It’s always possible that we disremember, but it seems to Celestial Exploring that the column has never before coincided with Thanksgiving Day. That somehow seems significant, something that might give us pause…and so, we do.
Is there anything spectacular occurring in the nightscape this evening and into tomorrow morning? Some interesting views, but hardly in the mega-event category that “spectacular” usually indicates. As the late comedian George Carlin used to say in his weather report, “Tonight, dark.”
The Moon remained below the horizon until about 4:30 this morning, and is setting around 3:00 this afternoon, not to appear again until around 5:30 a.m. tomorrow. Carlin’s forecast is spot on; our Thanksgiving Day night will indeed be dark. Earlier this week the National Weather Service’s forecast for tonight’s sky was “mostly clear.” You’ll have to take a peek outside to determine if that were accurate. Assuming it has been, this evening and night should provide a crisp, clear, Milky Way-visible canopy for local stargazing.
Venus will still be beckoning in the southwest after twilight. Jupiter will appear in the eastern sky, Mars in the northeast. Stargazing guides like earthsky.org provide details on brighter stars, constellations, and star clusters available for viewing—unaided eye, binoculars, or telescopes. Algol, for example, the blinking eye of Medusa, is of special interest this evening.
As for meteors, the weak—three per hour—November Orionids will be with us tonight, in the wee hours of tomorrow. No expected asteroids are in the neighborhood this evening, although last Tuesday, 2006 WB, about the size of Empower Field at Mile High, zipped by about two to three Moon distances away.
In other words, an ordinary evening. And perhaps that is the quiet, graceful majesty of it all. Our protected dark sky nightscape is never quite “ordinary.” Oh, it’s ordinary enough in the sense that it’s always there on cloudless nights, shimmering, on silent display…and nudging us to ask where we are in the midst of this cosmos. Long removed now from being the pre-Copernican Ptolemaic geocentric universe of old, we Earthlings realize we inhabit a tiny, rocky planet orbiting a rather mediocre star on one of the far-flung arms of our home spiral galaxy, around which other galaxies hover. Some of the trillions…
That can never be ordinary, right?
The star glow that envelopes us this night is our extraordinary home, and the mansions of space/time/motion continue to expand in size as our telescopic eye expands. While we may not be able to comprehend the immensity, age, and speed of it all, the known universe insists on harboring our little sailing ship of a habitable planet.
So much of our immediate cosmic neighborhood is predictable. Simply type 81252 into, oh, for example, timeanddate.com, and the Moon and Sun positions relative to the Valley are accurately stated, past, present, future. And so much is unpredictable, as our ability to “see” into the observable universe unfolds more rapidly than our ability to absorb the data unveiled.
Huge forces of gravity, atmospheric chemical interactions, Earth-generated breathable air, and orbital tilting for seasonal changes that allow for food production provide an environment in which we can thrive…or not, depending on our response to our own presence here in this wonder.
Perhaps a small moment taken this Thanksgiving Day night beneath the Valley’s still, mysterious sky might call forth some small gratefulness. The complexities of our lived life in this huge surround of space/time/motion can be met humbly, with a gracious thank you…for whatever ticks in your heart when you use the gift of sight to look millions of light years into the reaches of your home, for whatever sense your granted life extends you in the quiet of your breathing in the dark, for the silence itself, so filled with the chorus of song and psalm the stars and planets and galaxies and meteors and asteroids seem to whisper into the night…
We’re going to give it a try…
Happy Thanksgiving, and happy viewing…
– W.A. Ewing