[meteorite-list] Ceres Puts On A Show This Week
From: Ron Baalke <baalke_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Wed May 4 17:38:49 2005 Message-ID: <200505042138.j44LcGM16346_at_zagami.jpl.nasa.gov> http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/science/20050504-9999-1c04star.html Ceres, a big name in rock, puts on a show UNION-TRIBUNE (San Diego, California) May 4, 2005 It was little more than 200 years ago - on the first day of the 19th century - that the Italian astronomer Giuseppe Piazzi found a strange object in the sky that no one had ever seen before - an "intruder" among the familiar stars of the constellation Taurus, the bull. After waiting several nights, he returned to the telescope and found that the object had moved. Piazzi's first thought was that he had discovered a comet. The intruder turned out, instead, to be an asteroid - the first ever found. He named it Ceres (SEE-reez), after the Roman goddess of agriculture and protector of Sicily. Today, Ceres is the largest such rocky chunk known, with a diameter of 567 miles. In fact, it alone contains about one-third of the mass of the entire asteroid belt, the swarm of countless rocky bodies orbiting the sun between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. This week, the asteroid reaches its opposition point in its orbit around the sun, rising in the east as the sun sets in the west. And this means that you should have a great opportunity to spot Ceres with binoculars. Ceres now glows at just under the limit of naked eye visibility - only about two times more faint than the faintest stars we can see. Nevertheless, with binoculars, you can search for this cosmic nomad on your own. To see it, head outdoors around 9 or 10 p.m. and find the constellation of Libra, the scales, low in the southeastern sky. Your best bet is to try tomorrow, May 5, or couple of days after. That's because the asteroid will appear less than one degree north of the brightest star of Libra, Zubeneschamali. If you aim your binoculars toward this star, you should have little trouble finding Ceres nearby, the brightest "star" in your field of view. Because Ceres moves around the sun, its orbital motion is detectable as it drifts past Zubeneschamali from night-to-night. So check it out the next night. And the next. You can even make a sketch of the field for later comparison. This works best if you can mount your binoculars on a tripod. If the "star" you thought was Ceres has indeed moved, you've found it. And my guess is that you'll be just as excited as Piazzi must have been two centuries ago. Received on Wed 04 May 2005 05:38:14 PM PDT |
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