[meteorite-list] Ceres Puts On A Show This Week

From: Gerald Flaherty <grf2_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Wed May 4 19:21:47 2005
Message-ID: <005601c55100$06cd39d0$2f01a8c0_at_Dell>

Thank you Ron, for the heads up[no pun intended]. I hope it's clear skies
tomorrow nite. Tonight's a wash! Jerry
----- Original Message -----
From: "Ron Baalke" <baalke_at_zagami.jpl.nasa.gov>
To: "Meteorite Mailing List" <meteorite-list_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Sent: Wednesday, May 04, 2005 5:38 PM
Subject: [meteorite-list] Ceres Puts On A Show This Week


>
> 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.
>
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Received on Wed 04 May 2005 07:21:40 PM PDT