Here is the Moon’s progress past the two great planets over the next several days.
See the end note about enlarging illustrations.
The scene is for the evening of Saturday August 10, but nothing is much different on the other dates except for the positions of the fast-moving Moon.
And those would be noticeably different for locations other than the one we choose, the USA’s Central time zone. For instance, for the Pacific zone at the same clock time, the Moon of the evening of Aug. 9 will be 2/24 of a day’s journey onward. And for the same clock time in Britain, that Moon is 6/24 of a day’s journey back – therefore to the right of Jupiter.
I draw the Moon at twice its true size. The symbol for Jupiter is sized for its brightness, to compare with the stars; but for Saturn there is a little picture, at 150 times true scale, to show the present attitude of its rings. Though Pluto’s position is marked, it is way below the limit of naked-eye visibility.
You may notice a few improvements in my diagram of this kind. Form-lines, representing the traditional shapes we perceive as “constellations,” are, this time, drawn only for the more conspicuous ones. The individual stars shown, this time, are the few brighter than magnitude 2. But there are dots representing those other stars that define the form-lines. For instance, the shape of the huge Scorpion is defined by at least twenty stars; but only one of them, Antares, is of the first magnitude, so it is shown with appropriate size, and with a color indicating its “M” spectral type (though it isn’t really so red).
The Moon was at First Quarter (D-shaped) on August 7. It passes nearly 8° north of Antares on Aug. 9, and about 2° north of Jupiter on Aug. 10 at 1 Universal Time (back in Aug. 9 by American clock times).
Then on Aug. 12 it will pass Saturn, only about 4 hours before descending southward through the ecliptic plane. The result is an occultation – a covering of Saturn by the Moon.
The “shadow” of the Moon cast by Saturn’s remote light crosses Earth almost centrally, but geographically it lies south of the equator, because of Earth’s attitude at this season.
For observers in Australia, Saturn will disappear into the narrow dark strip of the 11-day-old Moon’s leading edge.
For us in Earth’s northern hemisphere, all these celestial transactions happen low over our horizon, because Jupiter and Saturn, and the Moon when it joins them, are traveling the southernmost reach of the ecliptic.
But it is in our summer evenings that we see these southern cibstellations of the zodiac, the one that really looks like a monster Scorpion and the one in which the ancients perceived an Archer and we perceive a Teapot, with the central and therefore brightest region of the Milky Way slanting through them.
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ILLUSTRATIONS in these posts are made with precision but have to be inserted in another format. You may be able to enlarge them on your monitor. One way: right-click, and choose “View image”, then enlarge. Or choose “Copy image”, then put it on your desktop, then open it. On an iPad or phone, use the finger gesture that enlarges (spreading with two fingers, or tapping and dragging with three fingers). Other methods have been suggested, such as dragging the image to the desktop and opening it in other ways.
Your chart showing Jupiter west of Saturn (but since only one zodiacal constellation behind, destined to catch up by late next year) reminded me of your discussion of the gathering planetary alignment in 1980 – 1982. Although I’m two weeks late compared to your diagram above, here is my image of the ecliptic Sunday evening (25 Aug) highlighting Jupiter and Saturn:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/starvergnuegen/48621344017/in/dateposted-public/
My straight-line ecliptic is aligned pretty well with reference stars at several points, but the image is sufficiently wide-angle that I *should* have drawn it slightly curved, but I can’t figure out how to draw a curve that gentle LOL.
A separate question: your astronomical calendar for 1977 listed an entire pageful of your publications. Are those still available somewhere? For example, you listed “A Year in the Piedmont” and “Varus, Give Me Back My Legions”. I live here in the Virginia Piedmont, as I suppose Greenville also is, so it caught my attention. Did you describe the seasonal changes and flora/fauna typical of the Piedmont, or was it something different?
Eric, you’re clever enough in getting that photo and mapping onto it that we’ll forgive you for too straight an ecliptic.
That page in Ast. Cal. 1977 (I’m sure, though I can’t at the moment get the volume down from the shelf) was a rash display of ideas that I intended to carry out, perhaps by putting them into my magazine “In Defense of Variety”. Only a few have been achieved (some may be in my website “Other Paths”).
The “Year in the Piedmont” would probably have been a calendar based on natural history instead of astronomy. While living and vegetable-gardening at Traveler’s Rest in the South Carolina piedmont I was making hundreds of drawings and notes about when grapevine buds first appeared, migrant birds arrived, caterpillars stung my bare feet, and so on. They’re still, along with much else, mouldering in boxes, for someone else ultimately to throw away if I don’t.
I’m not sure what “Varus, give me back my legions” would have been about. That was what emperor Augustus wailed on learning that his army under general Varus had been destroyed by wild Germans. But my essay might have been more about my pet theme of the value of human variety.
Guy, thank you for the explanation ~ you certainly did list a LOT of publications on that page! The Varus title caught my eye because I’ve always thought that battle in the Teutoburger Wald was fascinating. I think I read once that a British historian in the 1800’s nominated that battle as the most significant historical event in the past 2,000 years, owing to his assessment that the Roman advance through Europe was halted there. Had they won the battle, it would have been likely that a much greater portion of Europe, including all of the Germanic tribes, would have experienced development under the Roman sphere instead of with a much greater degree of independence than Gaul or the rest of Latin Europe.
Another of the What If speculations about history. I took up the one about what would have happened if the Athenians had not fended off the Persian empire by winning the battles of Thermopylae and Salamis.
There was a book about the What Ifs not long ago. Maybe others are about Norse survival in North America before Columbus; the industrial revolution starting in northern England; the Suez Canal…
I’m a little more skeptical of those speculations now. Some great developments might have happened even if antecedent incidents had been different.
The speculation about what the Germans call the Teutoburgerschlacht or Varusschlacht seems doubtful. The later Roman province of Germania covered the Germanic-inhabited areas of southern and western Germany , including I think the site of the battle. The Roman empire probably reached its high-tide mark, and began to shrink by abandoning Scotland and Dacia (Romania).
Eric, I managed to get out Astronomical Calendar 1977 from under the pile (at present I have no bookshelf high enough to store them vertically) and that page about publication ideas isn’t in it; you must have mistyped the number. Could you tell me which year you found it in?