Good Morning! Hopefully you’re reading this at least 90 minutes before sunrise on Thursday, October 8*.
UPDATE 7AM: The relative positions of Saturn and Mercury have changed since yesterday. Saturn is now above Mercury, still a bit to the left. So the graphic below is a bit off. Supposedly today (10/8) was when the 2 were to be closest, but they appeared closer yesterday. BTW, Saturn's rings are visible (barely) through 10 x 42 binoculars.
*If not, you can probably see pretty much the same thing for a few more days, but today is as close as Mercury and Saturn are going to get.
Here’s the deal. If you can get outside, and to an unobstructed Eastward view by ~an hour prior to sunrise* (so by 6:30AM MDT along the Wasatch Front) you’ll see 3 planets, all close together: Venus, Mercury, and Saturn. They’ll look like this, but the first thing you’ll look for is Venus.
*Yeah I know yesterday I said 45 minutes, but I checked the tables: sunrise today in Salt Lake is 7:32AM, and best viewing yesterday was ~6:35AM.
*Always below 47 degrees.
**Sunrise azimuth today = 97 degrees.
Side Note: BTW, Jupiter is still easily visible after sunset. A little higher than when I did the post, but if anything easier to check out. Last night all 4 Galilean moons were visible, 3 left, 1 right.
Extra-Help: OK, so you can’t figure out East, and don’t have a compass? No problem. Look up in the sky. Find Orion (pic right). It’s the big constellation that looks like a guy with a bow and a sword hanging from his waist. At 6:30AM right now it’s more or less due South. Look at it, then rotate about 80 degrees or so to your left. Can’t find Orion? No problem. Look at the Big Dipper*. At 6:30AM it’ll be on its side, about ~30 degrees or so East of true North. Rotate ~70 degrees to your right. *Can’t find the Big Dipper? Seriously, you can’t find the Big Dipper? Really?? Sorry, this blog just isn’t going to work for you…
Tangent: The night sky makes a great compass and clock, and you hardly need to know any stars, and really just 2 constellations- Big Dipper and Cassiopeia. I was going to get into it here, but time is limited. I’ll cover it in another post.
So you’re looking at Venus. Venus is, in many ways, the planet most similar to Earth. It has a solid surface, is nearly the same size, has almost the same gravity… oh wait a minute…
Tangent: You’re tuning out. I can tell. You’re like, “Oh, the planets- Mercury, Venus, Neptune, whatever… who cares?” I’ll tell you who should care: you. Not just because they’re super-cool- and they are- but here’s another reason, specifically for readers who believe in God.
Special Message For Theist-Readers
God will probably ask you about your death, and maybe your family and kids, and maybe you’ll talk about your career or other stuff. And you- like any good guest- will ask God about how he’s doing and Heaven and such, and at some point the conversation will almost certainly come around to God’s most amazing creation- the universe. He’ll probably ask you what you think of it, and what your favorite parts are, and he’ll probably expect that given you spent like 80 years right under them every night you have some knowledge of and opinions about, the planets, since they’re the most obvious, closest, easily-observable heavenly bodies in the sky. Now imagine how unbelievably freaking awkward you’re going to feel when God realizes that you never even bothered to learn the names and order of the planets, much less try to find them in the sky. Seriously, you don’t want to be embarrassed like that. Not on your judgment day.
Nested Tangent: I have to come clean and admit that the idea of post-mortem chit-chat with a supernatural being is not original. I actually got the idea from an old joke. In fact, it’s pretty much my Favorite Joke Ever. What’s that? You’d like to hear it? OK, but be warned- the joke involves Satan, substance abuse and homosexuality, so if these topics offend you, just skip ahead right now…
The Joke
So this guy dies after not having lived a very good life and he goes to Hell. So his first day in Hell, he reports to Satan’s office for his orientation interview.
SATAN: Welcome, welcome, please have a seat. Welcome to Hell!
GUY: (sits down)
SATAN: You know, Hell gets a bad rap, and a lot of new arrivals are all nervous about it, but it’s really not accurate at all. There are lots of great things about Hell.
GUY: (rolling his eyes) Oh sure, right…
SATAN: No, really. Let me ask you something- do you smoke?
GUY: Well yeah, I did smoke and it’s probably one of the reasons I died when I did…
SATAN: Great! Then you’re gonna love Mondays. Monday is Smoker’s Day. We have all kinds of tobacco- cigarettes, pipes, chew, Cuban cigars, all the best stuff, all free and because you’re already dead, you can’t hurt your lungs!
GUY: Well, I guess that’s OK…
SATAN: That’s not all! Let me ask you something else- do you drink?
GUY: Well yeah, I did drink and in fact most days I started around…
SATAN: Great! Then you’re gonna love Tuesdays. Tuesday is Drunk Day! We have all kinds of alcohol- beer, wine, gin, tequila, single-malt scotch, all the best stuff, all free and because you’re already dead, you can’t hurt your liver!
GUY: Well, hey, that sounds pretty good!
SATAN: That’s not all! Let me ask you something else (with a conspiratorial wink)- do you like to do drugs?
GUY: Well on occasion I did indulge in recreational…
SATAN: Great! Then you’re gonna love Wednesdays! Because Wednesday is Drug Day. We have all kinds of drugs- pot, cocaine, crack, heroin, meth, all top-grade, all free, and because you’re already dead, you can’t hurt your brain!
GUY: WOW! That sounds awesome!!
SATAN: And that’s not all! Let me ask you something else- are you gay?
GUY: Uh, no.
SATAN: Oh. Well you’re gonna hate Thursdays…
Venus lacks a magnetic field, for reasons not entirely clear*, so if you were standing on the surface (pic right from Soviet Venera lander, 1985) your compass wouldn’t work. 
*Probably lack of convection in the interior, maybe due to a super-heated mantle.
Next Up – Mercury
For a long time astronomers thought that Mercury was tidally locked (explained in this post) to the Sun, with a permanent, boiling-hot light-side and a freezing-cold dark side. But it turns out that Mercury is actually in a stable orbital resonance* (explained in same post) with the sun with a 3:2 ratio, meaning that Mercury rotates 3 times for every 2 times it rotates around the Sun**.
*The math is beyond the scope of this post, but the resonance is believed to be stable because Mercury’s orbit is so elliptical.
**Mercury’s year = 88 Earth-days.
All About Saturn
*My calculation. Could be wrong.
The bad news is that you almost certainly won’t see the rings this morning. The rings are tipped only about 2 degrees* toward us (North-side visible) right now, and in the dawn light I doubt you could pick them out even with a decent scope. The gaps in the rings, BTW are caused by a series of orbital resonances with several of Saturn’s moons. And speaking of moons…
*Saturn has an axial tilt of almost 27 degrees, which means that much of the time we can see the rings quite well.
Moons. Saturn has 61 moons, most of them little teensy things, but 13 of them good sized, including Titan, the most amazing moon in the solar system. It’s nearly the largest* and the only moon to have a substantial atmosphere (mostly nitrogen) and the only planetary body besides Earth known to have “lakes” in this case of liquid methane.
*Ganymede, which we talked about in this post**, is bigger. Like Ganymede, Titan is tidally locked to its planet.
**It’s like, I have a post for everything.
Side Note: I may have spotted Titan through my scope once, several years ago, still not sure. In any case, you won’t see it tomorrow.
OK, that’s all I got. But 3 planets, and my Favorite Joke Ever- wasn’t that worth waking up early for?
10 comments:
Dear Sir:
In your post, you wrote that Venus' temperature was the "... result of the runaway greenhouse effect in Venus’ overwhelmingly CO2 atmosphere." On behalf of the Venusian Chamber of Commerce, I want to assure your readers that this so-called "warming trend" on our planet is nothing more than a misreading of long-term cooling trends. Why, four centuries ago, it was a breezy 862F, two degrees higher than this century!
The Venusian Chamber of Commerce backs sensible environmental and economic protections -- for example, we were at the forefront of the popular Martian Embargo -- but warns against fanaticism in the face of so-called "global warming".
Thank you for your time.
Oh, OK. I though you were going to complain about the joke...
Now that was funny... I can see I have a lot of preparation to do before engaging in small talk with the Creator... Might be a little awkward as you say. I'm hoping that following your blog will give me a bit of an advantage.
Note to self...Don't use any Uranus jokes as an icebreaker.
Good post. I'll try to get up and take a look, but I doubt I'll be able to see much with my small binoculars. Perhaps I'll borrow my neighbor's spotting scope.
The botany is cool, but I must admit I like astronomy a bit more so I'm enjoying these recent posts. Like plants, our solar system is there everyday and seems pretty simple, from the stuff we learned in grade school. But if you start digging even a bit you quickly find all sorts of amazing and interesting details.
For instance, I'm embarrassed to admit this, but only a few years ago I learned (or more likely re-learned since I MUST have heard/read about this sometime before then) that the moon is tidally locked with Earth. Yep, I totally didn't get the whole dark side of the moon concept (even with Pink Floyd naming an album after it). It just seemed so weird that until Apollo 8 in 1968 no human had seen the back side of the moon.
Right now I'm reading "Big Bang" by Simon Singh which recounts the history of astronomy (and related fields like physics) from the early discoveries and theories up to the theory of the Big Bang. It's written for non-scientists but still includes enough detail that it's not fluff. It's been a page-turner for me as I often can't wait to find out how a new theory was devised, or how a problem was solved, or simply what happens next. I recommend it.
For a broad overview of the development of most of the scientific fields, I recommend "A Short History of Nearly Everything" by Bill Bryson. Loads of fascinating info and told in a conversational style. The astronomy/cosmology in section 1 was a bit light and I'd heard most of it before it was more of an overview and not as interesting to me. But section 2 where he delves into the beginnings of the various scientific disciplines was fascinating. It's amazing how some things were discovered and how quirky some of the early scientists were. This was the best part of the book. The final section on Evolution was good, but it's a tough subject mired in myriad details. Still, I felt Bryson did his best to sum it up and be honest and objective.
I'm thankful for people like Sagan, Singh, Bryson and Watcher who make science accessible because there really is some amazing stuff out there. And I don't want God to think I'm a dunce.
Chamberman Phil - funny!
Make that three times I have seen Mercury:)
The window to see it is so short, and it is so tiny and dim, that without a landmark near it (like Saturn!!), it can be hard to find. Very cool, thanks for the guide.
I did not know that about the reverse rotation of Venus.
Isn't it interesting that we have this HUGE moon, just the right tilt, just the right orbit, just the right electromagnetic field to shield from cosmic rays, Just the right day length that life as we know it is here. Must have been accidental:)
KK: Thanks for the recommendation book wise. I remember seeing a great PBS special where they went into the history of astronomy and the big bang, and how each era's scientists built upon the achievements of the prior ones as they tried to understand the universe. The process took thousands of years, and we are all "standing on the shoulders of giants" at this point.
I agree though: More astronomy (and molecular evolution, and geology...).
E
Dang, I wish this was the view at twilight instead of sunrise. 6:30 AM to the top of the mountain is a bit early for this sloth.
Here is one vote for more biology, especially the evolutionary stuff. It is revolutionary to me.
OK. So Kris wants more astronomy. Enel wants more astronomy, geology and (molecular) evolution. Jube wants more evolutionary biology…. You people and your demands!! I post and I post and I post but it’s never enough!!
Sorry, just had a moment there. Actually I have couple of cool astro-posts kicking around in my head that I hope to get to next week, including a super-cool post about the Big Dipper (it’s way, way, way cooler than you think.) I also want to do a post about my Dad, hearing loss and evolution… But then again maybe I’ll see something else super-cool over the weekend and get totally distracted.
Kris- I enjoyed Bryson’s book as well. My favorite section was the geology part- the whole Yellowstone supervolcano thing is pretty sobering for anyone within a few hundred miles of the place. I’ll have to check out Singh’s book; I read Timothy Ferris’ “The Whole Shebang” several years ago and really enjoyed it.
Enel- So did you see Saturn, too? It’s rising, while Mercury’s sinking, so this morning (Friday) it was almost straight above Mercury, maybe 40% of the way from Mecury to Venus.
Speaking of space this morning- did anyone else wake up @5:15 to see the moon-crasher impact live? OK, kind of a dud. Now I’m tired and I didn’t even ride this morning…
I saw all three again this am in a nice straight line.
I thought Saturn was the second brightest of the three with Mercury being the dimmest (and in the middle). You are probably right though.
If only Mars were around we could see all the naked eye planets in one night.
Great post, and now that's my favorite joke too!
regards--ted
Did you see the show this am? One of the best astronomic events I've ever observed.
Waning crescent moon above Saturn above Venus above Mercury in the pre-dawn gloaming. Incredibly beautiful.
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