Celestial Delights
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Francis Reddy Celestial Delights The Best Astronomical Events Through 2020 Third Edition Patrick Mooreʼs Practical Astronomy Series Patrick Moore’s Practical Astronomy Series For further volumes: http://www.springer.com/series/3192 aaaaaaaaaaaaa Celestial Delights The Best Astronomical Events through 2020 Francis Reddy Francis Reddy Syneren Technologies Corp. Lanham, MD, USA ISSN 1431-9756 ISBN 978-1-4614-0609-9 e-ISBN 978-1-4614-0610-5 DOI 10.1007/978-1-4614-0610-5 Springer New York Dordrecht Heidelberg London Library of Congress Control Number: 2011936392 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2012 All rights reserved. This work may not be translated or copied in whole or in part without the written permission of the publisher (Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, 233 Spring Street, New York, NY 10013, USA), except for brief excerpts in connection with reviews or scholarly analysis. Use in connection with any form of information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed is forbidden. The use in this publication of trade names, trademarks, service marks, and similar terms, even if they are not identified as such, is not to be taken as an expression of opinion as to whether or not they are subject to proprietary rights. Printed on acid-free paper Springer is part of Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com) For Kari and Sharon, who eagerly share the sky with a new generation. aaaaaaaaaaaaa Preface There is a widespread impression that the scientific appreciation of the universe must be left wholly to those who have had years of formal training or who devote a large part of their free time to science as a hobby. It isn’t true, of course, and it’s less true now than ever before. Thanks to the Web, volunteers with little specific training are now assisting scientists in tasks as diverse as classifying galaxies, searching for lunar features, and monitoring bird nesting sites. But you don’t need expensive equipment, a steep investment of free time or even a broadband connection to start observing the heavens. All you need are your eyes. Everyone takes a moment to sky-gaze now and then – admiring the colors of a Sunset, pondering the Man in the Moon or playing connect-the-dots with bright stars. And while most of us are denied the awesome pleasure of a clear, dark country sky far from the tawny glow of city lights, we can still observe the solar system’s brightest members – the Sun, the Moon and five planets. Their ever-changing con- figurations fascinated and puzzled sky watchers for the first few thousand years of human civilization, a time when the human eye was the primary observing tool. Tracking their wanderings through the sky requires nothing more than good weather and some guidance on when and where to look. That’s where Celestial Delights comes in. It’s a resource that lays out the best, most observable events for years to come and supplies the background necessary to understand and appreciate them. Think of it as a TV Guide to the sky. The first goal of this book is to share the simple beauties of the sky as seen by our ancestors, sights still available to all of us. By using the Moon and brighter planets as celestial signposts, the tables and charts in this book serve as a guide to every planet that can be seen easily with the unaided eye. Separate chapters detail upcoming eclipses, introduce the major constellations, describe the best meteor vii viii Preface showers, and explore other more challenging, if less predictable, phenomena. The Timetable of Celestial Events ( Appendix A ) provides an almanac of easy-to-see astronomical occurrences from 2011 through 2020, all organized by date and time and cross-referenced with diagrams and tables found elsewhere in the book. A secondary goal is to explore how we see the sky from the perspective of our spacefaring culture, one that has literally touched some of the worlds that human- kind has watched, prayed to and feared for ages. An exciting burst of planetary exploration is currently under way. Plans for the decade include continuing robotic exploration of the Moon, Mars, Mercury, and Saturn, and spacecraft are now en route to asteroids, comets and Pluto. I have attempted to share something of the excitement felt and the challenges faced by those who continue to delve into the long-observed phenomena that this book describes. I hope you’ll come to enjoy the beauty of the heavens that is, after all, everyone’s heritage, and encourage you to participate in this centuries-old delight. All you need to get started is to occasionally look up and wonder: “What is that bright star?” With this book, the answer is literally within your grasp. Bowie, MD. Francis Reddy Acknowledgments Celestial Delights would not be possible without the assistance of many others. First and foremost is my friend and co-author of two earlier editions, Greg Walz- Chojnacki, who encouraged me to go solo this time out. Working with him on the previous editions and other projects was a terrific experience, and his input was sorely missed. Fred (Mr. Eclipse) Espenak of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD, makes an immense body of eclipse information publicly available, something appreciated by all eclipse-chasers and not a few science writers. Fred’s work is ultimately the source for all eclipse and transit predictions in the book, and his maps long have inspired my own simpler creations. One new feature of the solar eclipse maps is the inclusion of city lights as a way to illustrate urban locations that are otherwise too numerous to label. This data, which is acquired by satellites of the U.S. Defense Meteorological Satellite Program, is made available by NOAA’s National Geophysical Data Center. Theodore Yapo, a doctoral student in the Computer Science Department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, graciously provided the book with another novel feature – detailed images of the Moon’s appearance at mid- totality at upcoming total lunar eclipses. Ted rendered these “sneak peeks” using his own computational model that tracks how sunlight refracts, disperses and scat- ters in Earth’s atmosphere. The artistic eyes and obedient cameras of many photographers grace the pages of this book. If it’s true that a picture is worth a thousand words, then they’ve saved me a great deal of work, but I doubt my words are even remotely as beautiful and compelling as their images. For the use of their photographs, heartfelt thanks go to Anthony Ayiomamitis, Juan Carlos Casado González del Castillo, António ix x Acknowledgments Cidadao, Ben Cooper, Lars Christiansen, Miloslav Druckmüller, Iván Éder, Antonio Fernandez, Alfred Lee and Tunç Tezel. My friend Robert Miller has long supported this project by creating custom software for it, and he reprised his role in the last edition by generously providing star maps showing the retrograde loops of Mars. Most of the astronomical computation for the book was performed using the Multiyear Interactive Computer Almanac (MICA) developed by the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C., and published by Willmann-Bell, Inc. of Richmond, Va. Additional helpful resources include the Horizons Web-based ephemeris computation service provided by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory; Starry Night Pro Plus 6, sold by Simulation Curriculum Corp. of Edina, Minn.; Stardome Plus , a Java applet made available by Astronomy magazine; Runmap, a map-reprojection tool by Wesley Colley at the University of Alabama, Huntsville; and the Generic Mapping Tools software package created by Paul Wessel and Walter Smith at the University of Hawaii. Many others have been generous with their time and knowledge during the writ- ing of this and previous editions. They include: Pål Brekke at the Norwegian Space Center; Geoff Chester, U.S. Naval Observatory; Douglas Caswell, European Space Agency; Bill Cooke at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, AL; Daniel W. E. Green at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, MA; Michael Mumma and Michael Smith at NASA Goddard; Cary Oler at the Solar Terrestrial Dispatch in Stirling, Alberta, Canada; David Pankenier at Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA; Michael Rappenglück, Institute for Interdisciplinary Science, Gilching-Geisenbrunn, Bavaria, Germany; Peter Schultz, Brown University, Providence, RI; Ewen Whitaker, retired from the U.S. Geological Survey, Flagstaff, AZ; Jon Giorgini, William Folkner and Donald Yeomans at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA, and James Young (W7FTT) of Wrightwood, CA. However, I am solely responsible for any errors in the text and illustrations. Linda Connell, director of NASA’a Aviation Safety Reporting System, helped me locate a report where a pilot describes mistaking Venus for an oncoming jet. Diane Jarvi, a singer-songwriter based in Minneapolis, provided translated lyrics from Revontulten Leikki (“Northern Lights at Play”), and Judith Heymann trans- lated the writings of French astronomer J. J. Lalande. Judy Young, director of The Sunwheel Project at the University of Massachusetts, has provided continued encouragement. Last but not least, I’m grateful to my wife Cecelia for proofreading the text and assisting with the index and to everyone at Springer for their support and patience in creating this third edition. About the Author Francis Reddy is a senior science writer for Syneren Technologies Corporation on contract to the Astrophysics Science Division at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD, where he writes science-related stories, scripts, press releases and other content. He previously served as a senior editor at Astronomy magazine, where his writing was honored by the Solar Physics Division of the American Astronomical Society and FOLIO: magazine.