Category Archives: venus

aliens, stargazing, venus

A Grand Time

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Another Blogging Milestone

The other day I made my one-thousandth post to this blog.  I didn’t know this milestone had passed until I logged in today and the helpful counter in the administrative area told me so. What a milestone to achieve with my post about Jupiter and its latest impact!  I’m grateful to all my readers who keep coming back. You’re why I write this stuff about the universe!

So, here in post 1,002, what should I write about?  Stargazing is always a good topic.  There’s nothing like a stroll under the night-time sky to inspire one’s thoughts toward cosmic ideas. We’ve been going out every night to watch the sunset and see who can spot Venus first.  It’s there, if you know where to look, and once the skies start to get kinda, sorta dark, the planet is blazing out like a beacon. The good thing about Venus is that you only need clear skies to see it because it’s bright in city skies as well as in the dark countryside. So, I encourage you to check out Venus in the evening.

Venus-gazing reminds me of a phone call we got at the planetarium back when I was a lecturer there.  It was from a person who was nearly terrified that the aliens were landing and that we (astronomers) hadn’t told anybody. I asked the caller what made them think the Earth was being invaded and they described how they had been watching this bright light in the western skies each night for a week and how that light got closer to the mountains each night and then disappear. They were sure that the alien ship was landing in the mountains each night. The caller was most upset when I explained that they were seeing the planet Venus set behind the mountains, just as the Sun did each night.  Well, I don’t know if they were upset at finding out what they were seeing or embarrassed at not having made the connection between the Sun setting behind the mountains and the planets (and stars) doing the same.

This was years before the Comet Hale-Bopp Heaven’s Gate cult madness and not long before I went back to school and spent some of my grad school years studying comets.  We were used to getting phone calls from the public about mysterious lights in the sky, but the imaginative stories some people told never failed to amaze (and sometimes sadden) me.

It seems that when it comes to the sky and understanding what’s in it, somehow some people suspend their common sense, their sense of disbelief, and will swallow anything.  I don’t know why that is. I just know that it happens.  Which is too bad, because actually studying and understanding how things in the sky work is a very satisfying and fascinating journey.  It’s not different from understanding (in general terms) how a car engine works or how a plane works.  If you want to know, you probably ask somebody who works on cars, or you find a book on how planes fly.  You seek to understand the physical reasons why the car runs and the plane flies.

We wouldn’t tell somebody that a car works by magic or that a plane goes up into the air because of magical spirits that lift it up, would we?  So, why, upon seeing a bright light in the sky, did a person jump to an unsupported conclusion that it was a shipload of LGMs on some kind of tour of the planets?  Why did the Heaven’s Gaters decide that a known comet was a mothership?  They didn’t use common sense — well, let me say that the person who called me at the planetarium at least wanted to know what the light really was. The Heaven’s Gaters didn’t want to know (0r couldn’t let themselves find out) what Comet Hale-Bopp really was.

Certainly stargazing lights some amazing thought-fires in your brain.  It certainly does in mine, and I’ve been lucky to be able to share those thoughts with readers since early 2002. It’s been a grand time doing a grand of postings!

venus, Venus Express

Venus in all Its Glory

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The Evening Star

Dont miss the final Moon-Venus conjunction of this seasons cycle. Theyll be a real eye-catcher at dusk on Friday the 27th, at least if youre in the longitudes of the Americas. These scenes are always drawn for the roughly middle of North America (latitude 40° north, longitude 90 ° west). European observers: move each Moon symbol a quarter of the way toward the one for the previous date. In the Far East, move the Moons halfway. The blue 10° scale is about the size of your fist held at arms length. For clarity, the Moon is shown three times actual size. (Click to embiggen)
Don't miss the final Moon-Venus conjunction of this season's cycle. They'll be a real eye-catcher at dusk on Friday the 27th, at least if you're in the longitudes of the Americas. These scenes are always drawn for the roughly middle of North America (latitude 40° north, longitude 90 ° west). European observers: move each Moon symbol a quarter of the way toward the one for the previous date. In the Far East, move the Moons halfway. The blue 10° scale is about the size of your fist held at arm's length. For clarity, the Moon is shown three times actual size. (Click to embiggen) (Courtesy SkyandTelescope.com)

We went out last night for dinner and on the way to the restaurant we noticed Venus shining high in the west. It’s really gorgeous these nights.  If you  haven’t been out lately, take  a step out and look west after sunset.  It’s absolutely stunning, shining like a jewel up there. You can’t miss it.

Over at BadAstronomy, Phil Plait has a nice entry called Beauty Without Borders, an effort to get people around the world watching Venus. There’s a website about it, called BeautyWithout Borders: an Evening for Venus.

The event started last night and will go through March 1, so strap on your Venus-viewing eyes, step outside somewhere with a good view to the west and join millions of people around the world who are feasting their eyes on planet Venus.

While we’re all on the ground watching the Evening Star, the European Space Agency has been studying Venus with the Venus Express spacecraft.  Lately the mission folks have been studying up on an eerie infrared glow in the nighttime atmosphere of Venus. That glow occurs in the presence of nitric oxide and its presence is giving scientists a good view into the temperamental atmosphere of the planet — its chemistry and composition, as well as atmospheric  temperatures and wind directions.

The nightglow is ultimately caused by the Sun’s ultraviolet light as it encounters the atmosphere and breaks the molecules up into atoms and other simpler molecules. The free atoms may recombine again and, in specific cases, the resulting molecule is charged up with some extra energy that it radiates as infrared light.

The night glow on Venus has been seen at infrared wavelengths before, giving away the presence of oxygen molecules and the hydroxyl radical, but this is the first detection of nitric oxide at those wavelengths from an area of the atmosphere that lies above the cloud tops at around 70 kilometers above the surface. The oxygen and hydroxyl emissions come from 90-100 kilometers altitude, whereas the nitric oxide comes from 110-120 kilometers altitude.

Want to read more about this cool find?  The ESA folks have a whole web page up about Venus’s atmosphere. Check it out!

And don’t forget to go study Venus with your own Mark I eyeball set. This week we’ll be seeing the last Moon-Venus conjunction for a while in our evening skies over the  next few days.  Read more about what’s up tonight at SkyandTelescope.com.