Late July Planetary Sights

It’s been a while since I’ve pointed out any sky sights to my readers, so here’s a quickie look at the post-sunset skies for the last week of July. For folks in the northern hemisphere, this is about how the sky looks just after sunset, when things are starting to get a bit dark. First, you’ll likely see a bright “star” low in the west. It’s not a star, it’s the planet Venus.

Back when I was working at the planetarium on campus during my grad school years, we would often get phone calls from members of the public about Venus. The most memorable one came from a person who said she’d been watching it for hours and it was moving slowly, so was it a UFO?  I guess she didn’t remember that as Earth turns, objects in the sky will eventually set in the west. Such is the case for Venus–it sinks below the horizon a while after sunset, giving us a pretty view of this cloud-covered planet.

As it gets darker, you should also be able to spot Saturn, not far from the star Spica (in Leo the Lion), headed for its rendezvous with the horizon shortly after midnight. If you have binoculars or a telescope, check out Saturn’s rings. Even at low magnification, they’re enough to get a “wow” out of you upon first sight.

Saturn is one of my favorite planets, right after Mars. I like Mars because it’s likely that humans will get to go there someday. Saturn just enchants me because of those rings. When I was a kid, those rings just screamed “alien world” at me!  Now, of course, we know a LOT about Saturn, and it has turned out to be a fascinating place in its own right. To read more about Saturn, check out the Cassini Mission web pages.  Mars info is available here.

Whatever you do this last week and a half of July, make sure it includes stepping outside after sunset and checking out the sky!

Our Home World, As Seen from Interplanetary Space

Friday and Saturday people around the world stepped outside and smiled waved to the sky. With that innocent action, they signified that WE are here on this planet. Across the solar system, spacecraft at Mercury and Saturn captured the moment.  Cassini at Saturn and MESSENGER at Mercury documented our planet from their unique vantage points in space.

The first images from that interplanetary photo shoot are now on Earth, being studied by scientists. They’ve made them available for us to see.

That’s our home, folks. It’s where we live. It’s all we got.

I’m going to leave you with the words of the late Carl Sagan, the scientist who inspired ME to get into science communication. He wrote in his book Pale Blue Dot, “From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Consider again that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.

The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there…

Earth is the only world known, so far, to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”

Think about his words. What do they say to you?