This is the
Classical Astronomy Update, an email newsletter especially
for Christian homeschool families (though everyone is welcome!) Please feel free to share this with any interested
friends.
I will praise thee, O Lord, among the people: I will sing unto thee among the nations. For thy mercy is great unto the heavens, and thy truth
unto the clouds. Be thou exalted, O God, above the heavens: let thy glory be above all the earth.. -- Psalm 57:9-11 IN THIS UPDATE About that Green Comet.... Hello Friends, Hope your new year is off to a good start. It's funny how astronomy news works -- seems there's nothing to report for a long time and then suddenly there's more than one item. So for everyone who likes shorter newsletters, you'll be glad to know that this one is short, only dealing with one subject. But I intend to send another short newsletter next week to cover the other subject, rather than cramming it all into one
newsletter. Let me know if you like it better this way. I'm happy to report that I've finally finished the script phase of Measuring the Heavens, the long-awaited sequel to our Signs & Seasons astronomy curriculum. I still have to write an introduction and the appendices, which will include a Glossary, Biographia and tables,
similar to S&S. But there's some great content here, friends! If you liked Signs & Seasons and are ready for the next level of your astronomy education, you will be pleased with Measuring the
Heavens! The plan is to create a full color edition, and more of a "graphic novel" format, as was the original intention of this series. I also need to concurrently create the companion workbook which
will include all the math problems. It will likely take at least a year to have all that ready, probably even more time since this is all side work after my day job and family obligations. After that project is complete, I'll begin the full color second edition of Signs &
Seasons. Thanks to everyone for your prayers! The LORD has blessed this effort! Your ongoing prayers are appreciated! I've been having a lot of fun lately on the new and improved Twitter. It's fun again like social media used to be a decade ago, before it morphed into a partisan censorship tool for crafting a manufactured consensus for the mainstream narrative. If you're on Twitter, please follow me @JayRyanAstro. Send me a tweet or a DM to remind me that you're a newsletter reader and I'll follow you back. Anybody know anything about Substack? A lot of people I admire are on it, and it looks like a great new way to blog and share newsletters. But at this point in my life I'm just weary and wary of investing more time and effort into
still another internet platform. I was the first one on my block to have my own website way back in 1996. Since then I've had several sites and platforms and seen small players grow past me into large players, including Space.com, Amazon, Google, and many others. So I'm curious if anyone has any knowledge or opinions about Substack, and whether any of you nice folks would subscribe to me there. If so, I might phase off this current newsletter platform and switch to that.
Thanks in advance for any feedback. If you have not yet done so, check out our new and improved
Book Trailer video for our Signs & Seasons astronomy curriculum, and share this newsletter with your friends: For more information about topics from Classical Astronomy discussed in this newsletter,
please check out a homeschool astronomy curriculum (but popular with adult readers too!) Visit our archive of previous editions of the Classical Astronomy Update newsletters, going back to 2007. ***** About
that Green Comet.... I've had a few
people lately ask me about that "Green Comet" which is currently in the sky and in the news. I'm not a bg fan of comets since SO MANY have been overhyped fizzle dud non-events over the years. My first comet letdown was Comet Kohoutek as an impressionable young child in 1973. Another memorable comet disappoinment was the much-ballyhooed return of Halley's Comet in 1986, when I was by then a college student, a jaded veteran of astro-hype. As the comic strip Bloom
County succinctly opined at the time, "It's a SPECK! The astronomical event of our generation is a SPECK!" Anyway, this is how it goes with comets, which is no doubt one reason why so few people are interested in
astronomy. The media hypes a comet to death and then it totally tanks, over and over and over for decades. To paraphrase Scotty from Star Trek, "fool me once, shame on you, fool me a MILLION times, shame on me." The astro media is even lazier than usual in their reporting of the latest cosmic interloper, C/2022 E3 (ZTF), simply calling it "The Green Comet" instead of coining a catchy name. Many comets are somewhat green, as are the meteor showers they leave behind, nothing new about that. Comets have traditionally been named after their discoverers, but these days comets are discovered by robotic telescopes running continuous scans of the sky. Several stories
reported that this "Green Comet" was discovered by "astronomers" via a robotic scope at the Zwicky Transit Facilty on Mt. Palomar in Southern California. (Can't believe they can still do any astronomy at all at this historic observatory, which is now sadly a light polluted location.) So it would be unsurprising if the Green Comet failed to deliver. But in spite of the many disappointments over the years, we did have back-to-back stunning comet shows in 1996 and 1997 with Comet Hyakutake and Comet Hale-Bopp. And Comet NEOWISE was faint but worthwhile in 2020, which was the best cometary performance since the latter events back in the 90s. So it is worthwhile to take a look when a comet comes to town,
in spite of the astro-media's lousy batting average. Just don't allow yourself to get overly excited. Well, so anyway, there are numerous news stories out there only a keyword search away, but be sure to search C/2022 E3 (ZTF) to find intelligent results. This
website has scientific data and observing tips and also a nifty Java app visualization tool of the comet's orbit. You can twirl around and look at the comet's orbit from every
possible camera angle, zoom in and out, and advance forward and backward through time. As you can see from this app, the plane of the comet's orbit is nearly perpendicular to the the ecliptic, the plane of the
Earth's orbit. (For detailed info about the ecliptic, check out our Signs & Seasons astronomy curriculum.) The comet passed perihelion on January 12, which is its closest distance to the Sun. The
closest approach of the comet to Earth will be on February 1, when it should appear largest and brightest to human observers. According to the above website, this Green Comet is predicted to be only magnitude 5 at closest approach. So it will be faint, maybe not even as bright as Comet NEOWISE, which was quite faint. (See this 2020 edition from our newsletter archive for a report on that comet.) In any event, you will require binoculars
and you'll have a better chance of spotting it if you get away from the city lights and observe from a dark rural location. Even then, you can expect the comet to appear as a faint smudge, as if someone smeared chalk dust on a blackboard (if you're old enough like me to remember blackboards and chalk!) Oh, and then there's this little detail -- very important -- if you do find it, don't expect the comet to actually be green. This color is physically present but there's not enough brightness to trigger the color vision of the human retina. The green color is only visible in long time exposures of the comet taken by fancy professional telescopes -- which is yet another ripoff from the "usual
suspects" of the "fake news" who lie to us every day about everything else besides comets. If you've seen these nifty green color pix splashed all over the internet, you've already seen all the color you can expect to see. The good news (and the reason why I'm even bothering to write this newsletter) is that the so-called "Green" Comet will be well placed for viewing as it passes through the most famous parts of the sky. Through the end of January, the comet will be straddling the faint stars of the constellation Draco, passing in between the Big Dipper and Polaris, the North Star. Most everyone knows the Big Dipper, and you can use "The Pointers" of the bowl of
the Dipper to find the North Star. (If you don't know about that, you can learn all about it our Signs & Seasons astronomy curriculum.) The comet will be very high up in the sky at its closest approach on February 1, nearly at the zenith. And passing so close to the north
celestial pole, the comet will be visible all night as seen from the temperate latitudes of the northern hemisphere. But the comet will be hanging around the evening sky all through the month of February, even though it will be decreasing in brightness. After passing through the famous constellations of the northern sky, the comet will then move south among the famous constellations of the Orion Sky. Everybody loves Orion and his neighbors, which include 7 of the 15 first magnitude stars, the brightest stars in the sky. A frosty clear winter night is always a treat with these stars spangling the sky. On the night of Monday, February 6, the comet will pass the bright first magnitude star Capella in the constellation Auriga. This star should make it very easy to spot the comet, even if it is quite faint. If the comet is indistinct, keep trying for at least several minutes
and don't give up right away. Sometimes you're looking and looking and then it just "pops out" so you can see it. Almost a week later, on the evening of Sunday, February 12, the comet will pass the bright red planet
Mars, currently hosted in the constellation Taurus. This should be another great opportunity to spot the comet while it's close to a conspicuous object. The comet will cross the plane of the ecliptic around this time, and will then be heading deep into the southern sky as it moves out of the inner
solar system. But as it moves away, it will pass to the west of Orion himself, and will be found in this part of the sky through February and for the rest of the winter. If you've had any success spotting the comet by this time, you might be able to follow it until it vanishes from sight, never to reappear in our lifetimes. As mentioned above, there will be another newsletter next week. This will be about the next upcoming lunar occultation of Mars. If you missed the last one back in December, you'll have another chance on January 31. There was another Moon/Mars occultation in early January but that one was not visible from the USA, so North America is being favored twice in three
consecutive lunations. So I'll get back to you soon with those details. Til next time, God bless and clear skies, - jay The Ryan Family Cleveland,
Ohio, USA When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers,
the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained, what is man that thou art mindful of
him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him? - Psalm 8:3-4, a Psalm of David
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