SKY GUIDE: This chart represents the sky as it appears over Maine during October. The stars are shown as they appear at 10:30 p.m. early in the month, at 9:30 p.m. at midmonth and at 8:30 p.m. at month’s end. Mars, Saturn and Jupiter are shown in their midmonth positions. To use the map, hold it vertically and turn it so that the direction you are facing is at the bottom. Sky chart prepared by George Ayers
October is when famous flaming foliage peaks for us in New England each year. Just as autumn is now transforming our landscape and cooling our air, the sky above is also changing as fall and winter constellations are rotating into view to set the stage for a new season.
This month brings with it more than the usual share of interesting highlights. The bonus this particular October will be Mars at its most dazzling in 17 years. Then you have Jupiter and Saturn getting a little closer each night, Uranus at opposition in Aries, two full moons including a blue moon on Halloween, an asteroid named Flora at opposition, the usual close conjunctions of the moon with some of the planets, a very close conjunction of Venus and Regulus, and favorable conditions for not one, but two meteor showers – the Draconids on the Oct. 8 and the Orionids on Oct. 21.
Mars will be the magnificent star on our celestial stage for all of this month. It doubled in brightness last month as the earth was rapidly catching up with the red planet in our respective orbits, and now that we have caught it, it will even outshine Jupiter. Mars will be closest to Earth on the Oct. 6 and it will reach opposition on Oct. 13, when it will rise at sunset and not set until sunrise. This only happens once every 26 months, based on how we both orbit the sun, but some of these oppositions can be much better than others. This will be one of the best. Although not as close as the last one in July of 2018, which was a perihelic opposition, meaning that its perihelion or closest approach to the sun coincided with its closest approach to Earth, this one will be fully 30 degrees higher above our horizon, allowing for much better views of our neighboring and still mysterious planet.
Mars will be 39 million miles away at this opposition. To put that into a good comparison scale to picture it and not just think of a number, that is the equivalent of about 5,000 earth diameters. The earth is 8,000 miles in diameter and 25,000 miles in circumference. The sun is nearly 12,000 earth diameters away on the average. The moon is just 30 earth-diameters away. Mars will even outshine Jupiter for a while this month and its apparent diameter will reach 22 arc seconds of the sky, or nearly half a minute. 30 arc minutes is half a degree, which is the size of the full moon and the sun.
The last good opposition before the July 2018 perihelic opposition was on Aug. 27, 2003. That was the closest approach of Mars in nearly 60,000 years, about the time modern humans started migrating east out of Africa. Mars was only 35 million miles away then, but a long-standing rumor started circulating on the web then that Mars would become as large as the full moon in our sky. Mars, which is half the size of the earth, would have had to get within just 83 earth diameters instead of the actual 5,000 earth diameters. That is about 60 times closer than it actually got. It might have been an honest mistake if they just mixed up arc seconds and arc minutes, which is a factor of 60. In any case, it is a good exercise in understanding relative size and scale of some of our nearby neighbors in our solar system.
You will still need a telescope to enjoy all the features now visible on Mars during this great opposition. Look for dark markings and both the north and south polar icecaps. The south polar cap is mostly frozen carbon dioxide, or dry ice. It is summer at the South Pole now, so it will be smaller than usual. I already saw some of these markings through several telescopes at our club’s last event a few weeks ago. Not many of us showed up, but it was good to see everyone again “live” outside and with masks on. We also enjoyed great views of Jupiter and Saturn and many popular favorite celestial objects like the Andromeda Galaxy and the great globular cluster in Hercules along with several nice planetary nebulae, which is a look into the distant future of what our own sun will turn into when it finally runs out of fuel in about 5 billion years.
You may even see the faint outline of Olympus Mons, the biggest volcano in the entire solar system, fully three times the height of Mt. Everest at 90,000 feet or 17 miles high. The whole mound covers the size of France. Then you may also see one or both of the small Martian moons, Phobos and Deimos, which means Fear and Terror. Phobos is slightly larger and brighter, but it is very close to the planet at only 3,700 miles, so it is hard to see over the glare of Mars. Phobos is about 14 miles in diameter and Deimos is only 8 miles across. Deimos is much farther away from Mars, so it is easier to see. Based on what we know about gravity and orbital mechanics, Phobos is getting a little closer to Mars each year and in about 50 million years it will either crash into Mars or be torn up by its gravity into a ring of rubble.
While you are enjoying this close opposition of Mars, be aware that three different countries have recently successfully launched a whole armada of scientific exploratory missions. NASA has the Perseverance Rover with a drone that will fly in the very thin Martian atmosphere, the United Arab Emirates have HOPE, which will just orbit Mars and not land, then China has Tianwen 1, which means “questions to heaven.” That is the heaviest payload ever launched to Mars and contains an orbiter, a lander and a rover. So humans will have invaded Mars remotely by late winter of 2021, instead of the Martians invading us. The result will be a lot of great scientific data and a much deeper understanding of this planet which will better prepare us for sending humans there safely in just 15 more years.
So dust off your telescopes or borrow one from a library or a friend or an astronomy club and enjoy this rare showing of Mars. The next time it will be this close and high in our sky will be in 2035, just about the time NASA has scheduled the first humans to land on Mars.
Both Jupiter and Saturn are now back to their direct or eastward motion. They are both easily visible high in the south as soon as it gets dark enough, before any other stars become visible. Watch how the closer and faster-moving Jupiter is catching up with Saturn. That will culminate on the winter solstice, when they will be just a quarter of a degree apart, their closest conjunction in about 400 years, since the invention of the telescope and modern science began.
The planet Uranus will reach opposition in Aries on Halloween. It will reach a magnitude of 5.7, so it should even be visible without binoculars. It will cover just 3.8 arc seconds of the sky, or 6 times smaller than Mars. It is tilted 97.8 degrees on it axis, so it appears to be rolling along the ecliptic. It exhibits a lovely pale blue color in a telescope.
Venus will pass within half a degree of Regulus in Leo on Oct. 2. That is the width of the full moon. I could see the star Regulus in the daytime very close to the sun along with several planets that instantly popped into view when it was completely covered by the moon during the total solar eclipse on Aug. 21, 2017. I drove all the way to eastern Idaho to see that and it was well worth every second of my trip. Everyone should see a total solar eclipse at least once in their lifetimes. You will learn more about the sun, moon, and planets and the inner workings of our solar system during those few brief moments of being immersed in the moon’s shadow than you ever could by just studying math and physics or watching movies of eclipses.
The Orionid meteor shower will peak on Wednesday, Oct. 21 at around 2 a.m. The conditions are favorable this year with no moonlight to see 15 meteors per hour from a dark sky site. These are tiny, sand grain-sized pieces of Halley’s Comet disintegrating high in our atmosphere at 148,000 mph, or twice the speed that the earth is always orbiting the sun.
The radiant of this shower is in the club of Orion. So you could picture Orion the mighty hunter hurling these meteors at the earth or batting them towards us with his club. Halley’s Comet also causes the Eta Aquarids on May 5 each year. The entire comet will not return again until 2062.
Oct.1: The full moon is at 5:06 p.m. This is also called the famous Harvest Moon because it is closer to the equinox than last month’s full moon was. The Yerkes 40 inch refracting telescope was dedicated on this day in 1897. Designed by George Ellery Hale, it was the largest telescope in the world at the time and is still the largest refractor in the world even now.
Oct. 2: Mars will rise with the moon tonight right after sunset. Venus will pass within half a degree of Regulus this morning.
Oct. 4: On this day in 1957, Sputnik 1 was launched by the Russians.
Oct. 8: The Draconid meteor shower peaks tonight.
Oct. 9: The last quarter moon is at 8:41 p.m.
Oct. 13: Mars is at opposition.
Oct. 14: Venus rises close to the waning crescent moon this morning around 4 a.m.
Oct. 16: The new moon is at 3:32 p.m.
Oct. 21: The Orionid meteor shower peaks at 2 a.m.
Oct. 23: The first quarter moon is at 9:24 a.m.
Oct 31: On this date in 2005, the Hubble Space Telescope discovered two more moons of Pluto, Nix and Hydra. The second full moon of this month, also called a Blue Moon, happens at 10:50 a.m.
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More than 40 trillion gallons of rain drenched the Southeast United States in the last week from Hurricane Helene and a run-of-the-mill rainstorm that sloshed in ahead of it — an unheard of amount of water that has stunned experts.
That’s enough to fill the Dallas Cowboys’ stadium 51,000 times, or Lake Tahoe just once. If it was concentrated just on the state of North Carolina that much water would be 3.5 feet deep (more than 1 meter). It’s enough to fill more than 60 million Olympic-size swimming pools.
“That’s an astronomical amount of precipitation,” said Ed Clark, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Water Center in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. “I have not seen something in my 25 years of working at the weather service that is this geographically large of an extent and the sheer volume of water that fell from the sky.”
The flood damage from the rain is apocalyptic, meteorologists said. More than 100 people are dead, according to officials.
Private meteorologist Ryan Maue, a former NOAA chief scientist, calculated the amount of rain, using precipitation measurements made in 2.5-mile-by-2.5 mile grids as measured by satellites and ground observations. He came up with 40 trillion gallons through Sunday for the eastern United States, with 20 trillion gallons of that hitting just Georgia, Tennessee, the Carolinas and Florida from Hurricane Helene.
Clark did the calculations independently and said the 40 trillion gallon figure (151 trillion liters) is about right and, if anything, conservative. Maue said maybe 1 to 2 trillion more gallons of rain had fallen, much if it in Virginia, since his calculations.
Clark, who spends much of his work on issues of shrinking western water supplies, said to put the amount of rain in perspective, it’s more than twice the combined amount of water stored by two key Colorado River basin reservoirs: Lake Powell and Lake Mead.
Several meteorologists said this was a combination of two, maybe three storm systems. Before Helene struck, rain had fallen heavily for days because a low pressure system had “cut off” from the jet stream — which moves weather systems along west to east — and stalled over the Southeast. That funneled plenty of warm water from the Gulf of Mexico. And a storm that fell just short of named status parked along North Carolina’s Atlantic coast, dumping as much as 20 inches of rain, said North Carolina state climatologist Kathie Dello.
Then add Helene, one of the largest storms in the last couple decades and one that held plenty of rain because it was young and moved fast before it hit the Appalachians, said University of Albany hurricane expert Kristen Corbosiero.
“It was not just a perfect storm, but it was a combination of multiple storms that that led to the enormous amount of rain,” Maue said. “That collected at high elevation, we’re talking 3,000 to 6000 feet. And when you drop trillions of gallons on a mountain, that has to go down.”
The fact that these storms hit the mountains made everything worse, and not just because of runoff. The interaction between the mountains and the storm systems wrings more moisture out of the air, Clark, Maue and Corbosiero said.
North Carolina weather officials said their top measurement total was 31.33 inches in the tiny town of Busick. Mount Mitchell also got more than 2 feet of rainfall.
Before 2017’s Hurricane Harvey, “I said to our colleagues, you know, I never thought in my career that we would measure rainfall in feet,” Clark said. “And after Harvey, Florence, the more isolated events in eastern Kentucky, portions of South Dakota. We’re seeing events year in and year out where we are measuring rainfall in feet.”
Storms are getting wetter as the climate change s, said Corbosiero and Dello. A basic law of physics says the air holds nearly 4% more moisture for every degree Fahrenheit warmer (7% for every degree Celsius) and the world has warmed more than 2 degrees (1.2 degrees Celsius) since pre-industrial times.
Corbosiero said meteorologists are vigorously debating how much of Helene is due to worsening climate change and how much is random.
For Dello, the “fingerprints of climate change” were clear.
“We’ve seen tropical storm impacts in western North Carolina. But these storms are wetter and these storms are warmer. And there would have been a time when a tropical storm would have been heading toward North Carolina and would have caused some rain and some damage, but not apocalyptic destruction. ”
Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about AP’s climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
It’s a dinosaur that roamed Alberta’s badlands more than 70 million years ago, sporting a big, bumpy, bony head the size of a baby elephant.
On Wednesday, paleontologists near Grande Prairie pulled its 272-kilogram skull from the ground.
They call it “Big Sam.”
The adult Pachyrhinosaurus is the second plant-eating dinosaur to be unearthed from a dense bonebed belonging to a herd that died together on the edge of a valley that now sits 450 kilometres northwest of Edmonton.
It didn’t die alone.
“We have hundreds of juvenile bones in the bonebed, so we know that there are many babies and some adults among all of the big adults,” Emily Bamforth, a paleontologist with the nearby Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum, said in an interview on the way to the dig site.
She described the horned Pachyrhinosaurus as “the smaller, older cousin of the triceratops.”
“This species of dinosaur is endemic to the Grand Prairie area, so it’s found here and nowhere else in the world. They are … kind of about the size of an Indian elephant and a rhino,” she added.
The head alone, she said, is about the size of a baby elephant.
The discovery was a long time coming.
The bonebed was first discovered by a high school teacher out for a walk about 50 years ago. It took the teacher a decade to get anyone from southern Alberta to come to take a look.
“At the time, sort of in the ’70s and ’80s, paleontology in northern Alberta was virtually unknown,” said Bamforth.
When paleontogists eventually got to the site, Bamforth said, they learned “it’s actually one of the densest dinosaur bonebeds in North America.”
“It contains about 100 to 300 bones per square metre,” she said.
Paleontologists have been at the site sporadically ever since, combing through bones belonging to turtles, dinosaurs and lizards. Sixteen years ago, they discovered a large skull of an approximately 30-year-old Pachyrhinosaurus, which is now at the museum.
About a year ago, they found the second adult: Big Sam.
Bamforth said both dinosaurs are believed to have been the elders in the herd.
“Their distinguishing feature is that, instead of having a horn on their nose like a triceratops, they had this big, bony bump called a boss. And they have big, bony bumps over their eyes as well,” she said.
“It makes them look a little strange. It’s the one dinosaur that if you find it, it’s the only possible thing it can be.”
The genders of the two adults are unknown.
Bamforth said the extraction was difficult because Big Sam was intertwined in a cluster of about 300 other bones.
The skull was found upside down, “as if the animal was lying on its back,” but was well preserved, she said.
She said the excavation process involved putting plaster on the skull and wooden planks around if for stability. From there, it was lifted out — very carefully — with a crane, and was to be shipped on a trolley to the museum for study.
“I have extracted skulls in the past. This is probably the biggest one I’ve ever done though,” said Bamforth.
“It’s pretty exciting.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 25, 2024.
TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — A rare Bronze-Era jar accidentally smashed by a 4-year-old visiting a museum was back on display Wednesday after restoration experts were able to carefully piece the artifact back together.
Last month, a family from northern Israel was visiting the museum when their youngest son tipped over the jar, which smashed into pieces.
Alex Geller, the boy’s father, said his son — the youngest of three — is exceptionally curious, and that the moment he heard the crash, “please let that not be my child” was the first thought that raced through his head.
The jar has been on display at the Hecht Museum in Haifa for 35 years. It was one of the only containers of its size and from that period still complete when it was discovered.
The Bronze Age jar is one of many artifacts exhibited out in the open, part of the Hecht Museum’s vision of letting visitors explore history without glass barriers, said Inbal Rivlin, the director of the museum, which is associated with Haifa University in northern Israel.
It was likely used to hold wine or oil, and dates back to between 2200 and 1500 B.C.
Rivlin and the museum decided to turn the moment, which captured international attention, into a teaching moment, inviting the Geller family back for a special visit and hands-on activity to illustrate the restoration process.
Rivlin added that the incident provided a welcome distraction from the ongoing war in Gaza. “Well, he’s just a kid. So I think that somehow it touches the heart of the people in Israel and around the world,“ said Rivlin.
Roee Shafir, a restoration expert at the museum, said the repairs would be fairly simple, as the pieces were from a single, complete jar. Archaeologists often face the more daunting task of sifting through piles of shards from multiple objects and trying to piece them together.
Experts used 3D technology, hi-resolution videos, and special glue to painstakingly reconstruct the large jar.
Less than two weeks after it broke, the jar went back on display at the museum. The gluing process left small hairline cracks, and a few pieces are missing, but the jar’s impressive size remains.
The only noticeable difference in the exhibit was a new sign reading “please don’t touch.”
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