy?

It's because Arcturus orbits our Milky Way galaxy at an oblique angle, almost exactly perpendicular to the plane of rotation of most of the other stars of the galaxy. This means that it doesn't carry the same angular momentum or velocity (speed and direction) as the majority of stars, native to the Milky Way. And, there's more. Lots more.

Our galaxy - a fairly typical, barred-spiral galaxy is, actually, an aggregate of a small "collection" of once, separate, individual galaxies!

You see, galaxies move through the universe in clusters, which are gravitationally bound to a common center of gravity, created by an original mass - say, a hypothetical, binary galactic pair.

Since all matter in the universe is gravitationally attracted to all other matter, the original, revolving pair, would soon have given in to the increasing 'force' of gravity generated by the pairs' decaying orbits, and, eventually collapsed together to form what we currently know as the Milky Way galaxy. (There may be other ways for stars to wind up as 'intergalactic rogues', such as, by gravitational sling-shot-ing, but it doesn't seem to be the case, here). But each galaxy of the original, binary pair would have possessed its own, specific inertia, as well as, specific mass, and a specific plane of rotation, bisected by a specific axis of rotation.

During the merger, most of the stars from both member galaxies would, over time, have assumed a common motion about the now-merged, galactic cores. But some stars, being farther away into the outer periphery of either galaxy, would have strayed, slightly, due to the effects of the differences of the combined angular momentums of the pair, and assumed their own orbits about the galactic core - as did Arcturus - along with 50 other known, stray stellar masses! These 51 stars are known as the "Arcturus Stream".  Other such streams are thought to exist, but these are so distant, relative to the Arcturus Stream, that they remain undetected.

Nevertheless, our Milky Way galaxy - our 'home' galaxy - has adopted these intergalactic wanderers as its own, which, is just as it should be, in my opinion, and I'm O.K. with Arcturus (much like, myself, in a way), as one of good ol' Sol's, 'intra'-galactic, adopted brothers!

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