Welcome to the University of Texas Skywatchers Report for Monday December 7th through Sunday December 13th.
The moon is at third quarter late on Monday the 7th and then we’ll have a waning crescent moon in the pre-dawn skies for the remainder of the week.
Jupiter and Saturn continue to move closer to one another and are visible low in the southwest as the sky darkens after sunset. Jupiter is setting at 8:20 p.m. with Saturn following less than 10 minutes later.
Mars is high in the southeast in the early evening twilight and is setting at 2:45 a.m. at midweek.
In the morning skies, Venus is rising at 5:15 a.m. at midweek, still about 2 hours before sunrise. Look for the thin waning crescent moon above Venus on Saturday morning.
Mercury is now rising just a few minutes before the sun as it heads towards conjunction next week.
The Geminids meteor shower peaks on the night of Sunday the 13th into the morning of Monday the 14th. The Geminids get their name because they appear to come from a point in the constellation Gemini The Twins, which is fully above the horizon by 8:30 p.m. This shower is caused by the Earth passing through the debris of the object 3200 Phaethon which is categorized as an Apollo asteroid, the designation for a group of near-Earth asteroids. The Geminids are usually an active shower and frequently produces 120 meteors an hour at its peak. The peak of the Geminids occurs less than a day before the new moon making conditions very favorable for the shower this year.
In space anniversaries this week, Monday December 7th marks 25 years since the arrival of the Galileo orbiter at the Jupiter system. That same day, the spacecraft released its probe that descended into Jupiter’s atmosphere to measure the chemical composition and other aspects of the gas giant. The rest of the spacecraft entered orbit around Jupiter a few hours later and operated at the Jovian system until it was deorbited into the planet’s atmosphere in September 2003 to avoid the possibility of an impact on Jupiter’s moons, particularly Europa, to prevent any potential biological contamination.
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.
