April 9. 2010, 9.00pm
Perfect night! Not a cloud in the sky! Audrey, my wife, and our two dogs went to look for a dark open field to look at the sky.
Not far from our house is an abandoned development where developers clear cut a huge area. Except for a few access roads nothing was ever built. No street lights, perfect dark… well as dark as it can get in close proximity to the city. First I situated our vehicle so we would be in line to a North – South direction, just to make it a bit easier to find our direction in the sky. After a few minutes of setting up we were sitting in the back of our pick up, looking at the sky. Big dipper was straight above us with Dubah more or less at our Zenith. Following the end of the big dipper leads straight to Polaris. I used the position of Polaris to confirm where North is. Back to the Big Dipper, looking at the handle, right where the handle makes a bend is the star Zeta Ursae Majoris. If your eyes are still good, you can see a fainter star, Alcor, right next to it. It has always been said, if you can see that little star, you still have good eye sight. Those two stars are the first known true binary stars, two stars that orbit each other. According to the Internet Encyclopedia of Science those two stars are about 500 Astronomic Units (AU) apart and take about 5,000 years to complete one evolution around each other.
Next we looked for Orion, which was in the western sky and slowly setting. At the time of the observation, the belt was about 15 degrees above the horizon, and the azimuth was W. Because Orion was so low over the horizon, we really were only able to see the belt and the sword that is hanging down from the belt. We recognized Betelgeuse, the giant red star that marks the left shoulder of the hunter. With our binoculars we were able to have a better look at the sword, a fuzzy cluster that make out the Orion Nebula. With our hand held binoculars, the best we could make out was a fuzzy kind of star cluster, interesting but that’s about it. Looking at pictures that were made by the big telescopes or by the Hubble telescope is when things start to look interesting. Knowing what we are looking at, and knowing that this Nebula is over 1,200 light years away from Earth makes sky watching so much more interesting.
From the Orion constellation we moved our field of observation a bit higher up and South to Gemini. The location of Gemini was at an Azimuth of about SW and an altitude of about 50 degrees. There is a bunch of interesting stuff in the area of the Gemini constellation, such as the Eskimo Nebula which is over 2,870 light years away. This nebula is too far away and too small to be visible to the naked eye, at least not in the light polluted area of the city. Once we found Gemini we were looking for Mars, and sure enough, there was Mars again traveling through the constellation.
Right next to Gemini, at the same altitude but a bit more South is the constellation Leo, or so did the Planisphere say. I think I did see some part of the Leo constellation, but I am not sure. It was not easy to trace out this constellation.
We were sitting out there for about one hour, but then it got cold. For our first sky observation, this was a great success. We got to recognize some new constellations, Gemini and Leo, plus had a better understanding of what we looked at in the constellation we knew, such as the big dipper and Orion. For our next sky observation trip we made notes of a few things we need to have. The lounge chairs on the back of the pickup was good, but we will definitely need a thermos with hot coca to keep warm. The planisphere is a very good tool to get a rough indication of where is what, but because the actual sphere is small and difficult to see and read in the dark I will try to plan out what to look for and make separate notes that are easier to read in the dark. We need to make sure we have flashlights with red or green colored light. We found it very difficult to use the bright white flash light to read what’s on the planisphere and then to look at the sky. It always took a while for the eyes to re-adjust to the darkness.
With those few adjustments, we are looking forward to our next expedition exploring the night sky.
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