Category Archives: astronomy

amateur astronomy, astronomy, conjunction

Jupiter and Venus Hug in the West

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Catch the Conjunction!

The planets Venus and Jupiter in conjunction around June 30, 2015.
The planets Venus and Jupiter in conjunction around June 30, 2015.

Take a moment from your busy day to step outside after sunset tonight and the next few nights and check out the close conjunction of Venus and Jupiter in the western sky.  They make quite a pretty sight in the gathering twilight. I heard someone describe them as “hugging in the sunset” and that’s a very poetic way to see them.

June 30 conjunction view.
June 30 conjunction view.

“Conjunction” is an astronomy term that means “two objects look fairly close together in the sky”.  The formal definition is “when two objects in the sky have the same right ascension or ecliptical longitude when observed from Earth.” These astronomical events can include specific bright stars, as well, so occasionally you might see one or more of the planets in conjunction with a star such as Spica (in Virgo) or Regulus (in Leo).

What’s Really Happening?

As planets orbit the Sun (and as the Moon orbits Earth), they appear against a backdrop of stars, and occasionally other planets are in the view, too.  Think of it like being on a merry-go-round and looking out at the scenery as it goes by. People standing near the carousel appear against a backdrop of other people or trees or parking lots or whatever is out there.  They may all look close together, but in reality, they’re not. This is because we live in a 3D universe where objects are distributed throughout space.  From your perspective, however, they seem to be close together.

So, how far apart are they?  Right now Venus is about  670,198, 462 kilometers (416,442,017 miles) from Jupiter. (That’s 4.48 times the distance from Earth to the Sun.) If one of the planets happened to be in conjunction with the star Regulus, they would be 77.6 light-years apart! So, conjunctions are something of an optical illusion, collapsing the reality of space between them.

Conjunctions can happen on other worlds, and someday when we’re all living on Mars, we’ll be able to see events like this one that include Earth in the view. Until then, however, let’s make the most of the view from our planet! The planets are visible right after sunset and will slowly move toward the western horizon over the next few hours. Take out your telescope or binoculars to get a more detailed look at Jupiter. Happy gazing and clear skies!

 

astronomy, launch failures, spacex

We Choose to Do These Things Not Because They Are Easy

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But Because They Are Hard

Explosion of the Falcon booster carrying supplies to the International Space Station. Courtesy NASA.
Explosion of the Falcon booster carrying supplies to the International Space Station. Courtesy NASA.

By now, most everybody has heard that the SpaceX tried to launch the Falcon 9 and Dragon cargo capsule on a resupply mission to the International Space Station and that the booster blew up just over 2 minutes into flight. The details are still coming in, and I’m sure we’ll be seeing more reports with information as soon as the launch crew can assemble and understand them.

I’m not going to supply much commentary about what actually happened; that’s what the launch experts will do. It’s certainly a sad day, particularly for the folks at SpaceX and NASA, but also for a group of students whose Cubesat experiment was on its second try (their first one was destroyed in last October’s Orbital Sciences Mission disaster). There were other experiments and pieces of equipment aboard, and those are now a total loss.

I’ve seen a lot of people commenting on social media now, making unfounded accusations, making statements that belie a lack of understanding of just how tough it is to launch things into space and how SpaceX and NASA and others handle the  news of these events. Belligerence doesn’t uncover facts. Patient, scientific investigation will tell us the story. For the folks who want to rant and rave, think about this: if it happened to YOU and your company, would you want people saying about YOU what YOU have said about this mishap today? Think a little before you post rantings, people.

Apparently, people also don’t read history too much. Everybody who has ever tried to launch something has faced failures. Most of the time, those failures resulted in the loss of the craft, but they also taught us something about the complexity of launch.  A few times, we’ve lost people in those failures, and those disasters taught us a deeper lesson about exploration and the human will to expand our horizons and how gawdawful it is when lives full of promise are lost in the attempt to do something big and important.

At least today, no one’s life was lost. The mission hardware is a loss, but the lessons learned will be used to pick ourselves up and try again. If you don’t believe me, do some reading about the early days of the American space program. Put yourself in the boots of the Russians, who have had their share of problems; or in the place of the Arianespace people, who also know the bitter taste of launch failure, but have gone on to more success. Everyone who launches faces failure, while hoping for success.

In short, as I say in the headline, and echoing the words of the late President John F. Kennedy, who spoke them while I was still a tiny child:  “We do these things… not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”  And, launching is hard. No matter how many times I’ve watched a launch (and I’ve seen a LOT of them), the knowledge that something can go wrong is never far from our minds. A lot of things go right, and when they do, we get amazing knowledge about ourselves, our planet, our solar system, our galaxy, and our universe. We didn’t lose the universe today and we didn’t lose ourselves. A launch vehicle failed. But, another one will take its place, and we’ll move on and upwards.