Explore the Universe - Beta Capricorni

The weather has warmed up and the sky is beautiful.  However, it is still too cold to setup my telescope in the snow without an observation plan.

Observation plans are important if you would like to accomplish anything more than checking out a few interesting sights in the sky.  I usually come up with a list of 2 or 3 objects that I would like to study in a given evening and a plan on how to find them.  Binoculars are a key tool as they have a relatively large field of view and allow you to understand the position of some bright background stars in your area of interest.

Early tomorrow morning at 04:34 the moon will be full.  I watched the moon rise from my office at work and noticed it was not quite full as some of the southwestern craters seemed to have terminator shadows on them.

Today's Explore the Universe entry is an observation I made 15 minutes after Alpha Caprcorni.  This time I observed Beta Capricorni, an actual multiple star system (not just an optical double).  The two visually observable stars are separated in space by a mere third of a light year.  This is about 21,000 times the distance from our Sun to the Earth.  It takes about a million years for these stars to orbit their common center of mass.

Beta Capricorni Observation Record

This morning I looked out the window around 05:30 and saw the clear sky.  Jupiter was very bright in my line of sight directly South.  It was close to Alpha Virginis (Spica) which is also a bright object.  At the southern horizon I saw the constellation Scorpio seemingly looking higher in the sky than when I observed it during the late summer evenings.  Antares, the beautiful red alpha star of Scorpio, was obvious even through a now breath fogged window.  To the East of Antares was a familiar sight from the summer -- Saturn had made itself visible once again.  I tried to see if I could get a glimpse of Mercury but the window had fogged up beyond all hope of even seeing the street lamp a few houses down.  The elusive inner planet won't fool me this year.  The best day to see Mercury in the evening sky will be April 1 as it will reach its greatest elongation east at 19° away from the Sun.  I am not a morning person so observing western elongations of Mercury will likely wreck me.

I am still holding out hope for an evening of observing this weekend but the windchill forecast is still quite frightening.  However, I will still try to come up with an observation plan for a quick 20 minute session to grab 1 or 2 objects or even just visually map out a constellation with binoculars.