Thursday, November 24, 2022

image

Sometimes at night I am walking home through Sunnyside park.

In this section of it I can see the night sky best:
Walking on that path it is only the backyards of houses facing it, so there are no street lights, only the faint backyard or household lights that shine through the house windows. The path is mostly clear of trees, except for around the perimeter, so it gives a fair amount of undisturbed night sky.
On any night, pretty much year round, I can see Jupiter, and, of course the Moon.

Often I can see what is called the Summer Triangle, which is Altair, Vega and Deneb; and I can see it well into October. In the winter I can pretty clearly see the whole of the Orion constellation.

On my walk home tonight I saw Jupiter, Mars and using my Sky Map app, what I learned was Capella. Of course, with the naked eye Capella looks like a single star, but I just read about it - it is actually two pairs of binaries that are all gravitationally connected. The two primary are giants, the two secondary are red dwarfs. Together they are all about 13 parsecs away.

From the Capella Wikipedia page, here is a chart that shows the relative sizes of the two binaries as compared to our sun. It is just their relative sizes, not their distances from each other.
I think I would have enjoyed being an astronomer; I'm just not certain that I'd have had the commitment to keep at it with the degree of intensity required to make a career out of it.

No comments: