Skies over Crestone, May 2008
by Kim Malville

May will be a great opportunity for viewing Mercury from Crestone. The elusive innermost planet of the solar system will be wonderfully well placed above our western horizon between April 28 and May 26. At the beginning of May, Mercury will be the brightest object in the north-northwest horizon. Start looking about a half-hour after sunset, and it will pop out as soon as the sky darkens. As the month progresses, it will slowly fade in brightness, but it will be higher in the sky, reaching its greatest height on May 12.

Mars will be high in the sky as the sky darkens. It starts out in the month in Gemini and enters Cancer on May 5. Because of its closeness to the earth, Mars is one of the fastest moving objects in our sky, except for an occasional comet or near-earth asteroid. One can track the changing position with your naked eyes, but it will be easiest with binoculars. The best opportunity to follow the motion of Mars will be on May 22 when it moves across the Beehive Cluster.

Saturn is a little higher in the sky at dusk than Mars. It is in Leo, close to the handle of the Sickle and the bright star Regulus. On May 3 it switches from retrograde to direct motion and starts to move eastward away from Regulus. Saturn will not return to the neighborhood of Regulus for another 3 decades.

Jupiter rises around midnight and is a brilliant feature of the dawn skies. Venus is invisible during May, lost in the glare of the sun.

May 1: Look west-northwest to see Mercury below and slightly to the right of the Pleiades. Catch it just before it sets. On this evening Mercury will be 9 light minutes away. (It takes light 9 minutes to reach us). By contrast, the beautiful Pleiades star cluster is 440 light years away. The six brightest stars of Pleiades is, of course, the symbol of Subaru. This cluster of stars, all born around 100 million years ago contains some 3000 stars, of which 14 can be seen with the naked eye.
May 5: New Moon
May 6: The very slender and delicate sliver of the youthful moon will be visible slightly above Mercury in the western skies. Further down is the Pleiades. Off to the left, you should be able to catch briefly a glimpse of Aldebaran, the red eye of Taurus the Bull.
May 9: A fat crescent moon forms a large triangle with Mars and Caster and Pollux.
May 10:The moon continues to move eastward and skims across the southern edge of the Beehive Cluster in Cancer. Best seen in binoculars, this large cluster, at a distance of 580 light years, is a little further away than the Pleiades. It was first observed in a telescope by Galileo in 1609 and led him to realize the immensity of the starry firmament. There are some fascinating interpretations of this cluster. Ptolemy saw it as the breast of Cancer the Crab. Other Greeks and Romans saw a manger containing two donkeys. The Chinese recognized a ghost riding in carriage and a puff of pollen blow from willows. I prefer the ghost.
May 12: The moon moves below Saturn and Regulus.
May 19: Full moon.
May 22/23: Mars is in the Beehive. If you have binoculars, grab them, and get another view of the Beehive as Mars glides through it.
May 24: The moon will be just a few degrees away from Jupiter at dawn.

Enceladus
Saturn has an astonishing 54 named moons. There are many more moons waiting in the wings to be explored and named. Enceladus, the fourteenth from the planet, is now emerging as one of the most likely places for life elsewhere in the solar system. One of the great discoveries of this century is a series of ridges, known as tiger stripes, which spew forth Old Faithful-like geysers of water and complex hydrocarbons. The temperature of the planet is 330 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. The water freezes quickly and falls as snow. The geysers also produce the mysterious E ring of Saturn.

Just a few tens of meters below its surface there appears to be a large reservoir of water held at a temperature close to 32 degrees Fahrenheit, where simple forms of life may live. This strange moon has the brightest surface of any object in the solar system, probably because it is covered with the same kind of fresh powder snow that the Vail Ski Corporation lusts over. This brilliant freshly fallen snow reflects 100 percent of the light falling on it.

On March 12 the Cassini space craft flew through its geysers at a distance of only 30 miles. What a feat! The moon is only 300 miles across and hurtles around Saturn at a speed of 30,000 miles per hour. Although it is one billion miles from earth, we made such a close encounter without hitting the moon. Another such daredevil feat is planned for Oct 9, when more tests for life will be made.

All of the features on the moon are named after places and people that appear in the Arabian Nights. There are craters named Aladdin, Ali Baba, and Sindbad. It seems the height of irony, that those tiger stripes, the strange hot cracks of Enceladus that erupt geysers of water were given the names Baghdad, Mosul, Cairo, and Damascus. Not just irony, it is downright bizarre that we are sending a robot spacecraft across the hot stripes of Baghdad, a billion miles away.

Top of Page