Venus, Jupiter & Moon (11 years later)

It's been 11 years since I wrote about the awesome alignment of Venus, Jupiter and Moon. It's been 11 years since I wrote anything at all! 11 years later these 3 celestial bodies have come together for another spectacular show. (Wish I was in an Opeth concert at this time. Or any open-air concert. Or just open-air. Would've been so cool...)

This awesome showdown happened over the last 3 days.. 21st to 23rd of Feb 2023.

21st.. Moon with it's first day of waning crescent above the horizon at sundown with Venus and Jupiter above it. The western skies were just amazing to look at for an hour or so till the moonset.

22nd.. Venus was barely visible with moon taking the center stage. I think it was a moon-venus occultation. But I'm not too sure

23rd.. All 3 bodies aligned in a near straight line.. Beautiful.

Today moon has moved further up to the zenith. And.. the show's over. Tomorrow it'll pretty much be at Zenith at this time. The show might continue again in about 6 weeks time. But it'll be too close to sunset.

Keep looking at the skies!

How stargazing saved my day (night actually)

[This was an incident that happened sometime in the late summer of 2010. Nearly ten years ago from now. But I found this in my drafts and realized it was a pretty nice story that I never published]

I was coming back to Princeton from Bethlehem. It was a pretty long distance to cover. Some 50-100 miles I guess. I had lent my GPS to a friend of mine, but I had my iPhone, which had an excellent 3G connection, the most upgraded version of Google Maps and a really really bad battery. My friend and I drove to PA and I headed back by myself at 11 or 12 in the night. I got lost after 15 mins into the drive. My battery had died. I drove further hoping to find a rest area on the highway where there will be some maps/guides to get me back to NJ. I couldn't find any. I really missed the paan-ka-thekas like in India at that point.

I stepped out of the vehicle after driving for about 30 minutes. I was tired and lost and anxious and pretty worried about getting back home. Mostly tired. I stretched and looked up. Orion was at the horizon. That's as close to the zenith it gets at those latitudes. I knew I was approximately 50 degrees north. The hunter, Orion, stands with his feet towards the south and head towards the north pretty squarely. I decided to drive towards his right. It would be east. I got to some strange junctions and took a bet on the next turn. A few bad turns later I was headed due East. I knew this would take me to NJ. I stopped again and looked at the sky to be sure. I often used to end up at strange places thinking the road is going straight while the road is actually curving in some direction. (Contour Rd. in Gokulam, Mysore is one of those roads... I've been lost on it so many times!. No matter what direction I went in, I ended up at this strange junction called Doctor's corner. I usually had to call my friend to get me out of that place... Thanks Yuvraj) So I checked the sky again and I saw that Orion had set. Leo had risen completely from the East, which was straight ahead on the road. I went on.

As expected I reached NJ turnpike, which is pretty much a North-South highway, in about 15 minutes. I could figure out my way from here. It was just a matter of taking Exit 9 towards Route 1 and go straight to Princeton. I finally made it at about 3:00 AM. It was quite an adventure to be on alone with the streets deserted, no one passing by but you find an old friend in the sky that can guide you home.

Star gazing was always a hobby for me. But this time... it was so much more.

Up next: Moon, Jupiter and Venus

On the 5th of Feb I'd been to Opeth concert at Palace Grounds in Bangalore. The stage was setup really well. I was all kinds of high and ready to get my mind blown by Opeth. But just at the dawn of the concert I looked up at the darkening sky and I could see Venus, Jupiter and Moon line up with the stage. It was a wonderful cosmic scene. The first image shows this view.

I went back home to trace the paths of these planets to see if the alignment gets any better to see through the naked eye and guess what... it does. In the coming few days Im expecting to see some awesome alignments. Without a telescope, this is a pretty pleasing sight to the naked eye.

Feb 5th 2012

Feb 26th 2012

Mar 14th 2012

In the second image, I also think Mercury is visible under the triangular alignment of Jupiter, Moon and Venus. By the time we reach the 3rd image, I think Mercury would have started its retrograde motion and gone back down towards the horizon and won't be visible properly. I should check my ephemeris data.

Apart from these, there are some pretty awesome things to look at right now. The night sky is filled with the cool stuff on the far side of the milky way.

• Firstly the Great Nebula in Orion's sword. 
• Secondly, Pleides (and Haydes also, but we'll only see Aldeberan from the polluted skies of most Indian cities)
• There also are the cool constellation along the Orion arm of the milky way with some of the brightest stars in the sky - Cassiopeia, Perseus (Algol), Auriga (Capella), Taurus (Aldebran), Gemini (Castor, Pollux), Orion (Betelguese, Riegel), Canis Minor (Procyon), Canis Major (Sirius), Carina (Canopus)
• Among the stars visible, Sirius is the brightest star and Canopus is the second brightest

So happy star-gazing. Enjoy the winter sky.

Universe Sandbox

I always kept thinking I should create this application where I can get the current planetary positions in a 3D simulation where I can move around in space and look at each planet and get close to it at which point the experience of using the application gets suspiciously similar to Google earth.

I had once started doing the application to move 9 spheres (this was when Pluto was still a planet) around another giant sphere at a particular angular velocity. Then I started adjusting the size and colors of these spheres to reflect the sizes and the look of actual planets. Finally when all went straight to hell, I gave up. Recently the itch to use an application like this got... scratchy. But this time I just Googled for an application like this and found one of the sweetest 3D simulation of the universe that's out there.

Uranus, the dark ring matter, the tiny moons embedded in the dark ring
matter and the orbits of the big 5 moons: Miranda, Ariel, Umbriel,
Titania and Oberon (As shown by Universe Sandbox)

Its Universe Sandbox! This app does a pretty good simulation of the current positions of planets, stars and nearby galaxies. It simulates the effects of gravity on an object in space extremely well. You can do stuff like: increase the mass of Jupiter to equal Sun and see how the planets start moving in all weird paths due to the increased gravity and you see Sun and Jupiter do the binary dance. Cool app.

Some dude has used this application to simulate the arrival of 'Nibiru' - the ridiculous star made of 'Dark Matter' that is going to 'collide' with the 'Solar System' causing the end of the 'Universe'!!! Some bull theory, but this dude has managed to simulate that using Universe Sandbox. It is quite interesting to look at. This is the YouTube link to the cool looking dumbness.

(I see the scope for a lot more posts while talking about the hype of the world ending in 2012)

The 'God' particle

I recently came across this 'God' particle a.k.a Higgs Boson. The fact that this particle is called the 'God' particle caused my mind to rate its interestingness as 10/10. So I went about reading more about this particle. The best links I found on this particle is this one. The articles in that page attempt to explain what Higgs Boson is in a page. These articles are my read for the day today.

Mars

As a kid, I had always been obsessed with Mars. Somehow all the adults around me seemed to think Mars was a fine place to go picnic around and if you took a liking then build a house on this lonely planet. So I said I definitely want to be on the spacecraft which goes to Mars. But as I grew up the realities of science hit you and you start wondering why were you surrounded by a bunch of morons who never told you that Mars was a very hot and cold place ; a picnic there could end up in a ghastly way! Well, in some way I am glad they dint tell me all that ( they probably dint know it themselves too well). So I could go on dreaming as long as I wanted to.
There was this book from "World Series", some "amazing or wierd facts", some something like that. And there was this story about an old woman who dreamt of going to Mars all her life and as she died she had left all her money to the future, i.e. to that someone who would be the first to reach Mars. Now that I had read this, I thought I was getting all the signs of doing this mission impossible all by myself :-)
Well, someday somebody with a 100 million dollar suit and 10 years worth training maybe able to step on Mars land and obtain all the money left by the old woman, but I am no more in the running for it, I have resigned!
But I still longingly look up at the wonderful object in the night sky, reddish, starkly different from the stars of the yonder and planets that pale, and wish to look at it through my telescope. Yes! I have still not really seen it through my scope yet!!!
Damn the time which keeps running, and I am not able stop about to watch it!
But when I do see it, hopefully sometime soon, its there in the night sky close to zenith this week ( just waiting for the moon to go away), I will blog again!
(The other connection between the co-author of this blog, me and Mars is the chocolate! I miss that)

Leonids

SO there were supposed to be the Leonids a few days ago. Somehow didn't hear much about it in the news. This year Leonids were supposed to be huge with a meteor rate of nearly 500 meteors per hour for a couple of hours. Unfortunately, at the place where I stay the sky was overcast and it was freezing outside. So I didn't see even a single meteor.

When you talk about Leonids, its imperative to mention temple-tuttle. Tempel-tuttle is a short period comet with a period of 33 years. But its a tiny non-impressive comet that is almost not seen by the naked eye when it enters the inner solar system. But what seems to be interesting is the dust it leaves behind. The dust belt that's left behind by the comet drifts away from the sun and eventually reaches earth's orbit. When earth passes through this best, we see the dust particles as meteors in the sky. Actually its more of dust, icy pebbles and other normal comet material.

One thing that I found very interesting is that scientists have actually observed each dust path that is left behind by the comet. This year's showers were apparently the dust left behind by the comet somewhere in 1533. Now that's some cool astronomy!

An amusing story!

Ok, I wanna tell a story. There is a planet earth.
Its a rock and if you look at the solar system, its really really small compared to Jupiter. So if Jupiter is a huge ball, our earth is a tiny little speck!
And now we look at the Sun. The magnificent, glorious huge humongous ball of fire, and compared to that! our Jupiter is a tiny speck! Haha...
Proceeding, we have our Sun surrounded by milllions and zillions of stars, some bigger or smaller, all kinds! So our Galaxy which holds all these zillions of balls of hydrogen, compared with that! Our dear old Sun is a tiny speck!
These galaxies spread out in the whole huge wide universe, can form HUGE clusters and these cluster can form superclusters and there are millions of galaxies...
"Hmmmmm....uh-uh, Ok now you have me lost me, sorry cant believe it anymore! You are making up stories... !"

That was the reaction some kids had by the end of this story I told them :-)
Well, thats how the universe is! Unbelievable!

Moon and Jupiter

So today, the 29th of September 2009, I saw the moon and Jupiter pretty close to each other. Though the sight of moon and a planet seeming close to each other is something that happens at least 3-4 times a month, this was significant because it was I who saw it. :)

The thing that I observed the most was how much the moon had moved over a day. If im not mistaken, in a day the moon travels about 7 to 8 degrees each day. If you were to look at the moon and forward / rewind the time by 24 hours, you'll have to nearly tilt your head a little bit to get your glance back on the moon.

The sky looks so calm and motionless, yet there are things like our little moon running around in circles like the ball on roulette. No matter what, there's always something amazing to look at in the night sky!

Saturn the 4 parts of the sky

Saturn can now be seen in Leo... Just under the triangular part at the lion's rear end. This is a nice thing to look at. After a few months this will be the only thing worth looking at in the sky if you don't have a 5" reflector. Perhaps even with that. Right now we see lots of stars in the sky because we can see the ring of milky way beyond the stars in Orion. Awesome constellation. After a few months, the sun will enter taurus and then gemini hiding the light of these stars in 'more' light.

I usually split the sky into 4 parts:
The Interesting part: far side of the milky way part with Orion as the outstanding constellation.
The somewhat empty part: The space beyond leo when we're looking at a direction perpendicular to the disk of the milky way (away from andromeda)
The really interesting part: The region beyond the summer triangle (Cygnus, Lyra, Aquilla) in the north extending all the way down to scorpious and saggitarius where we look at the thick of the milky way (right at the center.. wooot)
The hmmm part: the region beyond pegasus and all that where we look at the other direction perpendicular to the disk of the milkyway and oh we see M31 [Must be seen with a 5" reflector]

I saw a shooting star the day before. It had been almost an year since I saw one...