[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