Welcome to the University of Texas Skywatchers Report for Monday October 5th through Sunday October 11th.
The moon is at third quarter on the night of Friday the 9th so we’ll have a waning gibbous moon for most of the work week and a waning crescent moon for the weekend.
Mercury is moving back towards the sun after greatest elongation last week and is setting around 8 p.m. this week.
Jupiter and Saturn continue to shine brightly in the south at the sky darkens. Jupiter is setting at 12:50 a.m. at midweek, followed by Saturn at 1:20 a.m.
Mars is at closest approach to Earth on Tuesday the 6th when the two planets will be about 62 million kilometers (or 38 million miles) apart. Earth and Mars have their closest approach to one another about every 26 months and how close the planets are at that approach varies over a 15-year cycle. The closest approach in 2018 was the best of this 15-year cycle, but at the time Mars was covered in a global dust storm, so it was difficult to make out features on the Red Planet while observing it with a telescope. This time, while the planets aren’t quite as close as in 2018, the features aren’t obscured by a dust storm and you should be able to make out some details in even modestly sized telescopes. Mars is rising shortly after sunset this week and is visible for the rest of the night.
Venus is rising in the east before dawn at around 4:30 a.m. this week.
In space anniversaries this week, Tuesday October 6th marks 30 years since the launch of the Space Shuttle Discovery carrying the Ulysses spacecraft on its mission to orbit and study the Sun. The spacecraft was delivered to low-earth orbit by the shuttle and then onboard solid rocket motors propelled it towards Jupiter for a gravity assist. Ulysses made three passes of the Sun over the course of its mission and was decommissioned on June 30, 2009.
All public viewing events on UT campus telescopes are on hold for the remainder of 2020. We will update the website outreach.as.utexas.edu with a new schedule when we are able to resume viewing.
While you’re waiting for in-person telescope viewing to resume, you can tune in to McDonald Observatory live streams from west Texas. You can view past events on the McDonald Observatory YouTube channel and you can follow the observatory on Twitter, Facebook and at McDonaldObservatory.org to be notified of future events.
Thank you for calling the University of Texas Skywatchers Report.
