Sky and Telescope - January 2018 - 45

Under the Stars by Fred Schaaf

Across the Zenith
Now is the time to honor your astronomical resolutions.

BOB KING

T

here are many good ways to celebrate astronomy at the start of a
new year. Maybe you can watch brilliant Sirius arrive at the meridian and
soar to its peak height right around the
instant the new year begins. You might
ﬁnd (or at least observe) an asteroid on
New Year's Day - as Giuseppe Piazzi
did when he discovered the ﬁrst (and, to
this date, still the largest known) asteroid, Ceres, on not just the ﬁrst day of
the year but also the ﬁrst day of a new
century: January 1, 1801, the ﬁrst year
of the 19th century. New Year's Day is
also a good time to celebrate astronomy
by setting new goals for yourself as
an observer. Perhaps your New Year's
resolution will be to get a telescope with
greater resolution - and use it to obtain
much sharper views of all manner of
celestial objects.
There are, however, two other ways
of celebrating astronomy at the New
Year that I'd like to discuss. The ﬁrst is
to take a moment and ponder the milestones in your career as an observer.
The second is to spend your evenings
with three bright constellations as they
follow one another in a heavenly march
across the zenith.
The New Year and your personal
astronomical milestones. At some
time in our life, many of us may have
received our ﬁrst telescope as a Christmas present, one that we could start
making serious use of by the beginning
of the New Year.
My own ﬁrst quality telescope
was the one I got for Christmas 1967,
some ﬁfty years ago. I received it not
long after my 13th birthday. It was an
Edmund 4¼-inch Newtonian reﬂector, a popular model for many of us
starting in astronomy in those days. In
fact, it was several decades later that I
made the acquaintance of a new local
observing friend who had received his

own Edmund 4¼-inch only about one
month before I did. He told me he'd
used it straightaway to observe an
occultation of the ringed planet Saturn
by the Moon. I remember looking at the
Moon that night with my unaided eyes
and wistfully imagining what it would
be like to follow the planet, globe and
rings, right up to the Moon's edge. At
least in the decades since, I've witnessed
one delightful daytime occultation
of Saturn by the Moon using a large
telescope, and one absolutely astonish-

Bright Sirius shines high in
the wintertime sky.

ing grazing occultation of the majestic
planet by the Moon at night.
Winter's three bright zenithal ﬁgures marching in a row. My attention
on January evenings is so very often
drawn to the roughly straight line that
connects the Pleiades, Aldebaran and
the Hyades, Orion's Belt, and peerless
Sirius. But on these cold winter evenings when I turn my gaze higher, I,
like other observers at mid-northern
latitudes, behold a parade of three magniﬁcent constellations, marching in a
row across the zenith.
Perseus, Auriga, and Gemini proudly
show off their splendors at this time
of year. All three represent humans,
all three are famed in myth, and all
three have conspicuous patterns. Auriga
boasts zero-magnitude Capella, and
Gemini features 1st-magnitude Pollux. But these three constellations are
also rich in 2nd-magnitude stars (six
of them if you include Beta (β) Tauri
that completes the pentagon pattern of
Auriga) and bristling with bright open
clusters: the Perseus Double Cluster; the
Alpha Persei Cluster; M34 in Perseus;
M36, M37, and M38 in Auriga; and
M35 in Gemini.
One of the 2nd-magnitude stars is
magnitude-1.9 Beta (β) Aurigae (Menkalinan), whose current RA happens
to be 6h 00m. Only two other stars
in the list of the 200 brightest are
so precisely on an hour line of right
ascension. Remarkably, one of the other
two stars is magnitude-2.6 Theta (θ)
Aurigae, which shares the same line of
RA with Menkalinan. By the way, of all
stars north of -42° declination, Theta
Aurigae appears to be the brightest
without a proper name.
¢ FRED SCHAAF, at nightfall on that
Christmas 50 years ago, turned his telescope first on Capella.
sk yandtelescope.com * JA N UA RY 2 018

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