Make A Wish

Hmm...it's been a month since I wrote something. New record...time to write something again. I've been spacing out over the last month. :P

*tries to produce something vaguely meaningful*

First, I need a topic to write about.

Lets see, since we're talking about spacing out and about space, I guess I'll talk about space then.

The Perseid Meteor Showers start this week. They peak tomorrow night, between midnight and dawn if you're a night owl. But if you have some clear skys around you can definitely see them tonight as well.

So look up and make a wish. :)

The Perseid showers are the strongest ones we get all year, peaking around 60 streaks per hour, so that averages to one per minute. If you stay away from streetlights, then you're sure to see quite a few streaking by into the night. If you are willing to stay up/wake up early at dawn, and you live in a fairly dark place, the shower is expected to rise up to around 100 or more streaks per hour!

This meteor shower is called the Perseid showers because it seems to radiate from the constellation of Perseus, which might be of some interest to you if you like the Percy Jackson series. :) The "+" sign labeled "Perseid radiant" is where all the meteors will appear to be coming from.

So see if you have fifteen minutes, half an hour, before you go to bed tomorrow night. Go outside into a yard or something, if you have streetlights see if you can find a wall or tree or something to block it out. And look up. See any dots in the sky? They have been inspiring mankind for the last two thousand years.

Earlier in the evening, maybe a bit past sunset, you can probably find a huge bright dot low in the sky to the west, brighter than airplanes really, and shining yellow. That'd be Venus, what they call the Morning Star or the Evening Star. Venus will always be the brightest object in the sky when it is up, well, short of the moon and sun, of course. It does really glow quite beautifully, its hostile atmosphere of thick carbon dioxide reflecting off a good deal of light. Beneath the atmosphere though hold many features not unlike Earth's; mountains and canyons, plains and valleys. If only it wasn't like global warming on steroids; Venus is the hottest planet in the solar system averaging around seven hundred degrees. But if you have some binoculars or a telescope, you should take a look at it. You would never guess it to be a violent place from its peaceful shine. It is, after all, named for the Roman goddess of beauty and love.

If you look sort of above and to the left of Venus, you might notice a dot that looks like any other star, but has a definite reddish or orange color to it. If you take a guess, you might guess that that's Mars, the red planet. Living on Mars would be a lot more hospitable than living on Venus. The sky would be a pale red reflecting on the rusted soil that covers the planet. Mars may only have a radius half of Earths, but it is home to the most magnificent geological features in the Solar System. Take Olympus Mons, for example, Latin for Mount Olympus which stands ninety thousand feet high, over three times the height of Mount Everest. Or Valles Marineris, the Grand Canyon of the solar system that, if on Earth, would stretch from San Francisco to New York. It was probably the red color of the planet that inspired it's name - Mars is the Roman god of war. Two of the god's sons were named Deimos and Phobos, which also happen to be the name of the planet's two moons. These moons are really more like captured astroids. Being very irregular shaped and only a few kilometers across, they're too small to be seen through any Earth-based telescope. Deimos is the god of terror, and Phobos is the god of fear. His name is where we get the word "phobia" from - personal fear.

To the right and a little bit up from Venus, we have a third planet in the sky, Saturn. Without any optics, Saturn would appear just as any other star, sort of a pale yellow, not extraordinarily bright that you would give it a second glance. But if you peek at it through some high powered binoculars or a telescope, (maybe around 20x or 25x magnification) you can see very clearly the rings around the planet as well as some of its moons. The rings appear nearly edge on right now, as Saturn is tilted in pretty much the same plane as we are viewing from Earth. They go through a fourteen year cycle, so every seven years, we can see from Earth the rings full on in their entire beauty. Seven years later, the rings will seem to vanish as we view it right from edge on. The rings really are an endless collection of dust and ice, each piece no bigger than your fingernail, circling the planet.

Living on Saturn would be quite an adventure as well, as there really is no solid surface to stand on. The planet is a giant ball of gas, but it actually has a density so low that Saturn would float on water. If you were on Saturn, the sky would probably glow a warming yellow while you try swimming from place to place. It would be a rather calming place in the solar system, sort of like drifting along at the beach or in a swimming pool. It's here that you can let your problems go, and let them all just float away. If you want to stand on some solid ground for a change, you can visit one of Saturn's moons; it does have over sixty of them in addition to the rings. The largest moon would be Titan, named for the Titan gods, of whom Saturn is one.

These three planets form sort of a right triangle shape, making them fairly easy to find in the sky as soon as the sky gets dark enough. The three planets would drop below the horizon and set though around 9PM now, so they are early objects to look for. This is a little map of the western sky as how it would appear around 8:30PM tonight.

We skipped Jupiter, so let me talk about Jupiter a little bit. Jupiter is late to the party, showing up as it rises on the other side in the eastern sky around 11PM, the brightest object in the sky now that Venus (and Mars and Saturn) has set. It would appear looking like a bright star with perhaps a hint of red, but if you point some optics at it, you can begin to see it's reddish coloring and the bands on the surface, along with a line of four dots around it - its four largest moons. Jupiter also has over sixty, but these are the big four that Galileo observed in evidence to disprove the geocentric theory. Jupiter would be another unique place to live, with gaseous winds constantly blowing at hurricane forces. You would never need to worry about it being warm there, because there's always going to be a cooling breeze around! It's a gaseous planet too, so you would be sort of swimming or sinking in the atmosphere, going places driven by the wind currents. It could probably be easier to live on one of the moons though; Jupiter also has well over 60 of them. The largest four that you can see from Earth include Io, Europa, Callisto, and Ganymede. Each one is a unique environment of their own; the hot, active world of volcanic activity on Io, a cooler place of methane and possibly underground springs on Europa, the cratered and shattered surface of Callisto, the dark icy shadows of Ganymede. Being the largest planet in the solar system, Jupiter is named after the Roman god of the sky.

The naming of the planets just so happen to flow so well though. Jupiter is the father of Mars. Saturn is the father of Jupiter. So when the seventh planet was discovered in 1781, the natural thing to do was name the planet Uranus, the father of Saturn. The one strange thing I notice however though, is that Uranus is Greek, while all the other planets so far have been named based on their Roman names. Hmm.

I guess won't get into Mercury, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto that much because you can only very rarely see Mercury when it is at the right angle from the sun, and you can't ever see Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto with just your naked eye because they are too dim. Also, that would make this post to long, but if you guys want, I can talk about them a little bit in my next post too. Gives me a topic to write about next time. :)

Until then, go outside, look up,

and make a wish. :)