The Venus-Jupiter conjunction show continues in the low western sky in the early evening and I sure hope you’re enjoying it. Meanwhile, another planet is visible in the southern skies, and in my opinion is one of the best sites you can see through a telescope, even a smaller scope.
As I told you in a previous column, these are the good times and the bad times for observing Saturn. At just over 850 million miles away it’s still fairly close to its minimum distance from Earth for 2015. Another thing in Saturn’s favor is the tilt of Saturn’s ring system. It’s nearly at its maximum angle to our line of sight, making it really visible to us. In fact, most of the light that you see when you glance at Saturn with the naked eye is sunlight reflecting off all the ice in Saturn’s rings that, by the way, are only about 50 feet thick.
The downer about telescoping Saturn this year is that because of where it is among the backdrop of stars it never gets all that far above the horizon. When evening twilight is over look for the brightest star-like object you can see in low southern sky and that will be Saturn. Unfortunately that’s about as high as it gets. At that height above the horizon Earth’s atmosphere is thicker and has a definite blurring effect, especially with the higher humidity of summertime and strong upper atmosphere winds. The ringed wonder of our solar system is still a great telescope destination.
The best advice I can give you for viewing Saturn through a telescope is to take long continuous views and hope that you’ll catch a more transparent patch of sky coming through. Long looks also give your eye more time to adjust to the light level in your eyepiece field of view and allow you to see more detail. Along with details on Saturn itself, you should be able to see some of it’s many moons that resemble tiny stars.
Saturn doesn’t have another planet near it in the low southern heavens, but it does have some very intriguing company. It’s in the faint constellation Libra the Scales. The constellation is supposed to depict the scales of Roman justice, a symbol of justice still used today. Like most constellations, though, it’s a tremendous stretch turning that collection of mainly faint stars into a Roman scale. Libra does have a couple of brighter stars that are most interesting for their names. They are Zubenelgenubi, pronounced zoo-ben-el-je-new-bee, and Zubeneschamali, pronounced zuba-nesh-a-molly. These two mouthful-for-a-name stars are the next brightest shiners to the right of Saturn.
These tough tongue-twisting names are Arabic, and translate in English to the south claw and northern claw, respectively. What do “claw” stars have to do with a Roman scale? Absolutely nothing. As it turns out the constellation Libra was invented by the Roman Empire Julius Caesar. Originally the stars that make up Libra were once upon a time part of the neighboring constellation to the left, Scorpius the Scorpion. Zubenelgenubi and Zubeneschamali used to mark the claws of the great constellation Scorpius the Scorpion. One day Caesar just decided to hack the claws off of Scorpius and made the “Z” stars and few others around them into the new constellation Libra the Scales. Caesar had that kind of power. That’s why I say that this summer, Saturn is in the clutches of a giant celestial scorpion.
Unlike Libra, Scorpius is one of the few constellations that truly resembles what its supposed to be. Its brightest star Antares is the next brightest object to the lower left of Saturn and marks the heart of the Scorpion. If you have an unobstructed view of the southern horizon you can really see the tail of Scorpius. Incidentally, you can’t help but notice is that Antares has a ruddy appearance to it. That’s because it’s what astronomers call a super red giant star, or a swelled-up older star. One day it will explode into a colossal supernova explosion. Antares is possibly well over 600 million miles in diameter. By comparison, our sun is less than a million miles in diameter. In fact, this behemoth star is so large that if you were to put Antares in our solar system in place of our sun, the planets Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, and even Jupiter would lie inside of it. Our world would experience the ultimate in global warming.
In that case Saturn would be the closet planet to Antares, but it wouldn’t look the same. The ice in the rings would be gone, as well most of the gas hydrogen and helium gas of the planet.
Let’s keep our humble little sun just where it is.
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