Santa Monica Mirror: Celestial Phenomena Visible in Santa Monica's Starry Sky

You may think that the Santa Monica’s starry sky is not worth talking about, what with the tremendous flood of lights from Los Angeles and its suburbs. However, some celestial phenomena remain visible, if you only find a place where you are shaded from direct illumination.
And, sometimes, an evening trip to the beach may reveal to you more stars than you imagined, if only you wait a few minutes to enable your eyes to switch to higher sensitivity in a darker environment. And if you owe a telescope, even a small one, you may see quite interesting objects even from your backyard. In this column, we want to alert you to phenomena accessible to you each week. This column is not intended for advanced amateur astronomers; they know where to go for a truly dark sky, and possess a number of guidebooks telling them what to look for. We think that everyone should look at the stars from time to time, and if we eventually convert some of you into ardent amateur astronomers, we have accomplished more than we hoped for!

The Sun
The Sun is now farthest from you than at any other time during the year! On July 6, the Earth was at the farthest point in its mildly elliptical orbit (we say it was at aphelion). This largest distance from the Sun amounts to 152.1 million km, or 94.5 million miles. This is 5 million km (3.1 million miles) more than at the beginning of January, and yet we have summer now and winter in January, when we are nearest to the Sun! The explanation is that the variation in distance is actually quite small (only 3%), and much more important is how high the Sun is above the horizon — and all of us know, perhaps too well, that it is much higher and shines much longer in July! Even various local effects (prevailing winds, temperature of the sea currents, distance from the sea, elevation) play a greater role in local weather than the variation in the distance to the Sun.

The Moon
The Moon is now an early morning guest in our sky. We had the last quarter on July 6, And the Moon will be new (and entirely invisible) on July 12. After that, we will be able to see a thin crescent above the western horizon after sunset. We will tell you more about that next time.

A Total Eclipse
Total eclipse of the Sun will occur on August 11, and will be visible along a long (but very narrow) belt from England through Turkey to India. It is perhaps too late for you to arrange for a trip to some of these places. However, if you happen to be near the belt of totality, then we would like to encourage you to make every effort to see the total eclipse. It is a fantastic phenomenon, when the dark disk of the Moon covers the bright disk of the Sun, and you see a beautiful corona (the outermost atmosphere of the Sun), together with the brightest stars and planets The belt in which the eclipse is total is nowhere more than 112 km wide, so you must choose your viewing place very carefully. The belt of total eclipse goes across Plymouth in England, crosses the invasion beaches in France, then runs over Rouen and Strasbourg in France, then over Stuttgart and Munich in Germany, over Salzburg and Graz in Austria, over Lake Balaton and Szeged in Hungary.
The longest duration of the eclipse (no more than 2.4 minutes!) comes near Bucharest in Romania. Then the totality belt crosses the Black Sea, and continues across Turkey, over Esfahan in Iran, and Karachi in India. Farther east in India, the visibility ends at sunset.
The eclipse duration is so short and the weather is often so unpredictable that you may wonder if it is worth any effort to try to see it. Let me repeat: A total eclipse of the Sun is such a fantastic (as well as rare) event that it is worth every effort - and even if it is overcast, the associated effects (darkness during the day) are impressive.

The Planets
Even from the city, it is fairly easy to find the two bright planets adorning our evening sky. Venus is so bright that you cannot miss it. Just look towards the west any time around 8:30 p.m., and you cannot miss the brilliant star there. You might have seen it, knowingly or unknowingly, for a number of weeks by now. However, if you have not looked yet, you better hurry, because it will not be there much longer! At the present, Venus is at its brightest. When the sky gets a little darker, you may spot, quite near to Venus, a much fainter star. This is Regulus, the brightest star in the constellation Leo (the Lion), and is one of the brightest (real) stars in the sky; actually, it ranks 21st in brightness, and still qualifies as a star of the first magnitude. Yet it is no match for Venus! You would certainly guess that quite a few such stars would have to be assembled to match the brilliancy of Venus. However, you will hardly expect that, actually, 220 stars like Regulus would be needed!
   If weather is friendly, you should certainly attempt to look at the western evening sky on Thursday, July 15. You will see, in addition to Venus and Regulus, a beautiful, thin crescent of the reborn Moon!
   Mars is much fainter than Venus, yet it is still easy to see even from the city. As the sky gets darker, you can see Mars high in the south, and no far to the east from another star of the first magnitude, Spica in the constellation Virgo. Mars is brighter than Spica, and you will recognize it by its orange (sometimes even reddish) color. A look through a telescope—even through a fairly powerful one—at either of these two planets is not very rewarding. Mars, essentially a small planet, is receding from us fairly fast, and its disk measures only about 10’ (arc-seconds). You won’t see much on its surface, unless you are a very skilled planetary observer. As for Venus, this goddess of love is permanently hiding behind dense atmospheric clouds, but you can fairly easily recognize that the illuminated part of its disk is actually rather a thin crescent. The disk is more than 3 times larger than the disk of Mars.
   The two telescopically rewarding planets, Jupiter and Saturn, are morning stars, both shining in the constellation of Aries. If you wake up on the morning of July 9, look to the east: you will see the two bright planets with a crescent Moon. Otherwise, wait till the fall, and you will have both planets smiling at you in the evening sky.

The Stars
Then, if you are eager to look at something nice in the sky with your telescope, you may feel robbed this coming week—no Moon, no good planets to look at However, the absence of the Moon will make the evening sky darker, and you may spot more easily several interesting stars! Most of you will find, without difficulty, the Big Dipper (astronomically, Big Bear—Ursa major). The middle star in the handle is called Mizar. If the visibility is sufficiently good, a normal eye should detect a fainter star, Alcor, above Mizar. The difficulty here is not so much the quality of your eye but the quality of the sky; Mizar of the 2nd magnitude, Alcor of the 4th. A good amateur telescope will show you, very easily, that Mizar itself consists of two stars, the fainter one being again of the 4th magnitude, separated from the brighter star by 14’.
   A much more demanding test of good eyesight lies farther to the east, very near the conspicuous star Vega. Vega is the 5th brightest star in the sky, and has no competition in the northeast, so you cannot miss it. Very close to it, to the north-east, is a star labeled Epsilon on star maps. Seeing it requires an even better sky, since it is fainter than Alcor.
   A good eye, and certainly good binoculars, will show you that here are actually two equal stars close together; they are separated by more than 3 arc minutes (the eye can, under good conditions, resolve two stars at a distance of about 1 arc minutes. And, if you use a telescope with a magnification about 100 times, each of the two stars will again split into two. Here the separations are only between 2 and 3 arc seconds. Epsilon Lyrae is a quadruple system with four nearly equal stars!
   Another interesting spectacle of the July sky is the presence of a number of globular clusters. They are huge, spherically symmetrical stellar systems, and the larger ones may easily contain over one million stars. In good binoculars, or in a small telescope, you will see them as circular patches, brighter at the center. Larger telescopes resolve at least the outer parts into individual stars. The brightest globular cluster in the northern hemisphere lies in the constellation of Hercules, just west of Vega. It is not difficult to find a group of four stars that forms a shape reminding you of a flower-pot. The globular cluster is in the western side of this configuration, and is known as M(essier) 13. Another globular cluster, M 4, is also easy to find. First find the first-magnitude star Antares in Scorpius, in the south-east. M 4 is not far from it, to the west. In order to locate another globular cluster, M3, you first identify the orange first-magnitude star called Arcturus: the handle of the Big Dipper points to it. You can find M 3 by moving your binoculars to the northwest of Arcturus. And yet another beautiful globular cluster, M 5, lies to the south-east of Arcturus, in a constellation that you can fairly easily recognize as the head of a snake (Serpens). All these globulars are easily seen in binoculars, and are beautiful sights in a telescope, but you must observe away from the city

A Good Laugh
And, at the end, something for a good laugh: Isaac Newton, the discoverer of gravitation and of the laws of motion, is considered to have been one of the greatest geniuses humanity ever had. Nevertheless (or because of this?), he never married. His landlady permitted him to keep a cat in the bathroom, and to make a hole at the bottom of the door so that the cat could go out. The cat enjoyed this opportunity fully, so in due time she had kittens, of which Newton was permitted to keep one. Then the landlady, to her great dismay, found Newton cutting another hole in the bathroom door. Don’t you worry, said Newton, this will be a much smaller hole—you see, the kitten must also be able to get out from time to time!

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