Interesting weeks?

“May you live in interesting times!”

This is said to be a Chinese curse. A time is “interesting” if it is full of dangers, upheavals, disasters, anxiety.

The saying could have originated – though there is no evidence that it did – in China, whose long history included several periods of chaos, “warring kingdoms,” barbarian invasion.

In this ironic sense, we are in an interesting time.

Reasonless wars, politics dominated by money, autocratic top bullies, multiplying inequality between the luxurious and the starving, chemical poisons flooding our air and soil and information poisons darting through our cyberspace. And above all the race toward an overheated desert world.

In a non-ironic sense, what is an interesting time for observers of the night sky?

Fred Schaaf (whose many books on astronomy you may have on your shelf) mentioned to his friends by email that in writing his next column for the Atlantic City newspaper, which would cover January 7-20, he “came to the conclusion that in nearly 49 years of doing the column this two-week period may have a greater number of truly major planet-involved events than any other.”

I list the ones he mentioned:

Jan 10     Venus at greatest evening elongation
Jan 14     Moon (4 hours after full) occults Mars
Jan 16     Mars at opposition
Jan 18     Venus-Saturn conjunction
Jan 22     Mars in compact line with Pollux and Castor

This set me wondering whether there is a way to measure the amount of “interest” in the sky. The events are findable at various places in Astronomical Calendar 2025. And the paired horizon scenes are chosen for the “best” dates, according to a set of criteria, but they are limited to the early-evening and late-morning parts of the night and thus exclude what happens nearer to midnight. And the graph on page 3 shows the times when each planet is most observable; and the graph of elongation, on page 139, shows the times when the planets cross paths with each other and with the Moon.

But there are many other events of “major” interest. What about meteor shower peak dates, peaks and dips of the variable stars Mira and Algol, eclipses of Jupiter’s satellites best moments for asteroids and comets? And we would have to factor location and declination. Have you any ideas about how days (in Universal Time) could earn scores?

Here’s an event that isn’t among Fred’s examples, because it doesn’t involve a planet. The Moon passes across the northern edge of the Pleiades cluster on January 10 (at 2h UT, but that is back in January 9 by local time in America).

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