Mon Feb 13, 2023 GALILEO’S BIRTHDAY
The astronomer and physicist Galileo Galilei was born on February 15 in the year 1564. Galileo did not invent the telescope, but when he heard of its invention, he built his own, and like other astronomers of the 17th century, Galileo aimed his telescope at the sky and made some amazing discoveries. He saw the moon’s mountains and craters, which suggested that it was another world in space. He discovered the four largest moons of Jupiter, named the Galilean satellites in his honor. Using safe projection methods, he observed the sun and saw dark spots on its face – sunspots. He saw that the planet Venus went through phases like the moon, which showed that it orbited the sun and not the earth. And he saw the myriad stars of the Milky Way - more stars than could be seen by the unaided eye alone.
Tue Feb 14, 2023 CELESTIAL LOVE
Tonight some of the world’s greatest love stories are displayed in the starry heavens. That bright star in the west at sunset you may have noticed is actually the planet Venus, named for the Roman goddess of love. Well-placed in the south is the constellation Orion the Hunter, who in his youth pursued the Princess Merope - one of the stars in the Pleiades star cluster overhead. But in the end he loved Artemis, the goddess of the hunt and of the moon. Above and to the west of Orion is Taurus, which in mythology represents the king of the gods, Zeus, who turned himself into a bull to carry the lady Europa on his back across the ocean to Crete. Now return to Venus, which is now among the stars of Pisces, two fish which represent both Venus and her son Cupid, an avatar of Valentine’s Day.
Wed Feb 15, 2023 SPAGHETTIFICATION AND BLACK HOLES
If you ever jumped into a black hole, you’d find that the hole’s gravity would pull on your feet a lot harder than your head, which would stretch your body out as thin as a piece of spaghetti, which of course is not a natural state for the human body to be in, so you would disintegrate, and eventually all of your atoms would spiral into the black hole - so stay out of black holes! The nearest known black hole is V616 Monocerotis, in the faint constellation Monoceros the Unicorn, which is in the southeastern sky this evening and just to the east of Orion the Hunter. It’s about 3,000 light years away, or 18,000 trillion miles. So even the nearest black hole is so far away that nobody is in any danger of falling in!
Thu Feb 16, 2023 THE DISCOVERY OF PLANET X
On February 18, 1930, Planet X was discovered by Clyde Tombaugh at the Lowell Observatory in Arizona. Tombaugh was a talented amateur astronomer who was hired to make and search photographic plates of the sky, looking for anything that might shift its position from one night to the next, as seen when comparing one photo to another picture of the same part of the sky taken a few nights later. It was painstaking work but rewarding; Planet X was discovered out in the direction of the constellation Gemini, which is well up in the eastern sky after sunset tonight. But Planet X isn’t there anymore. This distant world is now six constellations over to the east, in Sagittarius. Oh, and it’s not called Planet X anymore; shortly after its discovery it was renamed Pluto.
Fri Feb 17, 2023 NICOLAUS COPERNICUS
The Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus, born on February 19th, 1473, advocated the heliocentric theory, which placed the sun in the center of the solar system, with the earth and other planets revolving about it. Copernicus received praise and encouragement from the Bishop of Kulm and the Archbishop of Capua and some scholars, but his ideas were also ridiculed by others including Martin Luther, who once said, “This fool wants to turn the whole art of astronomy upside down!”. Until the mid- 1600’s, the teachings of ancient Greek philosophers like Aristotle were considered the final word on science, and Copernicus’ predictions weren’t any more accurate than the old earth-centered model. But this Copernican model was a simpler way to explain the motions of the planets.
