Spectacular Conjunction for Mercury, Venus and Saturn

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2...pectacular.htm

Spectacular Conjunction
NASA Science News
June 22, 005

Mercury, Venus and Saturn are converging for a spectacular close
encounter this weekend.


June 22, 2005: Stick up your thumb and hold it at arm's length. It
doesn't seem very big, does it? But it is, big enough to hide three
planets.

This weekend Mercury, Venus and Saturn are going to crowd together in a
patch of sky no bigger than your thumb. Astronomers call it a
"conjunction" and it's going to be spectacular.

The show begins on Saturday evening, June 25th. Step outside and look
west toward the glow of the setting sun. Venus appears first, a bright
point of light not far above the horizon. As the sky darkens, Saturn
and
Mercury pop into view. The three planets form a eye-catching triangle
about 1.5o long, easily hidden by your thumb.

It gets better on Sunday evening, June 26th. The triangle shrinks with
Venus and Mercury only 0.5o apart. Now they fit behind your pinky!

Monday evening, June 27th, is best of all. With Saturn nearby, Venus
and
Mercury converge. At closest approach, the two planets will be less
than
one-tenth of a degree apart. Such pairings of bright planets are
literally spellbinding.

If you go outside to see the show, take someone along. Here are some
fun
facts you can sha

The closest planet to the sun, Mercury, is not the hottest. Venus is.
The surface temperature of Venus is 870 F (740 K), hot enough to melt
lead. The planet's thick carbon dioxide atmosphere traps solar heat,
leading to a runaway greenhouse effect. On Venus, global warming has
run
amok.

Venus is so bright because the planet's clouds are wonderful reflectors
of sunlight. Unlike clouds on Earth, which are made of water, clouds on
Venus are made of sulfuric acid. They float atop an atmosphere where
the
pressure reaches 90 times the air pressure on Earth. If you went to
Venus, you'd be crushed, smothered, dissolved and melted--not
necessarily in that order. Don't go.

Mercury is only a little better. At noontime, the surface temperature
reaches 800 F (700 K). If you turn your kitchen's oven to that setting,
the pizza will burn to a smoking crisp. Radars on Earth have pinged
Mercury and found icy reflections near the planet's poles. How can ice
exist in such heat? NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft is en route to Mercury
now to investigate.

Here's one way to trick an astronomer: Show them a picture of Mercury
and ask what it is. Many will answer "the Moon," because the Moon and
Mercury look so much alike. But Mercury has something that the Moon
does not: long sinuous cliffs called "lobate scarps." Some researchers
think Mercury's scarps are like wrinkles in a raisin, a sign of
shrinkage.
A shrinking planet? Weird.

If you look at Venus or Mercury through a telescope, you won't be
impressed. Both are featureless, Venus because of its bland clouds,
Mercury because it is small and far away. Saturn is different. Even a
small telescope will show you Saturn's breathtaking rings.

Galileo Galilei discovered Saturn's rings almost 400 years ago, but he
didn't understand what he saw. A planet with rings was too much even
for
Galileo. Scientists today are still reeling. Saturn's rings are
improbably thin. If you made a 1-meter-wide scale model of Saturn, the
rings would be 10,000 times thinner than a razor blade. They're full of
strange waves and spokes and grooves. And no one knows where they came
from.

One school of thought holds that Saturn's rings are debris from the
breakup of a tiny moon or asteroid only a few hundred million years
ago.
As recently as the Age of Dinosaurs on Earth, Saturn might have been a
naked planet--no rings! Tiny moons orbiting among the rings today
appear
to be stealing angular momentum, which, given time, could cause the
rings to collapse. Is Saturn like a flower, temporarily in bloom?

That's one of many questions being investigated by NASA's Cassini
spacecraft, which has been orbiting Saturn since 2004. Cassini is on a
4-year mission to study Saturn's moons (all 34 of them), rings and
weather. Every day the craft beams stunning images to Earth: click here
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/main/index.html to see
them.

A lot can happen behind your thumb. This weekend is a good time to look.

Mercury is only a little better. At noontime, the surface temperature
reaches 800 F (700 K). If you turn your kitchen's oven to that setting,
the pizza will burn to a smoking crisp.

Guess you don't spend much time cookin, huh Ron?
No kitchen ovens have that setting!

rj

rj wrote:
Mercury is only a little better. At noontime, the surface temperature
reaches 800 F (700 K). If you turn your kitchen's oven to that setting,
the pizza will burn to a smoking crisp.

Guess you don't spend much time cookin, huh Ron?
No kitchen ovens have that setting!


Set the oven to "self clean". It will then get hot enough to
burn off all the splattered crap inside, and any spilled pizza
sauce. Don't know if it will reach 800F though.

"robert casey" wrote in message
link.net...
rj wrote:
Mercury is only a little better. At noontime, the surface temperature
reaches 800 F (700 K). If you turn your kitchen's oven to that setting,
the pizza will burn to a smoking crisp.

Guess you don't spend much time cookin, huh Ron?
No kitchen ovens have that setting!


Set the oven to "self clean". It will then get hot enough to
burn off all the splattered crap inside, and any spilled pizza
sauce. Don't know if it will reach 800F though.

not even close, just 500 or a little more

Excellent article for amateur astronomy. Vacuously lame as science
education, though.

wrote:
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2...pectacular.htm

Mercury is only a little better. At noontime, the surface temperature
reaches 800 F (700 K). If you turn your kitchen's oven to that setting,
the pizza will burn to a smoking crisp. Radars on Earth have pinged
Mercury and found icy reflections near the planet's poles. How can ice
exist in such heat?

In what field did Dr. Phillips get his doctorate? Is he really this
clueless, or is he dumbing down the stories like panem et circenses? I
would suspect the latter, but dumbing things down, IMHO, is not wise
pedagogy. Unteaching the wrong answer can be tougher than teaching the
right answer in the first place.

The answer is (of course) that the ice _does_not_ exist in such heat.
Dr. Phillips forgot to mention that Mercury has no significant
atmosphere, and therefore, no greenhouse effect. When the Sun sets, a
Mercurial homestead freezes with mercurial swiftness. If the Sun never
rises (plausible inside a polar crater), there is no heat to begin
with.

He may not want or need to explain all this, but he shouldn't start off
by implying that the ice exists at 700K.

NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft is en route to Mercury
now to investigate.

Certainly not (specifically) how the suspected ice can exist, because
NASA already knows. It would be helpful to say what exactly NASA wants
to learn.

Here's one way to trick an astronomer: Show them a picture of Mercury
and ask what it is. Many will answer "the Moon," because the Moon and
Mercury look so much alike.

An astronomer, you say? Which picture, and how much of the planet does
it show? There are very few detailed photos of Mercury in existence,
and those that i'm aware of can't be mistaken for the Moon by anyone
who knows what the Moon looks like.

But Mercury has something that the Moon
does not: long sinuous cliffs called "lobate scarps."

....And every competent astronomer knows this. There are other clues,
such as shorter rays of impact ejecta and the lack of large maria. But
if you select a Mariner 10 photo that shows no scarps (and also avoids
the Caloris Basin and its antipode--more dead giveaways), it would be
as fair as a pop quiz to identify a person based on a photograph of his
elbow.

Some researchers
think Mercury's scarps are like wrinkles in a raisin, a sign of
shrinkage.
A shrinking planet? Weird.

Again, JMHO, but i think most people who would read this sort of
article would be fascinated to know more about this "weird" shrinkage.

But for the hobbyist (and sidewalk acquaintances), the article is a
good one.


Clear skies!

--
------------------- Richard Callwood III --------------------
~ U.S. Virgin Islands ~ USDA zone 11 ~ 18.3N, 64.9W ~
~ eastern Massachusetts ~ USDA zone 6 (1992-95) ~
--------------- http://cac.uvi.edu/staff/rc3/ ---------------

To Ron (I realise that you are a one way posting bot like Wormsley)

Mercury is the easiest way to show how cataloguers and theorists work
hand in hand to the detriment of astronomy,modelling and the adverse
influence on future generations for a cartoon relativistic concept.

The retrograde motion of Mars as seen from Earth is not an illusion but
a normal consequence of the orbital motion of Earth around the Sun
against the orbital motion of Mars around the Sun-

http://www.astro.virginia.edu/~jh8h/.../marsretro.gif

Retrograde motion becomes an illusion if the background stars and
celestial sphere is retained as a background and an artificial
speculative notion * substitutes for the direct translation of observed
motion against the background stars to the actual motion between the
orbital centers of Earth and Mars.This is the difference between Kepler
and Newton and ultimately cataloguers and the first heliocentric
astronomers.

The perihelion advance of Mercury is a cataloguing creation of the
motion of Mercury against the background celestial sphere which is
turned over to the theorists who impose a direct gravitational
solution to a 43 arc sec per century difference and then incredibly
attribute a value for Earth as well.

PLANET OBSERVED PRECESSION PREDICTED PRECESSION


Mercury 43.1 +/- 0.1 arcsec/century 42.98 arcsec/century


Venus 8.65 8.62


Earth 3.85 3.84


Mars 1.36 1.35


Attributing a value for Earth and simultaneously one for Mercury is an
incredible silly thing for the first thing a rational person would do
is subtract the Earth's value from Mercury's to take get the true
isolated value for Mercury as seen from Earth thus changing the
observed value.The bogus verification of relativity in 1919 through
Mercury defies common sense but given that cataloguers go along with
this absurdity the theorists imagine they are astronomers.

Troll, troll, troll your post,
gently down the screen.
Merily, merily, merily, merily,
your stuff's just not worth beans!

In message . com,
writes

nothing

(as I've noted, netiquette requires some quoting of the original post,
but you aren't saying anything worth repeating)

Hi Gerald. Still showing 4 newsgroups that you are a complete idiot?

The apparent retrograde motion of planets has absolutely nothing to do
with the advance of perihelion due to relativity. Or perhaps you have
some other explanation for the advance of 4.2 degrees per year observed
in the binary pulsar PSR B1913+16
http://relativity.livingreviews.org/Articles/lrr-1998-10/node18.html.

"Jonathan Silverlight" wrote
in message ...
In message . com,
writes

nothing

(as I've noted, netiquette requires some quoting of the original post, but
you aren't saying anything worth repeating)

Hi Gerald. Still showing 4 newsgroups that you are a complete idiot?

The apparent retrograde motion of planets has absolutely nothing to do
with the advance of perihelion due to relativity. Or perhaps you have some
other explanation for the advance of 4.2 degrees per year observed in the
binary pulsar PSR B1913+16
http://relativity.livingreviews.org/Articles/lrr-1998-10/node18.html.

I think you need to aim at a different level of
understanding Jonathan, Gerald's problem is that
he doesn't understand Kepler's _first_ law, his
thinking is Ptolemaic:

http://tinyurl.com/b2otz

Sure. The Earth goes round the Sun in 365.25 days so the _average_
angular displacement is

360/365.25 = 0.986 degrees

Again,you are sweet,especially the "Earth goes around the Sun" bit

Are you back to rejecting Copernicus and reverting to Ptolemy again? I
note you can again find no error in anything I have written.

"Goes around the Sun" or 'falling around the Sun' is ill-defined,the Earth
does no such thing ...

George

To Silverlight

You have no idea how ****ing funny Albert's 1920 comments are given
that they were made before the motion of the stars around the galactic
axis was discovered in the mid 1920's.Retrograde motion of Mars is not
an illusion when viewed from the orbital center's of the Earth and Mars
but Newton brought in an inappropriate perspective by judging
retrograde motion seen from Earth and resolved it by shifting the
perspective to what it looks like from the Sun,using mean Sun/Earth
distances * using the celestial sphere or fixed stars as a backdrop.

Newton maneuvering and misconduct is just plain awful but Albert is
just plain funny,I mean any intelligent and decent man would certainly
go back to Newton and sort it out rather than remain with the 'fixed
stars' and the motion of Mercury seen through Albert's homocentric
eyes.It is funny,funny,funny and anyone who suspects that the great
astronomers such as Kepler and Copernicus operated in this way or even
Newton deserves to live the nightmare of somebody's relativistic
cartoon universe -

"We must draw attention here to one of these deviations. According to
Newton's theory, a planet moves round the sun in an ellipse, which
would permanently maintain its position with respect to the fixed
stars, if we could disregard the motion of the fixed stars, themselves
and the action of the other planets under consideration. Thus, if we
correct the observed motion of the planets for these two influences,
and if Newton's theory be strictly correct, we ought to obtain for
the orbit of the planet an ellipse, which is fixed with reference to
the fixed stars. This deduction, which can be tested with great
accuracy, has been confirmed for all the planets save one, with the
precision that is capable of being obtained by the delicacy of
observation attainable at the present time. The sole exception is
Mercury, the planet which lies nearest the sun. Since the time
Leverrier, it has been known that the ellipse corresponding to the
orbit of Mercury, after it has been corrected for the influences
mentioned above, is not stationary with respect to the fixed stars, but
that it rotates exceedingly slowly in the plane of the orbit and in the
sense of the orbital motion. The value obtained for this rotary
movement of the orbital ellipse was 43 seconds of arc per century, an
amount ensured to be correct to within a few seconds of arc "

http://www.bartleby.com/173/29.html



"PHENOMENON V.
Then the primary planets, by radii drawn to the earth, describe areas
no wise proportional to the times; but that the areas which they
describe by radii drawn to the sun are proportional to the times of
description.

For to the earth they appear sometimes direct, sometimes stationary,
nay, and sometimes retrograde. But from the sun they are always seen
direct, and to proceed with a motion nearly uniform, that is to say, a
little swifter in the perihelion and a little slower in the aphelion
distances, so as to maintain an equality in the description of the
areas. This a noted proposition among astronomers, and particularly
demonstrable in Jupiter, from the eclipses of his satellites; by the
help of which eclipses, as we have said, the heliocentric longitudes of
that planet, and its distances from the sun, are determined."

http://members.tripod.com/~gravitee/phaenomena.htm