Elizabeth Loupas

And speaking of stargazing: this month the Moon finds its way from planet to planet, with a star cluster thrown in for good measure; and the Lyrids return.

• April 6: Saturn, which will look like a bright gold-colored star, appears close to the Moon tonight. Observe them together and meditate on the vast distance that actually separates them.
• April 18: Jupiter appears a little to the lower left of the Moon in the very early morning, low in the southeast.
• April 21: Meteors! The Lyrid meteor shower is at its best tonight. For more information click here. Meteor showers are a law unto themselves, sometimes dazzling, sometimes virtually unnoticeable. Bit of historical goodness: in 1095, an April meteor shower (almost certainly the Lyrids) was so spectacular that one Gislebert, Bishop of Lisieux, took it as a sign of heavenly approval for what became the First Crusade.
• April 22: The Moon, Venus, and Mars appear close together low in the east, just as it begins to get light. The Moon will actually occult Venus, hiding it briefly from view.
• April 26: The Moon, the planet Mercury and the Pleiades align low in the west-northwest as night falls. Mercury will look like a fairly bright star. The Pleiades star cluster is a little below the Moon, sandwiched between the Moon and Mercury.

Happy sky-watching!

After all the excitement last month—comets! conjunctions! occultations! penumbral eclipses!—this month is quieter. There is some good planet viewing, however, particularly of Saturn.

• March 8th: the moon, just two days to full, rises in the east at nightfall, just above the star Regulus (Alpha Leonis, the brightest star in the constellation Leo) and the plant Saturn.
• March 9th: the moon rises between Regulus and Saturn, with Regulus above it and Saturn below it. A moon sandwich!
• March 10th: the full moon rises below both Regulus and Saturn. Saturn is at its brightest for the year. One of my favorite childhood memories is the awe I felt the first time I observed Saturn and its rings through my little 60x telescope.
• March 20th: the Vernal Equinox occurs at 6:44 a.m. Central Daylight Time, marking the beginning of Spring (yay!) in the Northern Hemisphere.

And speaking of Saturn: just this week it was reported that scientists found a moon hidden in one of Saturn’s outer rings. How cool is that? Saturn has a lot of moons (sixty-one, counting the new one) in addition to its rings, but there’s something about an unknown and mysterious moon hidden away within a ring. How could that be worked into a story?

Fat Tuesday! The last day of Carnival!

Ferrara celebrates Il Carnevale

Comet Lulin update: clouds last night. Will try again tonight.

Don’t forget to keep an eye out for Comet Lulin tonight and tomorrow night. It’s kind of cloudy here right now and I’m hoping the clouds blow off by tonight.

The coolest thing about Comet Lulin (besides being backwards and green, both of which are both pretty cool in themselves) is that this is its one trip around the sun. Most comets have orbits and return periodically, even if their periods are hundreds of years. Lulin, however, appears to have enough velocity to escape from the solar system entirely on its way out, and disappear forever into deep space. So we are the only people, in the whole history of mankind and the entire future of mankind, to see it.

Stargazing is just pretty incredible.

The February full moon was last night. As you can see, the February stargazing score is now clouds two, Elizabeth zero—all I saw was a fuzzy-looking disk (no, that’s not the camera, it’s the clouds) high over the gables of our house. This full moon is usually called the Snow Moon or Hunger Moon. Colonial Americans called it the Trapper’s Moon and in medieval England it was sometimes called the Storm Moon. The Chinese refer to it as the Budding Moon (and some of our trees are already budding—it’s in the seventies today, although we’re under a tornado watch at the moment) and the Celts called it the Ice Moon. This year I’m calling it the Cloud Moon!

• I didn’t get to see the occultation of the Pleiades by the gibbous moon on Tuesday night. It was cloudy. Boo hiss clouds. One of the hazards of stargazing.
• I don’t know how people manage 10,000 steps a day on pedometers. The best I’ve been able to do is about 6,000, and that includes a walk with the doggies.
• What I am reading right now: The Serpent’s Tale by Ariana Franklin. I loved Mistress of the Art of Death and I love this one, too. The story of “Fair Rosamund” has always intrigued me and I’m willing to suspend all sorts of disbelief to immerse myself in Franklin’s evocative, texture-rich tale.
• Flat Stanley update: “Flat” is about to conclude his adventures in Texas and return home. Yesterday he helped me glue together a birdhouse.
• Many thanks to everyone for the congratulations and well-wishes on signing with Fox Literary. Welcome to the new visitors to the blog! It’s up to Barbara now, to make her way in the world.

Here’s my stargazing schedule for the coming month:

February 3rd: the gibbous moon will pass north of the Pleiades, eclipsing (well, the real term is occulting) some of the brightest stars. The dark side of the moon will cover the stars first, and then they will reappear from the moon’s bright side. Pretty cool.

February 9th: the full moon, called the Snow Moon. On that same night, there’ll be a penumbral lunar eclipse, which means the moon will pass through the edge of the Earth’s shadow. Truth be told, you won’t really see anything, but why not watch and imagine?

February 24th: Comet Lulin, a unique two-tailed comet, will reach its peak of brightness. Lulin was discovered in July 2007, and is named for the Lu-lin Observatory on Mt. Front Lu-Lin in Taiwan.

February 27th: the crescent moon and the bright planet Venus will be only a degree and a half apart. I am going to try to take a picture of this. I managed a fair picture of the “sad face” moon-Venus-Jupiter conjunction on December 2nd:

The crescent of the moon is a little blurry, but as the Broadcasting Legend™ says, 252,000 miles is a pretty long focal length for our little backyard camera. One day I’m going to buy the adapters and gadgets I need to attach the camera to my telescope. Although I don’t really want my stargazing to get too professional. What I love about it the most is the mystery and the history—the sense of millenia of people looking up at the sky and seeing the same things.

Tagged again! This time, it’s Bryn Greenwood’s doing. I really have to learn to run faster. Heh.

All right. Six things that make me happy.

1. My first cup of coffee in the morning. Strong strong coffee with milk. It’s not really lattè because the milk isn’t steamed or foamed, but I call it lattè anyway. So report me to the lattè police.
2. Taking a siesta after lunch. Piling into bed with both doggies and the Broadcasting Legend™ if he’s not on the road and drowsing deliciously through Everyday Italian and Barefoot Contessa on the Food Network.
3. Hugs from little children.
4. Going to church. Singing For All the Saints or one of the other great processionals as the scrubbed acolytes (more little children) and the choir stream into the sanctuary, and almost crying as the sopranos launch into the high, soaring descant on the last verse of the hymn.
5. Flower scents. Real flowers, not perfumes or oils. Lilies of the valley, lilacs, old-fashioned clove pinks. Our English roses—Jude the Obscure, Eglantyne, Winchester Cathedral.
6. Standing in the back yard and looking up at the sky. Picking out the constellations I learned when I was a little girl at the lake. Trying to work my mind around the inconceivable distances.
7. Opening a thick, tantalizing new book to the first page.
8. Reading Algernon Charles Swinburne.

Oh wait. That’s eight. And I haven’t even gotten to chocolate.

I love to make lists. I live and die by my daily lists—I have a little gadget on my Vista sidebar where I can make a list with checkboxes, and check things off as the day progresses. Another holdover from my corporate days, I suppose, when I kept comprehensive lists of things to do on yellow legal pads, crossing off and dating things as they were done and saving the pads when they were full, just in case. Those pads came in handy sometimes.

This is just a list of things I’m thinking about at the moment.

• Christmas decorations are put away, all safe in their beds, for next year.
• No stargazing for the past few nights—it’s been cold, cloudy and rainy. I miss it.
• Revisions of Duchess are proceeding apace. Some really good stuff is happening, I think.
• I’m re-reading The White Witch by Elizabeth Goudge. It started to call to me after I wrote up my post about Goudge being part of my fantasy writers group. What an extraordinary book.
• Time to start thinking about this summer’s garden. Also to order a new rose bush from David Austin Roses. We have a spot where an ancient Peace rose gave up the ghost last summer.
• Did I mention that revisions are going really well?

One of my lifelong avocations is stargazing—not in a serious astronomical sense, but just to see the pictures in the sky and learn their fascinating historical lore (I’m always a sucker for historical lore). This week’s constellation is Auriga, the Charioteer or Wainman. At the left we see him as he appeared in Urania’s Mirror, a set of hand-painted cards published in London around 1825. (The scan is courtesy Ian Ridpath.) The constellation was first described in ancient times along the Euphrates River, in much the same form as we imagine it today.

Auriga appears in the sky as a pentagon shape, which represents the Charioteer himself. Alpha Aurigae, or Capella, is a first-magnitude (very bright) white star representing a she-goat the Charioteer is carrying in the crook of his left arm, and the three smaller stars forming a long triangular shape beneath Capella are the she-goat’s kids.

Why is a Charioteer carring a goat and her kids? There’s no one explanation. Some say that the unusual formation of bright Capella with her three kids beside her came first, and the Charioteer was later imagined around them. In any case, if you look directly overhead around midnight on a winter evening (if you are in the US—in other parts of the world the positions of the constellations will vary) it will be easy to pick out bright Capella and her triangular cluster of three kids, and consider the fact that you are seeing the same stars the Babylonians saw, and the same picture they imagined.