Here is the sky over the western horizon this Sunday evening, May 1.
See the end note about enlarging illustrations.
The arrows through the moving bodies, including the Sun, show their motion over 5 days in relation to the starry background. The Moon’s “age” is 29 hours, as indicated by the figure beside it; that is, it is 29 hours past its new moment beside the Sun.
In the low twilight sky, many of the features we show are for the mind’s eye, but you may be able to spot Mercury, which is shining at magnitude 1 – a shade less bright than Aldebaran.
Mercury passed close to the Pleiades cluster on April 30 at 7 Universal Time (4 or more hours earlier by North American clocks). The Moon will pass them both on May 2, zo that the three will form a “trio,” at its tightest on May 2 at 12 UT (daylight in Europe and most of America), when they will fit within a circle of diameter about 3.3°.
At the time and location of our scene, Mercury is 10° above the horizon.
Home Planet Anecdote
For Ukraine, there may a glimmer of light at the end of tunnel of war, and of the tunnels out of the Mariupol steel works, where a thousand defenders and a thousand civilians have been traoed for two months, many of them with wounds and amoutated limbs, with no medication or water. It seems some evacuation of them has for the first time been allowed. Previously, Russia bombed escape corridors.
But Russia bombed Kyiv when the secretary general of the United Nations was there, just after he had met with Putin in Moscow.
We have a friend who was a London constable, and when they moved her to a desk job she applied for something more exciting: went to Ukraine as a peace monitor with OSCE, the Organization for Security and Co-Operation in Europe. This was back when there was conflict and truce-breaking along the “line of contact” between, on the east, the Russian-supported breakaway republics of Donetsk and Luhansk, and on the west the parts of those provinces still held by Ukraine.
She told us that her favorite places were Luhansk itself and Kramatorsk (since then devastated by the April 8 missile strikes on its crowded railway station). And that the university of Luhansk was sadly in need of more books. When she was home for a while on leave, we gave her as many books as could fit into a suitcase, which she schlepped back to Ukraine. The books included the majority of those on astronomy that I still had (not all in English, but none in Ukrainian; there was an elderly Russian volume of ephemerides of minor planets).
Recently – after full war bad broken out in Ukraine – our helper Ed Merritt sent us a report, from MailChimp, about an emailing of notices to people about my Astronomical Calendar 2022. The report had an interesting analysis of “opens,” “clicks,” and other statistics. The countries with the largest numbers were, as you’d expect, the US, Canada, and the UK. But then fourth came Ukraine, with a few “opens,” ahead of New Zealand, the Netherlands, and several others.
It’s hard to see how this could have been caused by those donated books, though it’s also hard to imagine any other explanation. I may have out an Astronomical Companion and a Troy Town Tale into the suitcase, but that wouldn’t have got anyone into MailChimp’s email list. It would be nice to picture those books being enjoyed in the Luhansk library.
Unless it’s been hit by Russian bombardment, like this one.
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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” or “Open image in new tabV, 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 publishing it. If you click on the title, rather than on ‘Read more’, I think you are sure to see the latest version. Or you can click ‘Refresh’ to get the latest version.
This weblog maintains its right to be about astronomy or anything under the sun.