Eyes Full Of Stars

Night sky fans, mark your calendars! March 3rd – 16th are the dates for the 2010 GLOBE at Night campaign. Now in its 5th year, GLOBE at Night is a citizen-scientist program to survey the extent of light pollution worldwide. By compiling data received from observers, event organizers can more accurately determine the impact of artificial lighting on the quality of the nighttime environment.

Over the past couple of weeks, I spent more time trying to get images of Mars during its current apparition. Snowy weather and poor atmospheric conditions presented some challenges. But, I finally managed to make a decent capture last week. Compared to the image I made in late January, last week’s image already shows the disc of the planet has decreased in size and shadow is creeping in on the following, or morning, side of Mars. As Mars gradually becomes more distant, the shadow will appear to grow as the sunlit parts of Mars are seen by Earthbound observers at an increasingly oblique angle.

This time we explore a constellation as elusive as the creature it represents, Monoceros – the Unicorn. Located east of Orion and in between the two dogs, Canis Major and Canis Minor, Monoceros is a collection of faint stars lying along the plane of the Milky Way. With a name derived from the Greek monokeros meaning unicorn, it is one of a few star patterns in the northern hemisphere with a modern history

European cartographers first added the mythical beast to other established constellations in the early 17th Century. Dutch mapmaker, Petrus Plancius, included it on his celestial globe published around 1613. Jakob Bartsch, a German astronomer, used the Latin name, Unicornus and added it to his star charts in 1624.

The mid-winter night sky presents a treasure trove of targets well suited for viewing with binoculars. One of the most easily found is the Pleiades open star cluster. Nearly overhead at night fall, it is a group of several hundred sibling stars that formed from the same mother nebula. Their common origin makes the star cluster’s nickname ‘the seven sisters’ especially appropriate. At about 400 light years from us, the star light we see today began its journey about the  time when Galileo made the first astronomical use of a telescope.