Eyes on the Sky: Messier 4 and Ceres

Salutations celestial sight seers. I'm David Fuller. Welcome to Eyes on the Sky. What's up this week? We are looking south and the past several weeks we've looked at Jupiter and then Saturn. And those are obviously objects that move. And we've got one more kind of in the area. But I'm also going to talk about a stationary object because we will have an interloper into Scorpius starting in about a week or two. The dwarf planet Ceres. Is currently in Libra and it's about eighth magnitude, which for a lot of us should be visible in binoculars that have 50 millimeter aperture lenses. Might need to go a little larger, you might need to find a darker site, but generally a magnitude should be visible. If not, you can easily see it in just about any telescope from most anywhere. And Ceres is going to move towards where the the crab body is at, so we can actually see that. See, there's Ceres and here's Libra right here. And I guess that's supposed to be one of the claws. I still think of it as kind of where the body's at. But either way, we're going to have Ceres moving that direction. And you can see how it. Skips that way over the next about a month or so and goes right in between these nice two bright stars here. This one is Acrab and that is Juba. And Ceres will pass right in between those, so you can actually watch that kind of happen over the next three or four weeks, which is going to make it easy to be able to look for that object and find it. Because if you can back up to. Late part of. July, take off those and then we can then watch how Ceres does sort of move in right there and passes this way. You can see how the moon actually is going to also be part of that on the 8th of August. Probably don't want to look for Ceres on that day or a couple of days before or after, but Ceres will definitely be a nice object to be able to see for that time. And you can even if you want to, you can take Stellarium and just keep going and see where it's headed after that. It does actually move towards Antares, but it also gets dimmer towards ninth magnitude at that point. Plus, it's getting low in the sky at that point. So really now in the next three or four weeks is a good time to try and take a look for. This particular dwarf planet, its diameter is not very big. I mean, it's really going to be like less than an arc second across, which is pretty small because it's not a very big object. It's a it's a dwarf planet, but you can definitely find that then. You'll notice how you've got Jupiter here and here's these three stars of the Crab, or excuse me, of the Scorpion. Antares is the nice bright star there. Antares is normally kind of the brightest star over in that direction. But because we've got Jupiter right there in that neighborhood, it makes Antares look not that bright, even though it's a first magnitude star. But right near Antares is a globular cluster. So it's actually really easy to find because of that, because it's just over a degree away. So we can measure that and see how it's like. Not even a degree and a half. So most any finder scope can help you find that. Here's how kind of the easiest way to be able to do that is keep in mind, you're going to want to try to look at this while things are close to the meridian. We back up to here in kind of late. July, you can see how we're right about at the meridian at for me, 930 at night, and I realize for some of you north of me, you're really not getting dark until later. So it will drop down a little bit, but not significantly. Looking at the azimuthal grid, we can see, you know, at least at my latitude of 40 degrees, we're still above 20 degrees up in the sky. So if you are another 10, 12 degrees north of me, you should still have it at about 15 degrees, even at 1030 at night to help it be high enough up that you're not looking through too much atmosphere to try to capture looking at it. But we back up to 930. So it's we're still not quite an astronomical twilight, but we can start looking for it because we're going to lose it towards the west anyway, so we might as well take a look in that direction. So we take off the azimuthal grid, take off our lines for the actual constellation itself. So here's these three that kind of that we were talking about before. Akrab, Juba. And then I just I've always known this is Iscorpio Scorpii and I've never heard it called Fang or Nor. But anyway, those three stars right there, Antares, you're going to go on a line from Antares towards the middle one, towards Juba. You'll see this star, Almeyat, which is Sigma Scorpii. And these are all going to be easy in a five degree field of view of any or more five, seven degree field of view of binoculars or binoscopes. So let's check that out. This is a binoculars view, so we're looking at this correct orientation. Bottom is down. Horizon is down and left and right are correct in this. And you can see how we've got all those things right in that field of view. So what I always have done is just look for this triangle made by Antares and then Almeyat over this way and then just kind of drop my telescope down just a hair and split the difference between the two. And boom, there is Messier 4. And it's called the Crab Globular Cluster, and we can zoom in on that. And this is about four fifths to 80 percent of a degree. And you can see how there's going to be a fair amount of detail there. We take off even the photo from Stellarium. You can see how there's a number of bright stars right in that area as you're looking in that direction. So this is a good cluster. Just remember that that brightness from Antares can cause a little bit of an issue in terms of some of the reflected light that might bounce off the inside of your tube or if you've got a refractor off the inside of your dew shield. So be aware of that. But it's a good, bright globular cluster to look for. The magnitude is 5.9. And its size is quite large at 26 arc minutes across. Now, what's interesting is that if we go back kind of to our larger view here like this, Antares, although these look close together, M4 is way off in the distance. Antares is like 500 light years away. And Messier 4 is a good 12 to 13 times as far away from that. So there's definitely a distance perspective that you can keep in mind when you're looking at that tube. Definitely look for the orange. Star Antares. Which is a spectral type M, so it should look very orange and reddish when you look at it through a telescope or your finder scope and then just scoot over to Messier 4 and check out the gloriousness of that globular cluster over in the summer night sky. That's all for this week. Keep your eyes on the sky and your outdoor lights aimed down so we can all see what's up. I'm David Fuller wishing you clear and dark skies.