Will I Get Up Before Sunrise To See 5 Planets?

Today was one of those unexpectedly joyous days because my husband surprised me with a 4-day stargazing and hot spring-exploring trip to the California and Nevada deserts. We'll be heading for Pahrump, NV on Thursday and use that as a staging area for various night- / daytime forays and explorations. Death Valley is on the menu, and so is the Tecopa Hot Springs Resort.

Yet what I really look forward to - after 18 months spent in urban environs - is the lack of light pollution and unobstructed views of the skies. The weather looks favorable for the entire time and I'm hoping for spectacular celestial displays. Perhaps a glimpse of the Milky Way, which I have not seen with the naked eye since...oh,...let's just say a trip to the Canary Islands last century. 

I especially hope to get a great view of the current 5-planet alignment in the early morning skies:

Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech

In a rare alignment, Mercury, Venus, Saturn, Mars and Jupiter will form an arc in the pre-dawn southern skies, about 45 minutes prior to sunrise. In the CA and NV deserts, that's about 6:00 - 6:30 a.m. Antares in the constellation Scorpio will also join this early morning celestial dance, as will Spica, the brightest star in the constellation Virgo.

Image credit: Sky & Telescope

Another graphic of the early-morning planetary and celestial line-up that will remain visible until late February.

Image credit: New York Times

The diagram above shows that just because we can see five planets at the same time they are not the same distance away from Earth. The diagram illustrates the orbits of Saturn, Jupiter (planet name cut off in graphic), Mars, Venus and Mercury around the sun as well as the planets' relative distances from Earth. If I look at these five planets this weekend, and consider their relative distances from me, I wonder which one will appear brightest?

(Related science fact: Planets are not intrinsically bright. We can see them in the night skies because they reflect the light of our sun). 

Finally, I wonder if I will be able to locate the new Starman constellation, named in honor of the late, great David Bowie, who showed all of us how to reach for the stars.

Image credit: The Weathernetwork

 
I'll already be looking for Mars and Spica, so maybe The Starman will reveal itself to me this weekend ~

10 Reasons Why I Love Twitter #1: Tweeting Astronauts

As I’m squarely situated in the the middle-ish age range, Twitter usage among my friends, acquaintances and colleagues in my peer group seems pretty thin. When it does happen, I rarely see the enthusiasm and consistency that's in my daily tweet stream. So I often find myself explaining "why I do Twitter", "how I put up with the garbage on Twitter", "why Twitter is not a waste of my time", and so on. 

My response is to turn negative misconceptions around and explain why I enjoy Twitter and how it benefits me on many levels.

I have these conversations so frequently that I might as well write an explainer I can point to when questions from non-Twitter users come up in the future. 

Reason #1 is below.

#2 - #10 will be published in installments as I have time.

10 Reasons Why I Love Twitter

#1: Tweeting Astronauts ~ 

There are dozens, possibly well over a 100 astronauts active on Twitter. By "astronauts" I mean active or retired members of NASA and other astronaut corps (e.g., Roscomos, ESA, CSA, JAXA) who are in space, have been to space, or are training to go to space.

Yes, there are astronauts tweeting from the International Space Station, every day. Currently there is one space-based tweeter: Scott Kelly (@StationCDRKelly). There are three astronauts on the ISS at the moment; when there's the usual crew of six aboard, you can find two or three astronauts sending daily tweets from space.

You need only scroll through my Twitter timeline pictures (@ct_la) to see breathtaking vistas of our home planet and fascinating images of life on orbit at our human outpost in space.

Astronauts have been tweeting from the ISS since 2009. The myriad images of our fragile Earth have changed the mental representation I had of our planet. I love maps and my walls are full of them. Sometime around 2010 or so, I found myself looking at a physical map of the U.K. and said "Wait a minute. That is NOT what England really looks like!" By then I had seen dozens of images of Europe from space and become accustomed to the fact that in those images North is not always up, curvature of the Earth is an important marker and non-natural boundaries so common on conventional maps are non-existent. Now, when I think of, for example, Turkey, I don’t envision a map-like representation. Instead, I think of an image like this:

Image of western Turkey 
Tweeted by Samantha Cristoforetti (@Astro_Samantha) from the ISS on June 2, 2015 

It’s not easy to pick the one most awesome thing an astronaut has ever tweeted from space, but if I have to choose, I'll go with Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield’s (@Cmdr_Hadfield) rendition of David Bowie’s "Space Oddity", performed in microgravity. 

If you have a different all-time-favorite tweet from space, please tweet it @ me or leave a comment. I might have missed something! 

Earth-bound astronauts also provide plenty of twitter entertainment, education and fun. One of my favorites is Apollo-era moon walker Buzz Aldrin (@TheRealBuzz), who travels widely to do outreach for his "Get Yo Ass To Mars" campaign and, of course, tweets about it.

Another favorite is retired NASA astronaut Clayton Anderson (@Astro_Clay) who is a prolific daily tweeter and widely appreciated for consistently engaging his followers. This is, in fact, such an awesome Twitter perk that I wrote a separate post about it.

A Time & Space Oddity: 1969 Meets 2013

In a little over an hour, International Space Station Commander Chris Hadfield of the Canadian Space Agency will undock from the station inside a Russian Soyuz capsule and return to Earth with two of his fellow ISS residents, landing on the Kazahk steppe at 7:30 pm PDT. 

During his 5-month stay as Station Commander on the orbital outpost, Chris Hadfield has given Earth-bound humans unprecedented inside looks at station life and a daily stream of breathtaking photographs from orbit, via twitter, youtube, video chats and other social media channels.

Commander Hadfield is a musician, and on May 12, 2013 he published the first music video from space, shot on the International Space Station. It is a cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity" and I am not ashamed to admit that it brought tears to my eyes. As of this writing, the video has already been viewed 1.3 million times.

And here, from the Summer of Love Era and the year that saw the first human walk on the moon, is the original music video for "Space Oddity" featuring a 22-year-old David Bowie who had just written the song.     

 

I have always considered David Bowie an artist who symbolizes the rise of the space age, especially once I understood that "Space Oddity" pays homage to legendary filmmaker Stanley Kubrick's 1968 rendition on the big screen of Arthur C. Clarke's novel "2001 - A Space Odyssey". Bowie's visionary artistic genius has now come full circle. Amplified by Chris Hadfield's unique creativity from the ISS, "Space Oddity" has transformed from metaphor into reality as more and more people are becoming aware, viral-video-style, that humans stand on the threshold of claiming their future among the stars. Pop culture doesn't get any better than this.