The Night Sky

 

If you are a "Sky Dork" like me, you may appreciate this.  If not, maybe it will turn you in to one.

Not sure how many of you have noticed but, there is a really bright star in the the western sky.  It's actually not a star, it's Venus.  Cool thing is if you look directly under Venus you will get to see another planet, Jupiter.  Weeks ago they were really close to each other.  I have been watching their paths for several weeks now.  They just kind of crossed over each other last week.  Tonight you will see an awesomely bright crescent moon right next to Venus as the sun sets and the moon rises.  It will look just like the picture above.  If you want a real treat look over to the eastern sky and you will see an orange star that is a little bit brighter than all the others. You will notice again that this orange colored star is not what it seems either.  It's actually Mars.  Mars came closest to the Earth a few weeks ago than it has in a few years.

It fascinates me that there are now only 8 planets in our solar system (Pluto was demoted to "dwarf planet"in 2006) and at night we can see half of them!  We are on on Earth and Venus, Jupiter, and Mars are all visible.  Kinda cool huh?

Now just some quick facts about these planets

--You can fit over 1300 Earths inside Jupiter and 24 just in it's red spot!
--Jupiter averages 241,841,402 miles away from Earth!  And we can see it!
--Venus is the Hottest planet even though it's not the closest. It's dense atmosphere acts like an oven and it's average temperature is 867F, compared to Mercury's average daily temp of 425F as the closest planet!
--Mars' surface is made of the same stuff the clay in our Mid West states are made of, iron oxide..aka rust!
--The Moon has all those craters from meteors, most of those same sized meteors wouldn't harm us because Earth has an atmosphere that they would burn up in.  The Moon however is not so lucky.
--The Moon is believed to be a giant chunk of Earth that broke off from an asteroid hitting Earth 4.5B years ago and got caught in our orbit.  Either that or it's the actual asteroid...they are still arguing it now.  Read this article that came out just yesterday if you want.  http://news.yahoo.com/moon-formation-theory-challenged-study-160608598.html


Whether you like this kind of stuff or not, you got to admit that we are lucky as hell to be here and to be able to look at the sky and see our very, very far away neighbors.  Well, they are pretty close considering the size of our Universe but that's a whole new topic...

Cheers!


K.A. Ball