Saturn will glow brightly in the sky next week. Here's how to see it

[applegrove]

Saturn will glow brightly in the sky next week. Here's how to see it

By Megan Marples and Ashley Strickland, CNN

Updated 1:56 PM EDT, Fri July 30, 2021

https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2021/07/30/world/saturn-at-opposition-2021-scn/index.html?__twitter_impression=true


(CNN)See Saturn shine brightly for this once-a-year nighttime spectacle.

"SNIP......


On August 1 and 2, Saturn will be at opposition, meaning the Earth will be located between the ringed planet and the sun. This is when the outer planet will be at its most luminous, making for a brilliant night sky view.

Saturn's opposition is at 2 a.m. ET on August 2, or 11 p.m. PT for those on the West Coast, according to EarthSky.

....

Once Venus sinks below the horizon after the sun sets, Jupiter will be the brightest object in the sky, EarthSky said. To find Saturn, look just west of Jupiter.

Saturn is shown as it approaches its northern hemisphere summer solstice.

If you're hoping to catch a glimpse of Saturn's famous rings, you'll need to whip out a telescope, according to the Farmer's Almanac.

.......SNIP"

[FSogol]

1. Here's how to see it: look up!

[applegrove]

2. Ha!

[NurseJackie]

20. Here's some relaxing music to listen to while observing... 💖💖💖

[MurrayDelph]

30. That's step 3

Step 1: wait until night
Step 2: go outside

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

3. Yeah, you always need a telescope to see the rings.

I'll have to stay up late enough to see it.

One way to figure out if the bright object you're seeing is Jupiter or Venus, is to see how near the horizon it is. Venus will never be more than about 40 degrees above the horizon, either right after sunset or right before sunrise. Jupiter can easily be in the middle of the sky.

Also, even in cities with horrendous light pollution, Venus and Jupiter can still almost always be seen, even if nothing else can be.

I love astronomy stuff.

Do you know about Pluto Time?

[applegrove]

4. Oh tell us.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

5. Pluto time is a brief time before sunrise and after sunset

when the light you see is the same as being on Pluto, on its equator, at high noon.

Here's a link: https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/dwarf-planets/pluto/plutotime/

Once you make a point of being outside at your local Pluto time, you'll get so you can recognize it easily.

What I find so incredibly cool about this is that we tend to think of Pluto as being completely dark, but it's not. As far from the Sun as it is, it still gets significant light.

Maybe this will help: the magnitude of the Sun on Pluto is -19.2. In comparison, the magnitude of the full Moon here on earth is -12.6. So a LOT brighter than our full Moon.

I will have to make an obligatory thank you to My Son The Astronomer who has turned me on to lots of these things. I frequently call him up with yet another random astronomy question, and he's always incredibly patient with me, even when I'm asking the same question for the millionth time. Plus, he's very good at explaining things in reasonably simple language.

[applegrove]

6. Love it. I used to have access to the milky way at our cottage in Quebec. I so

miss seeing a night sky without interference from city lights. Back then you had to suss out info but i remember seeing man made satellites and shooting stars. I'm sure I saw a planet at some point too but don't remember which. Starbathing under the milky way should be on everyones list of to dos (I just made that term up borrowing from the Japanese forrestbathing). I have a night light that mimics the stars on the ceiling of my bedroom. That brings me right back. And heals. You look up and wonder about the meaning of it all when you can sit in the bowl of a mountainous lake and look up. Thanks P. You are lucky to have an astronomer in the family.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

11. I am lucky to have an astronomer in the family.

I also live in Santa Fe, NM, which has pretty dark skies. The city is getting ready to make major changes in street lights, which should make this an official Dark Skies city.

Tucson, AZ, where I partially grew up, is one such. I moved away in 1968, before they adopted a Dark Skies policy. It came about because the city is surrounded by mountains, many of which have telescopes, and the astronomers persuaded the city to make changes in street lighting. One recent time when I was there and driving on a major street at night, it was disconcerting that the street itself was well lit up, but only a bit above eye level the sky was dark. And lots of stars were visible.

Santa Fe is vastly smaller, and I already have decent star viewing here. Plus lots and lots of clear nights, lucky me.

My Son The Astronomer is currently in a PhD program in astronomy at George Mason University in Fairfax, VA, a bit south of Washington DC. I love being able to ask him stuff. Here's one recent factoid: As you probably already know, our galaxy, Milky Way, and Andromeda are on a collision course. Brace yourself. We'll crash into each other in about 4 billion years or so. Milky Way has about 300 billion stars, and Andromeda about 1 trillion. So I recently thought to ask him, when that collision happens, how many stars will actually crash into each other? He said, "Well, we're not sure, but the best guess is less than 10." Wow. Out of all those stars. Keep in mind that many others will gravitationally interact, but the fact that so few will collide tells you more than anything else just how vast interstellar distances are.

[applegrove]

12. Boggles the mind. The numbers in the universe are so high.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

13. Yes. And most people absolutely don't understand that.

Those who blithely say that of course aliens have visited/are visiting here from far away have no conception of the distances involved. Nor the fact that FTL, Faster Than Light drive is probably impossible, at least according to My Son The Astronomer. Even at 99.99% of c (speed of light) it would take four YEARS to travel to or from the nearest star. There are only 12 stars within 10 light years of ours, a whopping 133 within 50 light years. Think about it.

Perhaps there are intelligent species out there who can travel at 99.99% c, and who live at least a thousand years. For them, traveling 50 or even 200 light years is then feasible. Not for us humans. We're pretty much done with our working lives between 60 and 80 years, and largely dead by 80 or 90. We might possibly colonize part of the galaxy with generation ships, ones on which several or many generations of humans will be born, live, and die, before eventually getting to another star with habitable planets. But casually visiting other planets and coming home? Nope. Not gonna happen. As it probably won't/can't happen with the hypothetical aliens.

[applegrove]

14. There are so many stars that there probably is intelligent life out there.

sister was told that at the Natural History Museum in NYCity. So i believe it. Maybe we will just have to connect by radio and that is it.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

15. Maybe. But you also need to think about the age of the Universe at this point,

and how long a given intelligent species might last.

A million years is a reasonable guess. Given that the Universe is currently about 14 billion years old, and that it was a while before star formation happened, and that the very earliest stars are no longer with us, there may well not ever be an overlap of two specific intelligent species.

Now lets factor in how large our galaxy is. We may as well ignore all other galaxies, because travel between two even nearby galaxies simply isn't going to happen, trust me on this. If some planet on the other side of our galaxy actually evolves intelligent life comparable to ours, at this very same time, it's still about 100,000 light years away. That's 100,000 years plus of travel at full light speed. My Son The Astronomer tells me that current thinking in his field is that FTL, Faster Than Light travel is probably not at all possible. So forget some kind of warp speed.

He also tells me that a lot of current thinking in his field is that we may very well be the first technological intelligent life in our galaxy. So forget the idea that there are aliens out there vastly more superior. We may well be it.

Here are some other possibilities: Life evolves on a planet rather like Europa, a moon of Jupiter. It's covered by ice. Maybe, just maybe, intelligent life has evolved there. But they have no way of knowing there is anything at all outside of the ice that covers the surface of their world.

Or what if their vision is such they simply can't see the stars up there and wonder about what else may be out there? Or what if their entire focus is entirely on something else? Like some sort of philosophy of some kind?

What I'm saying is that yes, there may well be other intelligent life out there, but that doesn't mean they're all focused as we are on seeing the Universe and hoping to conquer it.

And that might well be the answer to the Fermi Paradox. We're the first.

Oh, and again, remember that any species, intelligent or otherwise, has a limited life span. Really. We humans are currently evolving, and will continue to evolve for as long as we are around. Anyone who thinks otherwise simply does not understand evolution. I'll offer the sickle cell trait, an evolution against malaria. Or how certain specific human groups can digest milk after infancy. Skin color. Eye color. Smaller jaws that can't accommodate wisdom teeth. Evolution continues. Those who think we've reached some sort of pinnacle and have stopped evolving simply don't understand how evolution works.

[applegrove]

22. We no longer needed the crush food so much so we humans evolved an over bite.

Wisdom teeth became a problem. But we suddenly could pronounce "f"s and "v"s so language was expanded.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

23. I don't think being able to pronounce "f"s and "v"s has anything to do with

wisdom teeth or the lack of them. Especially as both of those sounds are made at the front of the mouth, nowhere near the wisdom teeth.

[applegrove]

24. It was the over bite that did both... the over bite that was the result of not needing to crush food

as much as before. I just read an article on it. I will look for it.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

25. Hmmm. Not all humans have an overbite, and I somehow doubt

that pronouncing those letters is any different for those with perfectly aligned teeth. There are still various human groups that eat relatively unprocessed foods.

. . . . I just found a link to an article that talks about it. Interesting, but I'm still not totally convinced. And it does point out that not all linguists agree with that idea.

[applegrove]

27. Yes. It is interesting how science is up for discussion. A theory will

come up, be discounted then rebirthed sometimes 30 years later. Particularly in anthropology.

[applegrove]

26. Ancient switch to soft food gave us an overbite--and the ability to pronounce 'f's and 'v's

Ancient switch to soft food gave us an overbite—and the ability to pronounce ‘f’s and ‘v’s

By Ann GibbonsMar. 14, 2019 , 2:00 PM

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/03/ancient-switch-soft-food-gave-us-overbite-and-ability-pronounce-f-s-and-v-s

"SNIP.....

Don't like the F-word? Blame farmers and soft food. When humans switched to processed foods after the spread of agriculture, they put less wear and tear on their teeth. That changed the growth of their jaws, giving adults the overbites normal in children. Within a few thousand years, those slight overbites made it easy for people in farming cultures to fire off sounds like "f" and "v," opening a world of new words.

The newly favored consonants, known as labiodentals, helped spur the diversification of languages in Europe and Asia at least 4000 years ago; they led to such changes as the replacement of the Proto-Indo-European patēr to Old English faederabout 1500 years ago, according to linguist and senior author Balthasar Bickel at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. The paper shows "that a cultural shift can change our biology in such a way that it affects our language," says evolutionary morphologist Noreen Von Cramon-Taubadel of the University at Buffalo, part of the State University of New York system, who was not part of the study.

Postdocs Damián Blasi and Steven Moran in Bickel's lab set out to test an idea proposed by the late American linguist Charles Hockett. He noted in 1985 that the languages of hunter-gatherers lacked labiodentals, and conjectured that their diet was partly responsible: Chewing gritty, fibrous foods puts force on the growing jaw bone and wears down molars. In response, the lower jaw grows larger, and the molars erupt farther and drift forward on the protruding lower jaw, so that the upper and lower teeth align. That edge-to-edge bite makes it harder to push the upper jaw forward to touch the lower lip, which is required to pronounce labiodentals. But other linguists rejected the idea, and Blasi says he, Moran, and their colleagues "expected to prove Hockett wrong."

First, the six researchers used computer modeling to show that with an overbite, producing labiodentals takes 29% less effort than with an edge-to-edge bite. Then, they scrutinized the world's languages and found that hunter-gatherer languages have only about one-fourth as many labiodentals as languages from farming societies. Finally, they looked at the relationships among languages, and found that labiodentals can spread quickly, so that the sounds could go from being rare to common in the 8000 years since the widespread adoption of agriculture and new food processing methods such as grinding grain into flour.

.....SNIP"

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

28. Notice that not all linguists agree.

But other linguists rejected the idea, and Blasi says he, Moran, and their colleagues "expected to prove Hockett wrong."

[applegrove]

29. Yes. They fight amongst themselves.

[rdking647]

7. a photo of it a couple nights ago

from my backyard outside of austin texas

[applegrove]

8. You must have quite the telescope and camera. Love it.

[rdking647]

9. cheap scope and old camera

celestron nexstar 102 i bought a few years ago at costco. old sony a6000 camera

[applegrove]

10. Well that is a great sight.

[kentuck]

18. What a great photo!

It's about 28 years since Saturn in Aquarius was in opposition to the Sun in Leo.

Happy Birthday to all the early Leos!

[electric_blue68]

21. Happy sigh. How lovely! Saturn with it's rings...

in NYC (surely elsewhere) the amatuers astronomy society held (previous to covid) monthly or so public viewings.

I thought I barely saw Mas' ice cap.
But I did see my first Moon close up ? 35 yrs ago or so. with them. About 1/10 part of it (about 1:00 to 2:30 circular wise),vand a bit of space with the sharp craters and even sharper shadows! Near swoon. ❤️

I watched that ? Jupiter/Saturn ? conjunction on line some months back.

While being a quite smaller image than my big glimpse of the moon - having a 12x zoom optical + digital to 30+ where I can actually use a camera to see craters and shadows ol the moon to some degree is wonderful!

Have you ever seen the Pliedies?

[kentuck]

16. This Sun/Saturn opposition only happens every 28 years or so.

It is meaningful. Big changes happen in our lives when Saturn is in opposition to our Sun. The changes are catalyzed by Mars and the Moon.

[Champp]

17. August 2 is a cross quarter day

Lamas or Lughnasadh.

[kentuck]

19. Wow!

My birthday.

What does it mean??