Strange Universe

This coming Wednesday and Thursday nights, Saturn is the very nearest star to the Moon. And since Saturn reached its annual near point to Earth just three weeks ago, it happens to be as big as possible. We’d usually also say it’s as bright as it gets too, but that’s now changing because its rings are slowly getting oriented more and more sideways.

Here’s a twist on the expression “Blue Moon.” This coming Tuesday and Wednesday evenings at around 8 p.m., lower in the western sky, the nearest star to the crescent Moon will be the bluest of them all, which is Virgo’s brightest star, Spica. The lovely twilight of dusk will still be visible though fading, and the low waxing crescent Moon is always an ancient, evocative sight all by itself.

July’s first-ever James Webb Telescope images showed sharper-than-ever scenes of extremely distant objects – some distorted into lines and arcs by the warping of space created by invisibly distant massive objects. The goal is to ultimately see the earliest stars and galaxies being formed, once the universe became transparent 279,000 years after the Big Bang. But if the universe is eternal, the Big Bang could still have happened.

In our hyperbole-minded culture, it's easy to exaggerate. But one planet never disappoints. Through any telescope with more than 30x, Saturn elicits gasps. Oddly enough, photos of the ringed world do not pack the same visceral punch. You have to see it for yourself.

Pluto stood at opposition last week, meaning it’s now at its brightest of the year.But that's not good enough. It's so dim, even large backyard telescopes show it as a faint speck lost among the zillions of other dots in Sagittarius. At magnitude 14.3, Pluto is 600 times fainter than the dimmest naked-eye stars.

The next clear night at around dinnertime, look high in the north. You’ll see the famous Big Dipper, which you’ve probably recognized since childhood. But now follow the curved arc of the Dipper’s handle, and it points to a very bright orange star, the only brilliant star high in the north – the famous Arcturus. It’s the only celestial body to open a world's fair. And the only major star that will soon ... disappear!

Backyard astronomers are really getting into two-eye observing. Sales of binoviewers and matching eyepieces have exploded in the past five years. This week we’ll examine this 3-D realm in all its dimensionality.

June 5 begins the 6-day period when the Moon is at its absolute best. Many imagine that the Full Moon is the jewel of the heavens. But astronomers know that that’s when to close up shop and forget the universe. The Full Moon is disappointing because the sun then shines straight down like a flash camera to erase all shadows, making its wonderful craters disappear. As if that wasn’t bad enough, its light is then so brilliant that all the lovely nebulae and galaxies and most meteors seem to vanish because they can’t compete against such a bright background. Surprisingly, the Full Moon isn’t merely twice as bright as a half Moon, but 10 times brighter!

Neutron stars don't get much attention these days. They're not as notorious as black holes, nor as capable of fully warping spacetime. But this story really started before dawn on July 4, 1054, when a new brilliant star abruptly appeared near the left horn of Taurus the Bull, very close to where the Sun is located during the next few weeks. It was seen in broad daylight for more than a month. Good backyard telescopes show this as the remnant of an exploded star 6,500 light-years away, whose tendrils still rush outward at a thousand miles a second, visibly altering the nebula every few years.

Sunday night, May 15, we see a total eclipse of the moon. It is especially welcome because for the last couple of years every lunar eclipse has been penumbral, meaning the moon failed to touch even the edge of Earth’s shadow.