Month: January 2024

2024 Highlights: When & Where to Watch the Skies

If your New Year’s resolution included more skygazing, you’ll have many fantastic opportunities to view some showstopping astronomical events.

Kick off the year by watching the skies on Jan. 17 as the Moon pairs up with Jupiter, appearing high in the southwest, for two evenings. After a near year-long fade from the naked eye, Mars is also becoming brighter in our sky as the month progresses and will be visible low on the eastern horizon before sunrise.

Perhaps one of the most anticipated by scientists and enthusiasts is the total solar eclipse 2024 Total Eclipse – NASA Science on April 8, 2024. It will be the last total solar eclipse visible from the contiguous United States until 2044.

A view of the Eclipse 2008
For a moment on August 1st, the daytime sky grew dark along the path of a total solar eclipse. While watching the geocentric celestial event from Mongolia, photographer Miloslav Druckmuller recorded multiple images with two separate cameras as the Moon blocked the bright solar disk and darkened the sky. This final composition consists of 55 frames ranging in exposure time from 1/125 to 8 seconds. See the photo here.
Credit: Miloslav Druckmuller (Brno University of Technology), Peter Aniol, Vojtech Rusin

As the sky darkens during the solar eclipse, several of the brightest stars and planets will become visible.

Bill Cooke, lead for the Meteoroid Environment Office at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, will also be tracking Comet 12P/Pons-Brooks. The comet will slowly brighten over the coming months and may be just barely visible to the naked eye by the time of the eclipse.

On December 4, 2023 periodic Comet 12P/Pons-Brooks shared this telescopic field of view with Vega, alpha star of the northern constellation Lyra. Fifth brightest star in planet Earth’s night, Vega is some 25 light-years distant while the much fainter comet was about 21 light-minutes away. In recent months, outbursts have caused dramatic increases in brightness for Pons-Brooks though. Nicknamed the Devil Comet for its hornlike appearance, fans of interstellar spaceflight have also suggested the distorted shape of this large comet’s central coma looks like the Millenium Falcon. A Halley-type comet, 12P/Pons-Brooks last visited the inner Solar System in 1954. Its next perihelion passage or closest approach to the Sun will be April 21, 2024. That’s just two weeks after the April 8 total solar eclipse path crosses North America. But, highly inclined to the Solar System’s ecliptic plane, the orbit of periodic Comet 12P/Pons-Brooks will never cross the orbit of planet Earth. Credit: Dan Bartlett

“Comet 12P/Pons-Brooks is an intrinsically bright Halley-type comet that underwent an outburst back in July. Pressure from sunlight (radiation pressure) has caused the gas and dust surround the comet to assume a horseshoe shape, which some observers say reminds them of a devil with horns. Spring will see two phenomena that would have terrified our ancestors – a solar eclipse turning day into night and a “devil” comet. Should be exciting!” he exclaims.

Cooke also shared his picks for the top three meteor showers in 2024:

    1. Perseids in mid-August – The Perseid meteor shower is always a stunner and this year, there will be no moonlight to spoil the show.
    2. Eta Aquariids in early May – This is an outburst year with visual rates as high as one per minute for observers in the Southern Hemisphere.
    3. Geminids in mid-December – The number of bright meteors is expected to outshine the strong Moon interference.

 

A sky full of falling meteors.
The featured composite image was taken during the 2018 Perseids from the Poloniny Dark Sky Park in Slovakia. The dome of the observatory in the foreground is on the grounds of Kolonica Observatory. Although the comet dust particles travel parallel to each other, the resulting shower meteors clearly seem to radiate from a single point on the sky in the eponymous constellation Perseus. The radiant effect is due to perspective, as the parallel tracks appear to converge at a distance, like train tracks. Click here to see the photo.  Credit: Petr Horálek / Institute of Physics in Opava

This is not an exhaustive list, however. The New Year will also treat us to supermoons, lunar eclipses, planetary alignments, a new comet, and much more.