Next Friday, on July 27th 2018, Mars reaches opposition  where it lines up directly opposite the Sun from the Earth. It then makes its closest approach to Earth a few days later on July 31st.  During this time, Mars will appear brighter and larger than usual.

Oppositions of Mars happen roughy every 26 months but what makes this one more special is that the Red Planet will be at its brightest since 2003  when it made the closest approach to Earth in 60,000 years.

Viewing Mars at Opposition

The Moon will be full on July 27th which will make it easy to find Mars.  Looking to the south-east between 11 and 12 pm, Mars will be the bright object close to the Moon – about a fist width lower and to the south.

Mars is close to the horizon during this year’s opposition – just a bit above 10° – so you will need a clear view to the south-east to see it.   The low altitude also impairs telescopic views more than usual due to additional atmospheric turbulence.

RASC volunteers will have telescopes trained on Mars and available for public viewing at the Starry Nights Event at Simon Fraser University on Friday, July 27th.   The event starts at 09:00 pm but Mars will not be visible until after 11:00 pm.

Unfortunately, a global dust storm has also been obscuring telescopic views of the planet since May 30th, 2018. Some amateur imagers in the Southern Hemisphere have recently reported that the dust may be subsiding and have been able to capture impressive surface detail.

A brochure on Mars and other information on observing the planet is available from the Mars 2018 Opposition page on the RASC national web site.

Mars Missions

The best time to go to Mars is around its closest approach so that the travel distance is minimized.  Many Mars missions have taken advantage of the close distance to visit the planet and 2018 is no exception – NASA’s  InSight mission launched on May 5th, 2018. This mission aims to land a probe on Mars in November that will investigate the interior. The rocket that launched InSight also launched a separate NASA technology experiment: two mini-spacecraft called Mars Cube One, or MarCO. These briefcase-sized CubeSats fly on their own path to Mars behind InSight.

A RASC coin and two stamps were recently released by the Royal Canada Mint and Canada Post to commemorate RASC’s 150th anniversary.

The coin features the Eagle Nebula, the Andromeda Galaxy, the Moon, and a view of the meteorite formed Manicouagan crater in Quebec. But the coolest thing is that the coin includes a fragment of a meteorite from the Campo del Cielo meteorite field in Argentina. The iron meteorite was recovered from one of 26 impact craters formed roughly 4,500 years ago. The typical composition of a Campo del Cielo meteorite is 92.7% iron, 6.15% nickel, 0.42% cobalt, 0.37% carbon and 0.28% phosphorus.

The stamps feature two spectacular phenomena – the Milky Way and the Northern Lights – from photos taken in 2016 by two Canadian astro-photographers: the Milky Way from Bruce Peninsula in Ontario by Matt Quinn, and the Northern Lights from Churchill in Manitoba by Alan Dyer.

The stamps include hidden information about the photos written in special ink that is only visible under black light. The hidden information includes the date and time the photograph was taken, GPS coordinates, and the type of camera lens used for the photo. The special ink is also used to overlay Constellation lines and names on top of the photos.

Our NOVA Newsletter, for July-August 2018 is available as a hi-res or low-res pdf file. An archive of older issues can be found on our Newsletter page.

Contents of Volume 2018, Issue 4, July-August 2018:

What Canada Day Meant for Me This Year by Suzanna Nagy

President’s Message by Leigh Cummings

The Dangers of Astronomy in Afghanistan by Bill Burnyeat

Hoo… hoo… hoo… by J. Karl Miller

There is a close conjunction of a thin crescent Moon and Venus visible tonight just after sunset. Mercury is also visible but will be harder to spot in the glow of the sunset. Binoculars will show Venus and the Moon in the same field of view, reveal details of the Moon’s surface,  and make it easier to isolate Mercury from the sky glow. But remember to never point binoculars towards the sun!

Stay up later to see Jupiter, Saturn and Mars.   That makes up the 5 planets in one night identified by a CBC article. If you have a pair of binoculars, aim them at Jupiter around 10:30 pm  to see four of Jupiter’s moons: Callisto, Ganymede, Io, and Europa.

P.S. You can view a sixth planet by looking down at some point during the night.

NASA has put its planet hunting  Kepler space telescope  into hibernation because it is running low on fuel. Kepler has discovered over 2,500 exoplanets by monitoring more than 150,000 stars for slight dips in brightness that might be caused by an exoplanet passing in front of the star.

NASA made the move to ensure that Kepler has enough fuel left to beam its latest data haul to its handlers early next month. Kepler has been on its 18th observation campaign since May 2018. It has been pointing at a patch of sky towards the constellation of Cancer that it previously studied in 2015. This second look will provide data that helps astronomers  confirm previous exoplanet candidates. Returning the data back to Earth is the highest priority for the remaining fuel. On August 2, the team will command the spacecraft to awaken from its hibernation state, maneuver the spacecraft to point its large antenna back toward earth, and transmit the data over the Deep Space Network.

The Kepler mission launched in March 2009, with the goal of helping astronomers determine just how common Earth-like planets are throughout the Milky Way galaxy. Kepler has been tremendously successful by any measure. A key finding from he spacecraft’s observations suggest that about 20 percent of sunlike stars host a roughly Earth-size planet in the habitable zone (where liquid water could exist on a world’s surface).

Kepler’s primary mission  ran through May 2013, when the second of the spacecraft’s four orientation-maintaining reaction wheels failed. The K2 mission  was developed  in the months following the failure with the novel concept of using sunlight pressure to help stabilize the spacecraft. K2 became fully operational in May 2014 allowing Kepler to  continue making scientific observations.

The transit method of detecting exoplanets looks for slight dips in the brightness of a star when a planet passes in front of a it as viewed from Earth. We can observe an occasional transit of Venus or Mercury when they pass in front of the Sun and appear as a small black dot creeping across the Sun’s surface as seen from Earth.

After  several transits are detected, the planet’s orbital radius can be calculated from the period (how long it takes the planet to orbit once around the star) and the mass of the star. The size of the planet is found from the depth of the transit (how much the brightness of the star drops) and the size of the star. From the orbital size and the temperature of the star, the planet’s characteristic temperature can be calculated. From this the question of whether or not the planet is habitable (not necessarily inhabited) can be answered.

The SpaceX CRS-15 Mission to the International Space Station launched from the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida at 2:42 am PDT this morning. In attendance were three students from the Nanaimo District Secondary School to witness a space mission that they have been working on since September.

The mission involves sending planarian flatworms into orbit to test the effects of micro-gravity and the supplement L-carnitine on muscle loss. A  group of worms still in Nanaimo, and not sent into space, serve as a control group. Astronauts in space experience muscle mass loss and the experiment may yield insights that will help astronauts on extended missions.

The  CRS-15 mission marked SpaceX’s fastest re-flight of a booster. The same booster launched the planet-hunting Tess satellite in April. The booster was topped with  a used Dragon cargo spacecraft with 2,700 kilograms of supplies and science gear for the International Space Station. The  cargo includes the spherical AI bot named Cimon, genetically identical mice, super-caffeinated coffee and the Nanaimo worms.

RASC Vancouver is participating at  Vancouver Illuminated on Saturday, June 2nd, 2018.  The City of Vancouver and the H.R. MacMillan Space Centre have teamed up to present an evening of discovery about Vancouver’s night sky  and an opportunity to engage residents about the City’s Outdoor Lighting Strategy.  Drop by our table to chat with our LPA Chair, Pascal Pillot-Bruhat, and find out more about Light Pollution Abatement.

While you’re at it, enjoy a Planetarium show at 7:30pm and 9:00pm for just $5 – register to secure your seat.

Details 

Sat June 2nd, 2018 – 6:30pm to 10:00pm
H.R. MacMillan Space Centre
1100 Chestnut Street
Vancouver, BC V6J 3J9
View Map

• Chat with City staff about Outdoor Lighting Strategy
• Take a free walk through the Space Centre’s Cosmic Courtyard
• Learn what animals depend on natural darkness through Stanley Park Ecology Society’s Interactive dark exhibit
• Find out what organizations like the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada are doing about light pollution
• Test your knowledge about outdoor light pollution and you could win a $50 gift card to Dark Table!

7:30 – Planetarium Show: ‘Asteroid Mission Extreme’

9:00 – Planetarium Show: ‘Phantom of the Universe’

To provide feedback on the City’s Outdoor Lighting Strategy, read the consultation paper and send in your feedback no later than June 12. Visit vancouver.ca/outdoorlighting to learn more.

Scott shares some hints on observing the night sky, using the Heavens-Above  web site,  and information on the the James Webb space telescope.

Discovery Challenge

Hints (two more coming in the next few days)

1. The field of view in the image is approximately 3.4 by 2.3 degrees and the same field is visible during most of the night on May 12th from Vancouver. That is not much to go on but look for further hints over the next few days.
2. Asteroid Kalliope (magnitude 11) passes through the bottom left hand side of this field from May 3rd to May 12th, 2018.
3. The image includes parts of the Virgo Galaxy cluster.
4. The final hint is that the image contains several Messier objects including M58, M59, M60, M87, M89.

In this talk, Scott explains the TESS mission to hunt for exo-planets, recommends all of Steven Hawking’s books and Leonard Susskind’s “The Black Hole War”.