Juno the betrayed

Asteroid 3 Juno is at an ironic opposition.

See the end note about enlarging illustrations.

As we say in Astronomical Calendar 2022, Juno, “though among the first asteroids discovered, and though named for the queen of Roman goddesses, is smaller than the others of the First Four, and is in most years surpassed in brightness by at least one of those discovered later…  This time it is 1.3 AU from us and at magnitude 7.9, its closest and  brightest since 2017, when it reached 7.4; it can be as dim as 10.”

Any of these magnitudes is dimmer than the naked-eye limit of around 5 or 6, so it will take binoculars and comparison with nearby stars to find Juno, as in the finder chart in the Astronomical Calendar.

Alas, poor Juno. This otherwise unusually favorable opposition clashes with nearly-full moonlight. As you can see in our sky scene, the Moon will in two days come past the point we’ve marked as the “anti-Sun,” where Juno is now.

But opposition is only the mid-point of the span of time during which a body is most observable. You may be able to locate Juno now, or wait a few days till the Moon has gone past and Juno continues the zigzag retrograde movement it is making in the angle between celestial  equator and ecliptic.

Again to quote the AC and one of its illustrations:

“An interesting feature of Juno’s orbit is that it always comes to opposition close to the celestial equator…”

Mythical heaven department

Queen Juno, too, had to put up with being treated as less than supreme. She suffered some disrespect from her stepdaughter Diana of the Moon, and the serial infidelity of her husband Jupiter.

When I was nine or ten, my parents moved from Sutton Coldfield to Sutton, Surrey, and my sister and I had to travel by ourselves in a train. A man opposite to me smoked a cigar, so I was sick in bed for a week, and I picked off the shelf one of the books my parents hadn’t read, and read it: it was the Iliad, translated by Edward earl of Derby into blank verse of old-fashioned style. Speeches by heroes ended with “Thus he spake, and hurl’d his glitt’ring spear,” and speeches in which Juno and Jupiter, feasting in Olympus or looking down on the battlefield, argued about the fate of Troy began with retorts such as “What word hath pass’d the barrier of thy teeth!” White-arm’d Juno seduced Jupiter into lovemaking and sleep on a meadow of  Mount Ida, allowing the Greeks to save their ships from burning by the Trojans and a stone to stun Hector of the flashing helm, prop of Troy. Lycaon, Hyrtacus, Merops, Pyraechmes, Augeas, Amarynceus, Diores, Astyanax, Diomedes – how delightful it would be to learn a language composed of words like these names! So, when I could, I opted to learn Greek. And discovered that Lord Derby had used Roman forms: Juno and Jupiter and Minerva were really Hera and Zeus and Athena, and Amarynceus was Amarunkeus, Mycenae was Mukenai. Hercules was really Herakles – a name that still puzzles us, since he was not the “honored of Hera” but the Zeus-bastard whose birth she tried hardest to prevent; she was his bane, driving him mad (so that he killed his own children and had to undertake the twelve Labors). The Latin names, Jupiter and Juno and Hercules and Achilles and the rest, became familiar in post-Roman cultures. In my Troy Town Tale I preferred to go back to the Greek, such as Hera and Akhileus. They have more verfremdung, detachment-effect; they take us back to that archaic age.

You could say it was a cigar that diverted me into learning Greek. An example of what I call chaotic determinism: every thing that happens is the product of a net of innumerable causes, many of them small. That the cigar caused me to study the classics doesn’t have great consequence for the world, but something diverted Karl Marx into his study of economics, leading to the rise of communist nations.

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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 tab”, 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.

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