We’re back to standard time now, so hopefully you’ve set your clocks back to get an extra hour of sleep. Most people don’t need to worry about changing their clock because the clock handles the change automatically.
The only people I know who need to worry about DST vs. Standard Time are students in an astronomy class who are tracking the movement of the sun and seeing the sun rise at its highest around noon standard time and at 1 pm DST point around. Those of us who drive to work have noticed this change as well, as the sun rises higher in the morning and lower as we drive home.
Tuesday night will give us a nice long total lunar eclipse as the full moon slides into the darkest part of Earth’s shadow (umbra) at 1:09am until 2:17am where it will fully enter Earth’s umbra and Appears orange – the red known for total lunar eclipses.
The total lunar eclipse phase will last until 3:42AM, and the Moon will leave the umbra at 4:49AM (all standard times). You can see all this happening high up in the southwest sky. The full moon will be between Aries and Taurus above Cetus.
During a total eclipse, the full moon turns orange-red because the orange and red sunlight passing through Earth’s atmosphere is able to bend around the Earth and reach the moon, even when it’s in complete shadow. Shorter wavelength colors such as green, blue and violet are scattered away. At the center of the umbra, blues and purples are nearly a billion times darker, while oranges and reds are only 25,000 times darker.
A completely eclipsed moon will appear orange, red or even brown, depending on the amount of dust in our global atmosphere. The massive amount of dust from the volcanic eruption that spreads across the globe can make a completely eclipsed moon appear dark brown, almost black, while a global dust-free atmosphere would give the moon a light orange.
Those with telescopes can participate in the Crater Timing Research Project. The observer only needs to notice when the umbra passes through the center of the crater (into the umbra, then out of the umbra). The timing of the crater will help us measure the size of Earth’s umbra. Earth’s umbra is slightly larger (54 miles larger on average) due to Earth’s atmosphere.
We’re still trying to understand why the size of the umbra varies from one eclipse to the next — increasing in size from as little as 47 miles to as much as 65 miles.
On Wednesday morning, there will be a near full moon next to the Pleiades star cluster in the shoulder of Taurus. Two days later, on Friday, a waning gibbous moon will approach Mars.
New craters on Mars
In a recent piece of Mars news, the InSight lander was able to detect a large earthquake when a meteoroid struck its surface on December 24 at a distance of about 2,150 miles from InSight. Two months later, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter team pored over satellite images of the Martian surface and found craters formed by the impact.
The meteoroid that formed the crater was between 16 and 39 feet in diameter, and it blasted a crater 492 feet wide and 70 feet deep. Such a large meteor would burn up in Earth’s atmosphere, but Mars’ thin atmosphere barely slowed it down.
It’s one of the largest craters we’ve ever seen while looking (or listening to). The impact also found subsurface water ice. In fact, this subsurface ice is the closest we’ve seen to the Martian equator at 35 degrees north latitude (about the same latitude as Bakersfield, where we’re also interested in water).
in the night sky
In our night sky, Jupiter, the king of planets, dominates the eastern sky because it is brighter than any star in the night sky. Jupiter will rise at sunset. Jupiter continues its slow journey among the dim stars of Pisces. Saturn will be high in the southwest near the tail of Capricornus.
The night of November 17, 2018 was the peak of the Leonid meteor shower. The moon will be a waning moon by then, and it will rise about two hours after the radiant (the point where the meteor appears to launch), so we should have a good view.
The Leonids occur when Earth passes through the dust trail left by Comet 55P/Tempel-Tuttle, producing 10 to 15 meteors per hour. However, we may see as many as 250 meteors erupt the next night as we pass through the meteors ejected by the comet in 1733, and smaller meteors erupt a day later from the 1800 meteor stream.
