Welcome to the University of Texas Skywatchers Report for Monday February 7th to Sunday February 13th.
The moon is at first quarter on Tuesday the 8th and then we’ll have a waxing gibbous moon for the remainder of the week.
Jupiter is low in the west after sunset and is setting at 7:35 p.m. at midweek. Jupiter is currently the only planet visible to the unaided eye in the evening and early next month it will join the rest of the planets in the morning skies.
This week in the pre-dawn skies, Venus is rising at 4:45 a.m. at midweek and will reach its greatest illuminated extent on the 12th at magnitude -4.6.
Mars follows shortly behind Venus and rises at 5:00 a.m. this week.
Mercury is rising at 5:45 a.m. and is still moving away from the sun and towards greatest elongation next week.
Saturn is just beginning to emerge from conjunction and is too close to the sun to see.
In space anniversaries this week, Friday February 11th marks the 25th anniversary of the launch of the Space Shuttle Discovery on the second servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope. The mission lasted nearly 10 days and included 5 EVAs totaling over 33 hours of spacewalk time for the four astronauts who did the maintenance work on Hubble. The astronauts upgraded several of the scientific instruments on the telescope and expanded its research capabilities.
And continuing the news of Hubble’s eventual successor, the James Webb Space Telescope, the space telescope collected its first photos last week as part the process to align and calibrate the telescope’s 18 mirrors. The whole process will take approximately 3 months.
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.
