Eyes on the Sky: Last look at Jupiter; observe M57

Salutations celestial sight seers, I'm David Fuller. Welcome to Eyes on the Sky. What's up this week? Well, as we look towards the West, we're going to be losing Jupiter to the western horizon as Earth continues to revolve around the sun. And Jupiter isn't going to keep pace with us. So the planet will sink lower and lower towards the western horizon in the weeks ahead. But we do still have an opportunity to look at it. And now is kind of a good time to look at it, because the Juno spacecraft that NASA launched back in 2011 just reached Jupiter on July 4th of this year. So it took five years to get there. It did successfully do the engine burn that it needed to. And it's on its way towards orbiting the planet in a polar orbit. So it's going to be studying one of its primary objectives, actually, is to look at the oxygen to hydrogen ratio in the atmosphere to see how much water might be there. And really look at some of the origins of our own solar system and how Jupiter formed in that. So that's an interesting one to take a look at. As we zoom in a little bit on Jupiter, we did look at this earlier a couple of weeks back, actually a couple of months back. But what we can do, and I do want to show you this because it's a little it's a neat feature about Stellarium. You'll notice that you can see how the moons on around are the Galilean moons of Jupiter anyway. The ones we can see very easily, even with binoculars. We'll move back and forth over time. So here's I'm skipping ahead in days and you can see how the moon sort of shuttle back and forth along that equatorial line. So what will happen is that the light from those is a little bit delayed because the sunlight that gets to Jupiter and then is on its way back takes a little over half an hour to get to Earth. So something that you can do in Stellarium so that you know exactly where those moons should be. And there's not a huge change, but it's enough that you may want to look at this because you'll know when there's going to be a shadow transit, for example, or a moon passing behind the planet itself. What you can do actually is click on this little checkmark right here where it says simulate light speed, because if I take that off, watch what happens. And see how the moon shifted just a little bit. And I'm going to click it again and they all shifted again. That's because they do actually move slightly based on the fact that light takes quite a bit of time to bounce all the way from where Jupiter is back to us. It's about 500 million miles. So it's a good long way and take some time for that to happen. So there's just that neat little simulate light speed thing that you're going to find that in the sky and viewing options window under the sky tab over here on the right hand side for simulate light speed. So that's just something that you might want to be able to do both for that and for Saturn. You can do a quick search for Saturn and swing over there and you can see how Titan and Rhea actually zoom in just a little bit more. We can see Dione and Tethys, some of these other ones. And so we click on that and you can see how the moon positions change. Now, that's probably more important when you have a star nearby and you're really not quite sure if that's Titan or if that's a star. You can actually help identify that a little bit better because Saturn is about 80 to 90 light minutes away. So that's even further. And those positions change even more. So that's a good way to be able to do that for those two planets. However, even though we've got the moons coming in towards first quarter phase in several days, what we do want to do is look towards Vega rising there in the east. Vega is the brightest star in the constellation Lyra the Harp. Lyra is just a little tiny constellation. We looked at Hercules and Messier 13 previously. So Vega and Lyra are kind of following that across the sky. If we look in that direction and really binoculars, this is where binoculars become so helpful because you can see most of this constellation in that field of view of binoculars. Here we've got. All the way across, it's like seven, just over seven degrees. So you can almost put the entire constellation in binoculars, especially if you have some really wide view binoculars, it will give you maybe a 10 degree field view. I've got some seven by 35. It'll show 11 degrees. I get that the whole constellation in there. But even if you don't do that, that's OK. You can put these two stars in there along with Vega. These are the two closer stars to the parallelogram there. And what we want to do is then scoot our way towards these two because there is actually a Messier object right in that area that's visible even with the moon out, because even though it's not large, it's really bright. So if we zoom our way in, we can see almost exactly halfway in between Sulafat and Sheliak is Messier 57 or the Ring Nebula. Now, the ring is small. As I said before, it's only two arc minutes across. So one thing that you're going to need is a lot of magnification on that. So you can really zoom in. Actually, we can use this button to just center that, and then you can zoom in like this. Now, you'll notice in this particular view that Stellarium shows you this wonderful blue and red and a hint of green and some orange. Usually that's not going to be visible in most telescopes. However, that said, despite the fact that it usually is going to look like a little puff of smoke, a little tiny smoke ring. There are times when you may see color. And the reason why I know this is true is because my friend Dave and I were observing just last week. We were looking at the ring. He almost never sees color in anything that we look at as far as deep sky objects. And he saw color in the ring that particular night. It was a very transparent night. We were using a 10 inch telescope. I saw the color. He saw the color. We called his son over. His son described exactly what we saw without even knowing what we had seen. So it is possible to sometimes see the color there. Does that mean you will see color? Not necessarily. Depends on your eyes. Depends on the transparency of your skies. And some people never, ever see color in deep sky objects. So if you don't see it, that's OK. But it's really easy to find because all you have to do is pretty much put your finder scope so that it's just about halfway in between Sheliak and Sulafat. And remember, you've got this other star here, which is the fifth magnitude star. That one almost makes it a little bit more of the halfway distance to Sheliak. We kind of zoom in and use our measuring tool. We can see how from this star to the ring we're looking at. Oh, about 44 arc minutes and from Sheliak. We're 48 arc minutes, so it's really a little bit closer if we go from this star rather than Sulafat. But even so, you're going to get in the right area just by splitting the distance between these two third magnitude stars. Fairly easily use a wide field eyepiece. You may miss the ring to start because it's so small. It's going to look star like. So start adding magnification until you start seeing that little fuzzy out of focus looking star and then bump up the magnification fairly high. I would go definitely up to what you would typically use on a planet for your particular telescope and see what you can see. Look for the obviously the smoke type structure of it. And then if you get lucky and have a large enough telescope and have transparent skies, you might even see a little bit of hint of color. Blue is what you most will be most likely to see. And if you're really lucky, like Dave and I were the other day, you'll get to see a little bit of orange and maybe some reddish, which was a really cool sight to have happen. But that's all for this week. So keep your eyes on the sky and your outdoor lights aimed down so we can all see what's up. I'm David Fuller, wishing you clear and dark skies.