“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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No matter how sagacious your skywatching scoring algorithm, the weather will always be a wild card. I try to get outside and look up whenever possible. Even clouds are interesting! Okay, monotone gray overcast stratus clouds aren’t that interesting.
By observing regularly you’re able to notice changes. The dramatic dimming of Algol at minimum brightness is only perceptible if you can find Algol in the sky and have a good sense of the star’s normal brightness. Mars has looked surprisingly bright the past couple of weeks, and the retrograde motion has been noticeable from one night to the next.
So anyway, although there are noteworthy brief events, I’m leery of giving people a nightly Astronomical Wonder Score. Just get outside, look up, and see what’s out there.
Anthony, that’s a great observation ~ some of my most memorable observing experiences were the result of randomly exceptional sky conditions, not because of a particular event (eclipses excepted of course). The old adage of “the more you look, the more you see” applies to astronomy especially.
Well, Guy, you’ve done it again, plucked an interesting notion for contemplation out of the sky in extending Fred Schaaf ‘s observation on the density of astronomical events. Eric David’s event list adds the random, unpredictable aspects to be considered. Perhaps the guidance on selecting “interesting” events is what does a human finds personally worthy of putting on such list, weighting the significance according to some rubric. Alignments, as you note, are indeed biased to an observation location. But there are other surging elements to consider. Armed with sensors to translate the invisible (particles, x-rays, radio, etc.) into seeable/hearable waveforms, would we not find ourselves coursing through an ever present sea of turbulence in which there might be enormous peaks of confluence? There is joy in knowing we are part of the soup.
Larry, of Celestial Products, is in the business of harvesting the sky’s productivity of interest.
Great post Guy, thank you very much for calling attention to the issue ~ my take on it is:
For planets, there are noteworthy visual events and then there are orbital benchmarks.
The orbital benchmarks such as opposition, greatest elongation, quadrature, stationary
points, etc. are not as significant in my opinion because they usually don’t confer a
particularly outstanding observing opportunity (e.g., Venus greatest elongation is not
a dramatically more opportune time to see Venus than during the month before or after).
The one exception to this rule would be Mars oppositions, because they do coincide
with a much more advantageous observing opportunity.
Noteworthy visual events would be conjunctions (for which many times the specific date
of the conjunction is much better than even one day before or after), Saturn ring plane
crossings, phenomena of Jupiter’s moons, alignments with stars or the Moon, gatherings
of multiple planets (e.g. May 2002 or April 2022), occultations, meteor showers, comets
that become bright, auroras, obviously eclipses of any kind, sunspots, transits, and a
nova or supernova (e.g., we have been waiting for T Coronae Borealis to erupt for over
9 months).
Of course, aurorae and novae/supernovae are not predictable except for possibly a few
days prior at most.
In terms of scoring, I would rate planetary gatherings of three or more very high, as
well as conjunctions of Venus and Jupiter since they are both very bright. Jupiter
and Mars conjunctions when they are both very bright would be especially significant
(1980). Inferior conjunctions of Venus are also high because of the opportunity to
see Venus’ extremely thin crescent in daytime. Transits would of course score very
highly.
Meteor showers and comets would get very high scores *after the fact* if they proved
to be exceptional (e.g., NEOWISE and Tsuchinshan-ATLAS), but giving them a high score
ahead of time can be problematic (e.g., ISON in 2013).
Much food for scoring thought there. I’m beginning to think that the whole concept is valid only for a specific on Earth (lat, long). Conceivably a program could find and give ratings to all the most observable “stellar” bodies and appulses of them between evening and morning astronomical twilight. But I suspect there are too many dimensions to the oroblem,
Have a look at midnight between Dec 23 and 24 in 2007. Full moon on summer colure occults Mars in opposition, Sun on winter solstice occults Jupiter – and more. I found it stroking.
I was a high school Astronomy teacher in Marblehead,MA and your different resouces i.e. (The Thousand Yard Solar System Model) were greatly appreciated during my career. But much to my surprise was you mentioning Atlantic City newspaper and Fred Schaaf. The surprise was due to the fact that the newspaper was my hometown’s newspaper.