Table of contents for May 2024 in Astronomy

PRECISION FACEPLANT Japan’s Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) mission made the most precise robotic lunar landing ever on Jan. 19, just 180 feet (55 m) from its intended target. However, it landed on its nose, limiting its ability to gather solar energy. COSMIC CAT VIDEO An ultra-high-definition video of an orange tabby cat named Taters chasing a laser pointer across a couch was streamed from NASA’s Psyche mission to Earth at a distance of 19 million miles (31 million km) via laser transmitter Dec. 11, serving as a demo for high-bandwidth deepspace communications. BETA CAT JWST has revealed that the debris disk around the young star Beta Pictoris — famously, the first such disk directly imaged, in 1984 — has a previously unseen curved feature, dubbed the “cat’s tail.”…

Visible to the naked eye Visible with binoculars Visible with a telescope The evening sky loses its last planet early in May, shifting the attention of planetary observers to the morning. Try to glimpse Jupiter before it’s lost in the Sun’s glow soon after sunset. Meanwhile, Mercury, Mars, Saturn, and Neptune are up before sunrise. A waning crescent Moon joins the group twice during May, adding beauty to the scene. Jupiter sets within an hour of the Sun on May 1 and earlier each successive evening, limiting its observability. On the 1st it shines at magnitude –2, bright enough to be visible in early twilight. At the onset of civil twilight, when the Sun is 6° below the horizon, Jupiter stands 4.5° high. It’s not a great altitude to see…

You heard it from your parents. You’ve seen it printed in bold on telescopes. “Do not look at the Sun!” But how can you resist observing the fiery ball of furious fusion that dominates the sky? Fortunately for the curious among us, there are some safe ways to do just that. And while the total solar eclipse of April 8, 2024, may be in the rearview mirror, the Sun’s 11-year cycle of activity is nearing its peak, so there is plenty to see. How to observe the Sun First, don’t throw away your eclipse glasses! You can use them on any sunny day to get a safe view of the Sun. But to get a close-up view of our nearest star with a telescope, there are two types of filters…

Space Age nostalgia I still remember watching Apollo 8’s memorable Moon encounter as a 12-year-old on Christmas Eve 1968. Those who weren’t around to experience the early days of the space program will never know the excitement we felt as we watched history play out on our black-and-white and, if we were lucky, color televisions. The networks would give wall-to-wall coverage to a rocket launch. We would sit glued to the television absorbing every minute. The tumultuous times of the ’60s and early ’70s notwithstanding, I would love to relive those days again. —Robert Lindner, Oak Creek, WI Victory and defeat I just finished the December 2023 issue, including the article about the Civil War entitled “A dark war and a bright night sky.” My only complaint is that the…

A. FLIGHT 1 April 19, 2021 Ingenuity successfully takes off, reaching an altitude of 33 feet (10 m) and hovering for 30 seconds. B. FLIGHT 5 May 7, 2021 Ingenuity completes its tech demo phase and departs its first airfield, dubbed Wright Brothers Field, heading south to begin exploring Jezero Crater. C. FLIGHT 10 July 24, 2021 Ingenuity makes its first official scouting flight, taking aerial images of surface fractures and ridges on the crater floor. D. FLIGHT 19 scheduled Jan. 5, 2022; departed Feb. 7, 2022 An unexpected dust storm causes the first-ever weather delay to a flight on another planet. After wiggling its rotors to shake off settled dust, Ingenuity finally takes off over a month later. E. FLIGHT 29 June 11, 2022 A low battery due to…

SECOND ON LISTS of lunar valleys is Rheita. The more famous Alpine Valley was created when the crust pulled apart, allowing the land to collapse. In contrast, the Rheita Valley is understood to be a nice line of overlapping craters where each impactor fell in rapid succession, obliterating the standard central peaks and rims of the ones formed just before. Around any young and large impact feature you can find several crater chains pointing radially away from its center, formed as debris from the excavation shoots out in linear sprays like a spoke on a bicycle wheel. The Rheita Valley is the widest such chain, implying that the original impact must have been rather large. It was: Mare Nectaris lies not far to the north. With a bit of practice…

BE READY at the end of astronomical twilight to catch Comet 13P/Olbers sinking in the north west. It should be shining at 8th magnitude, comparable to the nearby Crab (M1), the nebula that started Messier on his catalog. Contrast their shapes and profiles. As you sweep between them, enjoy some starless voids: nearby corridors of interstellar dust, some sporting Barnard numbers. Imagers will delight in the comet’s diatomic carbon-green halo as Olbers courses past the hydrogen-red Tadpoles of IC 410 from the 16th to the 18th. The twilight is more of a challenge than the Moon. Catch the comet again on the evenings of the 20th to the 22nd, less than 1° from the splashy star cluster M36. Returning every 69.5 years, Olbers never gets closer to the Sun than…

I CAN STILL REMEMBER the night that marked the start of my journey into astrophotography. It was a clear and moonless August evening five years ago, and the year’s Perseid shower was at its peak. As I looked toward the north, I could see meteors streaking across the sky in bright lines. I raced back inside to grab my Nikon D90 and tripod, then pointed the camera in the general direction of the meteor shower’s radiant and simply took a couple of five-second exposures. My setup was rudimentary at best. The only lens I had at the time was a 200mm telescopic lens — not exactly suited for wide-field shots! — and my tripod was about as steady as a wobbly restaurant stool. The results were even worse: The star…

A detailed Moon Lincoln Publishers New York, NY Exploring the Moon With Robert Reeves details the history of the Moon’s formation and how to capture images of it for yourself. Author and astrophotographer Robert Reeves attempts to demystify one of the most visible night-sky targets with years of research on the topic. The 300-page book features over 400 illustrations to help readers understand the types of pictures they can get when photographing the Moon. ebook $17.99; paperback $39.95; hardcover $54.95 www.amazon.com Portable Dob Sky-Watcher Richmond, BC The Virtuoso GTi 150P is a portable tabletop Dob ideal for beginners. It has built-in Wi-Fi controls and an app to access over 10,000 objects, including many in our solar system. Accessories include a red-dot finder as well as 25mm and 10mm eyepieces. $470.00…

Mercury never strays far from the Sun in our sky. The innermost planet follows a tight orbit around our star so even at its best, it hangs low in the west after sunset or low in the east before sunrise. That’s why it’s worth targeting Mercury this month as it puts on its finest evening show of 2024, becoming conspicuous in evening twilight after midmonth. At greatest elongation July 22, the planet lies 27° east of the Sun and stands 13° high in the west-northwest an hour after sundown. It lies 4° west (lower left) of 1st-magnitude Regulus, Leo the Lion’s brightest star. Five days later, Mercury passes 3° south (upper left) of the feline’s luminary. The planet’s phase shows up nicely through a telescope as the month ends. On…

EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE UNIVERSE THIS MONTH In the quest for the universe’s smallest starlike objects, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has identified a new record holder: a tiny, free floating brown dwarf (inset) with a mass only three to four times that of Jupiter. Brown dwarfs are objects that straddle the line between stars and planets. Like stars, they form from a contracting cloud of gas, but never reach the required temperature or density in their cores to begin fusing hydrogen to helium — earning them the name “failed stars.” This petite object is one of three brown dwarfs reported in December 2023 and captured by JWST’s Near-Infrared Camera in its view of the young star cluster IC 348, about 1,000 light-years away in Perseus.…

DESTROYER OF WORLDS The star J0931+0038 has an unusual composition with heavy elements that no known model of nucleosynthesis can explain. Astronomers think it formed from the remains of an exploded star at least 50 to 80 times more massive the Sun, which they’ve dubbed the “Barbenheimer Star.” CMB CO-DISCOVERER DIES Cosmologist Arno Penzias, who shared one half of the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physics with Robert Wilson for codiscovering the cosmic microwave background, died Jan. 22 at the age of 90. CLIMATE CRISIS CONTINUES A NASA analysis concluded that 2023 was the warmest year on record, with an average surface temperature 2.1 F (1.2 C) higher than a baseline period from 1951–1980. INTERGALACTIC SURVIVOR A 10-billion-year-old star found orbiting the Milky Way’s central supermassive black hole at a distance…

ASTRONOMERS MAY HAVE FOUND a dark, primordial galaxy — an enormous, undisturbed mass of cold hydrogen gas that has yet to form any stars — sitting in the modern-day universe. If confirmed, the object could offer astronomers a look at an early stage of galactic evolution. “I’ve been in this field for quite a few decades, and we’ve wanted to find something like this for a very long time,” study leader Karen O’Neil, an astronomer at the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia, tells Astronomy. The first hint of something unusual was a discrepancy between observations made by the Green Bank Telescope (GBT) and the Nançay Radio Telescope in France as part of a coordinated survey of faint galaxies. Though they were supposed to be looking at the same patch…

WHEN THE JAMES WEBB SPACE TELESCOPE (JWST) opened its eye to the universe in 2022, scientists anticipated getting a whole new view of star formation. The instrument’s ability to see infrared light not only would help pierce the dusty veil that too often hides star birth from optical astronomers, but it also would reveal emission from many of the simple molecules that populate stellar nurseries. Now researchers have harnessed both of these powers to reveal the inner workings of Herbig-Haro object 797 (HH 797), the outflow from a protostar still condensing from the interstellar medium. JWST’s exquisite resolution shows that what astronomers previously thought was a single protostar with oppositely directed outflows is actually two protostars, each with its own pair of outflows. THE LOWDOWN ON HH 797 JWST’s target…

Eta Aquariid meteor shower ETA AQUARIID METEORS Active dates: April 19–May 28 Peak: May 5 Moon at peak: Waning crescent Maximum rate at peak: 50 meteors/hour THIS IS THE YEAR to watch the Eta Aquariid meteor shower. In addition to a favorable Moon (New Moon occurs May 7), Earth passes very close to a stream of debris ejected by Halley’s Comet (the shower’s parent object) about 3,000 years ago. The shower is active from April 19 through May 28 and peaks on May 5. The radiant lies near Zeta (ζ) Aquarii and rises at 2:30 a.m. local daylight time in the continental U.S., reaching an altitude of 20° two hours later. This gives most observers a fine opportunity to watch for an hour or two before morning twilight. The predicted peak…

FREQUENTLY, THE BRIGHTEST and easiest-to-track asteroid through suburban skies is 4 Vesta. Starting May at magnitude 8.3, the main-belt world is falling behind Earth in its orbit so slowly that it barely fades 0.1 magnitude all month. Vesta is typically the second or third-brightest dot in the field of view, despite crossing in front of the rich winter Milky Way in Gemini. By comparing star charts to the view in his telescope, Heinrich Olbers (the same guy who found Comet 13P) noted one light out of place, making it the fourth “missing planet” discovered between Mars and Jupiter. Like him, you should make a sketch of the field and return in a night or two to confirm that the interloper has moved. From May 22 to 26, Vesta is almost…