Moon treads on Scorpion

In the morning sky, the waning Moon slides down through Scorpius and Sagittarius.

(See the end note about enlarging illustrations. Moon and Sun are exaggerated 2 times in size. Arrows through the moving bodies show their movement (against the starry background) from 2 days earlier to 2 days later.)

The Moon passed closely north of the red supergiant star Antares, occulting (hiding) it, as shown on pages 105 in the “Occultations” section of Astronomical Calendar 2024.

But this happened 10 hours earlier than our scene, when southern and southeastern Asia were facing in the direction to see it.

Dwarf planet Ceres is in the scene, near the southernmost point of the ecliptic, but, at magnitude 9, far too faint for the naked eyue.

 

Occultations of language

I thought of using the occultation as an excuse for unloading some of my collection of ambiguous or otherwise ridiculous sentences seen in recent newspaper articles. Later, maybe.

 

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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.

 

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