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Meet the RASCals of Cattle Point at Fairfield community centre

Saturn rises in the late evening sky and the moon dances with the planets this month
web1_COLBill-Smith

Jupiter climbs higher in the southeast sky over Port Townsend across the Salish Sea earlier in the evening this month. This means that telescope viewers don’t have to wait until midnight to get good views of the planet. You can enjoy Jupiter through binoculars, too. And there is nowhere better than Cattle Point Dark Sky Urban Star Park. You might even try the look-out at the top of Gonzales Hill in Oak Bay. This is the site of the planet MARS on the local walk known as “Salish Sea Walk of the Planets, the world’s biggest Orrery” (solar system model). Through binoculars, you should be able to see Jupiter’s four largest Galilean moons, Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto and watch them change position from night to night. Our moon appears near Jupiter from May 5 to 8.

Then it joins Venus and Mercury just before sunrise over Mount Baker on May 22 and 23. Finally it pairs up with red Mars just after sunset on May 26.

Saturn is now visible before midnight, rising in the east around 11:30 p.m. in early May and by 9:30 p.m. later in the month. Saturn reaches opposition in June when it is visible just after sunset through dawn.

The great “search for life” has captured the imagination of the European Space Agency and now a revitalized NASA.

The 2022 ESA JUICE mission will visit Jupiter’s moons Gannymede and Europa. It will include two flybys of Europa to see if the ocean under the surface of the icy moon harbours conditions suitable for life. The mission will undertake repeated close flybys of the icy moon from a long, looping orbit around Jupiter.

The second set of missions are to Saturn and its most interesting moon Enceladus. Just three years ago, in 2014, NASA reported that Cassini Mission found evidence for a large south polar subsurface ocean of liquid water with a thickness of around 10 km. NASA are now planning a flyby plume sample-return mission, and two astrobiology-oriented mission concepts (the Enceladus Life Finder and Life Investigation For Enceladus).

The best time to see Saturn and to tell your Oak Bay grandchildren about these exciting space missions to Enceladus, is when Saturn is highest in the sky – that’s after midnight this month, before midnight in June, and by early evening in July. Through your telescope you may see some of Saturn’s cloud bands and even a glimpse at Saturn’s North Polar Region, so beautifully captured by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft.

And now the eclipse : although we have three months to go, it’s time to prepare your road trip to Oregon for the Aug. 21 total solar eclipse. Not since 1979 has North America had a full eclipse. The shadow will cross the continent along a narrow path from Oregon to South Carolina. There will be total darkness in many cities and as most of the USA population is within 1 day’s driving distance, millions are expect to drive to experience this event. The partial eclipse will be visible over a even wider area.

If you decide not to travel south to experience this eclipse, it will be 2024 before the next one in North America.

Finally, I thought you like to see a map of where all six Apollo Moon Landings occurred. The first moon landing took place at the bottom of the “right eye” on the right as you face the moon.

You can catch up on solar system missions and all of NASA’s missions at nasa.gov.

Should you wish to meet the RASCals of Cattle Point visit facebook.com/groups/VictoriaRASCals/ and we meet at Fairfield Community Centre every Monday at 7:30 p.m.

Dark Skies to all friends of Cattle Point Star Park.

Summary is from the transcript of “What’s Up in May 2017” by NASA announcer and astronomer Jane Houston Jones with specific permission for localization to Cattle Point Dark Sky Urban Star Park and the Oak Bay News. You can subscribe to her weekly blog at solarsystem.nasa.gov/news/category/10things.