Welcome to the University of Texas Skywatchers Report for Monday January 24th to Sunday January 30th.
The moon is at third quarter on Tuesday the 25th and then we’ll have a waning crescent moon in the early morning skies for the remainder of the week.
Saturn is now setting just half an hour after the sun by midweek as it heads towards conjunction in early February.
Jupiter is up in the west-southwest and is setting at 8:15 p.m. at midweek.
In the morning skies, Mars is rising at 5:10 a.m. Early risers can see a nice pairing of the waning crescent moon and Mars on Saturday morning.
Venus is nearby and is rising just a few minutes after Mars but is much, much brighter than the Red Planet, shing at magnitude -4.6.
Mercury is rising at 6:30 a.m., almost an hour before sunrise.
In space anniversaries this week, Thursday January 27th marks the 55th anniversary of the loss of astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee when fire swept through their Apollo 1 capsule during a launch rehearsal test. The Apollo program was paused during the investigation and changes were made to the Apollo capsules before the next launch with astronauts on board, which would be the Apollo 7 mission in October 1968.
And in continuing news on the progress of the James Webb Space Telescope, last week the 18 primary mirror segments and the secondary mirror were successfully deployed from their launch configuration. The next step for the mirrors will be to do the fine alignment, which will take a few months. The next milestone for the telescope as a whole will be the insertion burn into the L2 Lagrange point, which comes this week.
Due to the current COVID surge, the start of spring semester viewing will be delayed as we continue to monitor the situation, so please continue to check our website outreach.as.utexas.edu for details about when we will be able to resume the telescope public viewing nights.
Thank you for calling the University of Texas Skywatchers Report.
