Great sight, great observer

The Moon passes 4° south of Saturn during the night between November 28 and 29, and moves on toward the next regal planet of the evening sky.

See the end note about enlarging illustrations.

The closest Moon-Saturn moment is 8h Universal Time, which is after dawn for most of North America and Europe.

Eclipse king

Jay Pasachoff died on November 20. There is an obituary in the New York Times.

I met him in Agra just after the eclipse that was his 23rd: 1995 Oct. 24. He and Steve O’Meara and Leif Robinson of Sky & Telescope invited me to dinner at the hotel where they were staying, though while Jay and Steve talked about the eclipse, Leif and I couldn’t tear our attention away from the two musicians, playing sitar and tabla.

The obituary says that Jay had “74 sightings under his belt.” If that means the number of eclipses that he saw – rather than something else such as the number of reports he made – it is an amazingly large number. At any rate, he almost certainly witnessed more solar eclipses than anyone else in history.

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

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.

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.