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Starwatch NewsletterMinnesota Starwatch is a newsletter describing the night sky in the Midwest.
It is updated monthly, and is produced by the |
Minnesota Starwatch for December 2007
The Moon is at last quarter -- in other words, rises about midnight -- on December 1st. New Moon is on the 9th, first quarter on the 17th, and full moon the day before Christmas, the 24th.
Venus is spectacularly bright in the hours before sunrise -- it looks like an approaching airplane. Mars is high in the midnight sky; during Christmas week the Earth is exactly between Mars and the Sun. On the night of December 23rd, Mars will be appearing very close to the full moon in the sky. (In fact, though, Mars is far, far beyond the Moon, 200 times as far away.) We can't see Jupiter now because it's on the far side of the Sun. Saturn rises in the east-northeast a little before midnight; it's fairly bright but not spectacular.
Many people saw last month's weird comet, comet Holmes, in the constellation Perseus, high in the northern sky in the evening. Well, it turns out there's a weird coincidence about that place in the sky. A faint galaxy, NGC 1260, is about 240 million light-years away, in practically that same direction. About 14 months ago a student in Texas discovered a supernova explosion, the death of a massive star, in NGC 1260. Factoring in the galaxy's distance, we now know that it was the brightest explosion ever seen -- ten times as bright as any other supernova! It must have been a star that weighed more than 100 times as much as the Sun, which is extremely rare -- like a person 8 feet tall, one in a billion. The site of that explosion now passes overhead at about 8 p.m. in Minnesota.
For fun Astronomy Outreach programs check out our Public Outreach link, or if you're interested in how you can help build the new Minnesota Planetarium, please call 612-630-6151 or visit http://www.mplanetarium.org.
The Minnesota Starwatch is produced by the University of Minnesota Astronomy Department.