Is there a smile across the sky?

You may be one of the many who have recently joined this blog, and I heartily thank you. It’s a “community” – friends who can converse, because you can freely comment.

I don’t want to start by depressing you with the scientific (maybe) report I’ve written on the hallucinations that follow heart surgery, to which I concoct an astronomical twist. So before that something cheerful.

Can you find us the cosmic smile, an east-west line of at least four stars, the end ones tilted to the north?

(I don’t know of such an asterism myself, because I can’t yet look; but you could if you’re the sort of person who looks at charts, such as the Map of the Starry Sky.)

And here is the current evening sky scene. I may from now on blog mostly these scenes, for which I’ve developed a design more useful, I think, than those in other websites and newspapers. After all, most other information on the events in the sky is in the Astronomical Calendar. (The online version of the 2024 book is already available; the printed version will be available in a few days; this blog will tell you.)

See the end note about enlarging illustrations.

Not much is happening to the “left” (east) of the Sun. A planet on the horizon. Ceres, largest of dwarf planets, is far below naked-eye visibility. Arrows through planets and the Sun show how they move, in relation to the starry background, over five days. The Moon is below the horizon; it is shown for five dates, so that you can see how it will later emerge as a slender crescent. Most other features shown are either abstract (such as the celestial equator, and the “antapex of Earth’s motion,” away from which we are flying) or too low to see in the bright twilight. But the broad arrow showing how far the sky rotates in one hour suggests how it will darken as the Sun goes lower, and stars will prick into visibility.

Let’s see how different it is if you are “down” in Australia or New Zealand.

The lines in the sky, celestial equator and ecliptic, cut the evening horizon at a different angle, because you are around on a southerly part of the ball of Earth. They lean over to the right instead of left. And Mars, being on a part of the ecliptic south of the equator, has been swung by this change of angle to a positon 10 degrees vertically above the west point on the horizon.

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This weblog maintains its right to be about astronomy or anything under the sun.

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” or “Open image in new tab”, 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.

Sometimes I make improvements or corrections to a post after publishing  it.  If you click on the title, rather than on ‘Read more’, I think you are sure to see the latest version.  Or you can click ‘Refresh’ to get the latest version.