Venus northernmost, couch awkwardmost

Venus will reach the most northerly point in its whole eight-year cycle, on the evening of Monday May 3 for America.

See the end note about enlarging illustrations.

The instant of this geometrical event is May 4 0h Universal Time.  That’s 1 AM by British clocks; in America it’s back in Sunday, 8 PM in the Eastern time zone, 7 PM in the Central, and so on.  So it’s a little before the time of our picture.

We show Venus’s position as a dot, and its narrow sunlit crescent exaggerated 150 times in size.  The arrows through it and the Sun indicate their movement, aginst the starry background, over five days.  So you can see that, while the Sun continues to advance eastward by about a degree a day as the year goes on, Venus is not staying ahead.  It is falling back rapidly, relative to the Sun, as it curves toward us, to pass between us and the Sun on June 3.

Diagrams like this include some details that you can’t see except with the mind’s eye: not only geometrical features such as the ecliptic, but things too faint in the twilight or low toward the horizon, such as the Milky Way and the Pleiades.  Venus, indeed, may be the only “star” you can see.  Now at magnitude -4.5, it is about 16 times brighter than Sirius, the brightest star, which is loer..

The spot marked “solstice point” is the northernmost point of tjhe ecliptic (it’s the spot where the Sun is at the June solstice).  The star with the Arabic name El Nath (meaning “the butting one”), otherwise known as Beta Tauri, traditionally marks the tip of the northern horn of Taurus; but it also completes the pentagon of Auriga, so it has another designation: Gamma Aurigae.

Here is a chart of Venus’s “northness” –

– its path across the northern zodiacal constellations Taurus and Gemini in the various years of the cycle.  This year it went into retrograde motion just short of reaching El Nath, and is northernmost a few daus later.  Eight years later, the same motion happen farther west and a few days later.  This is about the clearest demonstration of how the cycle gradually evolves.  The beautiful eight-year cycle, about which there is so much to be said, is actually, over the aeons of astronomical time, a fleeting condition that favors our local few thousand years of time.

The chart is from page 38 of my Venus: a longer view.  The book is cp,pleted and we hope to tell you about its availability soon.on.

***

Bad Decisions department.

When we found ourselves living in what had been the Baptist Manse in Lyme Regis, we went to London to buy a couch.  I got impatient with the search from shop to shop  and said “Let’s take this one, it’ll be fine!”  Not the first time I’ve tired of a search and cut it short with a rash decision.  The couch was long and heavy.  The delivery men nearly didn’t get it round the corners from front door to living room.  It was wide as well as long, so that people with short laps had their feet off the floor like children.  Once it sank splinteringly through a floorboard under the added weight of a corpulent guest.  And it was an apartment block for moths.  Then we moved from the old manse to a centuries-older house in the thick of the town.  There was no way the monster couch would go around those internal corners.  A team of friends got it in by sliding it up a ladder and in through the bay window.  I wish I’d thought of sketching or snapshooting that.  Then we moved to where we are now.  The buyer of our house refused to buy it with the couch in it.  It could not be dismembered unless with a blowtorch.  So another team of friends got it back out of the upstairs window, in the way you see.  (It now languishes in a shed somewhere.)  I wish I had snapped or sketched the next moment.  If they had just tilted  it, it might have dived between building and vehicle onto the sidewalk, killing a pedestrian.  So the fellow you see climbing onto the van got his back under it.

__________

ILLUSTRATIONS in these posts are made with precision but have to be inserted in another format.  You may be able to enlarge them on your monitor.  One way: right-click, and choose “View image”, then enlarge.  Or choose “Copy image”, then put it on your desktop, then open it.  On an iPad or phone, use the finger gesture that enlarges (spreading with two fingers, or tapping and dragging with three fingers).  Other methods have been suggested, such as dragging the image to the desktop and opening it in other ways.

Sometimes I make improvements or corrections to a post after positing it.  If you click on the title, rather than on ‘Read more’, I think you are sure to see the latest version.

This weblog maintains its right to be about astronomy or anything under the sun.