SOUTHERN SKIES STAR PARTY July, 2012, I attended the Southern Skies Star Party on the shore of Lake Titicaca in Bolivia. We were 12,000 feet above sea level in the Andes Mountains. The night sky was impressive. The Milky Way was straight up, arching from one end of the sky to the other. Scorpius was overhead, and farther down the Milky Way was Crux the Southern Cross. Alpha Centauri and Beta Centauri pointed to the Cross. Alpha Centauri is the closest star to us (I should say its small companion Proxima Centauri is). The system is 4.4 light-years, or 25 trillion miles away. Alpha Centauri is the 3rd brightest star and thought to be sunlike. Its proper name is Rigel Kent, meaning foot of the centaur. Beta Centauri is called Hadar. The Jewel Box is nearby, and we observed its gemlike stars through the telescope. It is an open cluster. I again saw the Coalsack although it did not appear as dark as it did from Australia. We looked at Omega Centauri, the best of the globular clusters. It is a fuzzy ball of millions of stars, named like a star although not a star at all. We were 16 degrees below the equator, so the southern pole star was 16 degrees above the horizon. The southern stars rotate around Sigma Octanis as the northern stars rotate around Polaris. Sigma Octanis is very dim at magnitude 5.4. The Southern Cross points to it, and I may or may not have seen it through my binoculars. The Cross is between the centaurs legs and was once part of Centaurus. In the old days, I never thought of Sagittarius as a teapot. Now, its plain! Its a teapot! Behind me was the Summer Triangle. Everything was turned around. Orion is the example everyone gives as being upside-down. The hemispheres are upside-down from each other, and this causes constellations like Orion to appear inverted in the south. It is the same with the moon. It is easy to get confused. We always feel like we are on top of the earth because gravity pulls us toward the earths center. It is the same gravity that created the earth in the first place. The first night is always best! It drops off quickly, and you force yourself to go out. My roommate, an Iranian who left Iran during the upheaval of 1978, located 45 galaxies in one night. He went on to Machu Picchu in Peru. Jen Winter, who organized the trip, and her friend Fred Bruenjes are eclipse chasers. They make sun filters near Kansas City and have photographed eclipses on every continent.
Posted on: Mon, 24 Nov 2014 17:20:52 +0000
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