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September Odds and Ends

© Gregg Pasterick

Hello fellow star gazers, poets and dreamers; welcome back. It's September already, and how that happened so quickly, I don't know. We're drifting into another autumn in the Northern Hemisphere, while the long dark winter begins to abate "down under." Mars has, only days ago, drifted a mere 0.373 a.u. past us, a truly once-in-a-lifetime event that will next occur so dramatically in the year 2729. Also this month, two minor meteor showers are favored by relatively dark skies; the Harvest Moon rises on the 10th; Mercury pops into the morning sky, and is at greatest western elongation on the 26th; the sky continues its relentless and reassuring spin overhead, summer's constellations disappearing in the glare of the sun while the winter constellations creep toward the evening sky.

First, Mars ...

On August 27th the red planet, polished and sparkling like the sequins on an Olympic skater's costume, outshone the stars from its nearest proximity in years and years. I suspect this preyed upon the fainter stars with low-esteem, upstaged by a mere planet. For those of us bound to the Earth by gravity, but with lighter-than-air dreams, it was joyous sight; a beacon beating back the darkness that often envelopes our hum-drum lives.

An apparition such as this is a thing of beauty and of philosophy and of pondering. With so many astronomical events often separated by millennia, I frequently find myself intrigued by what has transpired here, on Earth during that time. Mars was last so close to us more than 50,000 year ago, before Cro-Magnons came along and ruined the neighborhood for the Neanderthals. What will the Earth be like 700 years from now, when Mars is even closer?

It's all so wonderful.

In the meantime, in the here and now, Mars will get left in the dust as the Earth pulls away from it. It will fade in brightness from magnitude -2.9 to -2.2, still nothing to sneeze at, but a few of the fainter stars may no longer feel threatened.

Though not as spectacular as Mars, there are other planets about as well. Venus, though still very near the sun by the end of the month, is emerging as the Evening Star. It will not begin to really strut its stuff until December.

Mercury, as I noted above, is in the morning sky. It passes within 7⁰ of Jupiter on the 21st, which will help observers spot it, and is furthest from the sun on the 26th. Jupiter will have fully emerged from the pastel wash of dawn by the end of the month, rising about 2 & 1/2 hours before the sun at that time.