A NASA spacecraft rocketed away Monday on a quest to explore Jupiter's tantalizing moon Europa and reveal whether its vast hidden ocean might hold the keys to life.
I've been promising a review of October's distinctive comet and its fabulous Northern Lights display. I will only get to the comet today, however, because our lead topics are the many marvelous events of the moon, planets and stars we can see these next few weeks.
Saturn's rings and Martian spring
Not all our lunar and planetary happenings can be fully enjoyed without a good telescope, so consider adding a telescope to your Christmas list.
Two interesting planetary events for telescopes occur Tuesday. One is the rings of Saturn reaching the greatest tilt they will have before narrowing so much they vanish from view in a few months -- for the first time in 15 years. The other planetary event for telescopes is Mars having spring begin in its northern hemisphere. That happens Tuesday but will usher in a few months of seeing the bright north polar ice cap of Mars emerge from the polar hood of clouds and begin to undergo its beautiful break-up and melting away -- while Earth is passing closest to Mars.
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To enjoy most of the special display of both Saturn and Mars, you could wait until Christmas to get a telescope. But to catch the sight of the brightest Pleiades stars surrounding a nearly full moon, you'll have to have a telescope by 1 to 4 a.m. Saturday.
Friday Skywatch event in Cape will offer great views of planets, stars, comet and more
The South Jersey Astronomy Club will host a free public Skywatch on Friday night in Belleplain State Forest.
Bright lights, big planets
Brilliant Venus still sets only about 90 minutes after the sun, but by then the second-brightest planet, Jupiter, has risen in the east-northeast (Saturn, much dimmer, is then in the due south). On Saturday, the nearly full moon will be well above the rising Jupiter and the next night well to the left of the planet. Mars comes up bright and fire-colored (orange-gold) a few hours after Jupiter.
On the night of Nov. 19-20, the waning moon will pass through a series of absolutely beautiful arrangements with Mars and the two brightest stars of Gemini the Twins, Pollux and Castor. On the evening of Nov. 19, the moon will rise little more than the width of your thumb at arm's length below the almost-moonlight-overwhelmed Pollux. But loveliest of all perhaps is the view about 90 minutes before sunrise Nov. 20. At that time we should see a gentle arc of equally spaced lights. The arc, from left to right, will be bright Mars, tremendously bright moon, dimmer Pollux and similarly bright Castor.
Comet in review
I'm hoping some of you readers were part of the turnout of people who showed up at the South Jersey Astronomy Club Skywatch on Nov. 1. If so, you got telescopic views of Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS. The comet and some of its tail -- even a very special "anti-tail" -- were dimly visible to the naked eye in bright moonlight in mid-October. But the much anticipated comet faded rapidly and did not live up to our higher hopes -- except in photographs, most surprisingly in images using recently improved cellphone technology.
One local veteran observer agreed that the naked-eye view of Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS in New Jersey was inferior to that of Comet NEOWISE a few years back. Neither qualified as a "great comet" according to the criteria of the expert comet scientist Donald Yeomans.
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