StarWatch: Moravian University Astronomy

StarWatch for the greater Lehigh Valley

NOVEMBER 2023

NOVEMBER STAR MAP | MOON PHASE CALENDAR | STARWATCH INDEX | NIGHT SKY NOTEBOOK

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1420 November 5, 2023: Been There Before: Have you ever gone to a place for the first time and realized that it felt a little like home, as if you had been there before, perhaps in a different life? That may sound ridiculous to anyone involved in the sciences who does not believe in reincarnation. Still, Chaco Culture National Historical Park near the small town of Nageezi, New Mexico, evokes these types of feelings for me. * Chaco is over 6000 feet in altitude, where the temperatures can soar to nearly 110 degrees Fahrenheit in the summer and plunge to nearly minus 40 degrees F. during the bone-chilling depths of winter. Annual rainfall is about five inches, usually distributed unevenly in several storms during the summer months, where it can pour so hard that the parched canyon walls become waterfalls, spilling their precious contents forcefully from the mesas into the Chaco Wash. It is a wild and windy place, as my wife, Susan, describes it, the "Back of Beyond." * And yet here in this remote land, one thousand years ago, a culture flourished, the Ancestral Puebloans, who built exquisite masonry structures called Great Houses. They aligned them to the sun and to the moon to create calendars for farming and ceremonial purposes. These buildings were not for supporting large groups of inhabitants but perhaps for storing surplus grains when harvests were plentiful. * From 1998 to 2001, I was part of Chaco's Night Sky Initiative program, volunteering with my students as a Night Sky Interpreter. I also made sure that each of the nine field experiences to the Southwest that I planned as a public school teacher in Allentown touched upon Chaco's landscapes. * Still I was disappointed that the park was always locked down at sunset, never allowing me, except for one time, to see it in complete darkness when it was perhaps at its most mysterious. * That was when Gray Warriner, a film producer/director, was making a documentary about the park. He spent days preparing the rails and rigging for a short but difficult scene where the camera would follow a Native American, a Navajo carrying a lit torch, running through one of Pueblo Bonito's magnificent masonry rooms. He asked me on the shoot day if I would attend because he didn't think "the Navajo would show." Gray was not suggesting that the actor was unreliable, just scared to appear in the film. Chaco is a sacred site to the Navajo Americans and the other 20 Puebloan tribes that claim this land as their ancestral and sacred home. * The Navajo actor did not appear, and I was cast in the role, an extraordinarily tall 6-foot, 3-inch Puebloan with a burlap sack for clothing, running through one of the large dusty rooms of Bonito with a lit torch. Of course, my glasses had to be off, and with nearly 11 diopters of myopia at that time, I was also legally blind without them. At one point, I almost set my Best Girl (helper), Elizabeth Churchill's hair on fire, but after 11 takes, Gray was satisfied, I was exhausted, and Liz was very relieved to see the torch extinguished. Afterward, Liz and I had Bonito to ourselves under the light of a nearly full moon and a canopy of still brilliant stars. To say the feeling was magical doesn't explain how I felt. It was perhaps more spiritual. We wandered Bonito's familiar passageways for a short while, now drenched in bright moonlight, eventually sitting near the circular wall of a ceremonial great kiva. You could almost feel the low tempo created by a wooden foot drum, the melodic high-pitched sounds of a clandestine flute player hiding amongst the crags of North Mesa, the barking of a distant dog, the smell of smoldering charcoal, and the daily lives of The People surrendering to the slumber of a deep night's sleep. More about Chaco in two weeks… Ad Astra!

November 12, 2023: Leonids to Fly this Weekend

Traditionally, November represents the transition period from tolerable warmth to the chill of winter. By Thanksgiving, accumulating snow can already be in the forecast, although up to this point in 2023, we have been happily spared. Some of the best meteor observing occurs during the long, dark nights of late fall and early winter, and with a cooperating moon, these events can be impressive. If the sky is clear, the morning hours of November 18, with the maximum occurring just after midnight, promise to deliver an excess of shooting stars from the Leonid Meteor Shower. The moon certainly will not pose any problems since it sets about 8 p.m. on the evening of the 17th. * It was the Leonid shower of November 12-13, 1833, that gave birth to meteor science. During the four hours preceding dawn on the 13th, meteors rained down on the eastern and central US, with as many as 15-50 shooting stars visible each second, radiating away from the head of Leo the Lion. Screams of hysteria, as well as the bright but silent explosive flashes of light from fireballs illuminating bedroom interiors, awakened most people in the regions of the most significant activity. A 24-year-old Abraham Lincoln was an eyewitness to the Leonid storm that morning. * Leonid meteors result from our planet intersecting the abundant dross which is released by Comet Tempel-Tuttle, discovered on December 19, 1865, by E. Tempel (French), and independently, on January 6, 1866, by H. Tuttle (American). As this short-period comet swings around the sun every 33.17 years, dense corridors of debris are released from the sublimating (vaporizing) surface ices of the comet. Earth intersects the denser swarms of powdery dust near the comet in enhanced periods of activity when Tempel-Tuttle is generally close to the sun. In an average year like 2023, about 10-15 Leonids may be seen each hour after midnight on maximum morning. By dawn, Leo will be high in the southern sky, allowing meteors to be visible from all around the radiant. * Leonids are the swiftest of the major showers. They enter the Earth’s atmosphere at slightly over 43 miles per second and appear to radiate from the sickle of Leo the Lion, a backwards-looking question mark that forms the Lion’s head and lower torso. The bright star named Regulus represents the dot of the question mark. Leo can be located by taking the two stars of the Big Dipper that point to the North Star, Dubhe and Merak, but moving in the opposite direction until the body of the Lion is intersected. A Leonid meteor will appear to be radiating swiftly away from the head of the Lion every five minutes or so. * The Leonids were particularly active in their 1966 return when reports of 100,000 meteors per hour were recorded in the Southwestern US. The shower is cyclical, with the last interval of enhanced activity having occurred between 1998 and 2002. Heightened rates will not happen again until 2099, although the comet responsible for the action, 55P/Tempel-Tuttle, is headed inbound and will round the sun again on May 20, 2031. * The Leonids of 2000 were particularly memorable for the number of bright meteors that they produced. From 2:20-5:20 a.m. I witnessed 54 Leonids, perhaps 20 bright enough to be called fireballs. I caught most of their brilliant flashes between the skeletal branches of my backyard trees despite an obtrusive, fat waning gibbous moon brightening the landscape near the radiant point of the shooting stars. There is good meteor viewing ahead if you can stand the cold. A Leonid locator map is online here. Ad Astra!

Leonid Meteor will be radianting from the blue "X" in the sickle of Leo the lion. The best chance for seeing Leonid meteors is Saturday morning, November 18, after midnight. This map is set for 2 a.m. Graphics by Gary A. Becker using Software Bisque's The Sky.

1422 November 19, 2023: Chaco After Sundown: I spoke two weeks ago about my favorite national park, Chaco Culture National Historical Park, near Nageezi, New Mexico, an almost desert-like, wild place in the "back of beyond" where a culture of Native Americans, the Ancestral Puebloans flourished 1000 years ago. During my four seasons of volunteering for Chaco as a Night Sky Interpreter, I only saw the park at night one time. Chaco became off-limits at sundown when a ranger rounded up the remaining stragglers, locking the exit gate of the nine-mile loop road after the last visitor departed. * I have to admit culpability to one incident where I was with three Student Conservation Association members visiting Penasco Blanco, the most distant Chacoan pueblo in what is called downtown Chaco. I realized it was too late to get back in time, but the lighting was so perfect for photography that I could not resist spending as much time there as possible. * When the SCAs also realized the time to leave had passed, we walked back to the parking area at a break-neck speed, but the park officer was waiting for us with scowling brows. He pointed a finger at me, the adult, and decried, "I know that you're not responsible for this, but the three of you…" * I hang my head in shame, but I also admit that no one ratted me out either. Hopefully, Hollie, Tran, and Brandon were also enthralled by the beauty of the landscape created by a near-setting sun, and their punishment was worth the moment. * When I was recently hiking Chaco with friend Wildman Jesse (Leayman), a few days after the annular eclipse, that we had traveled to Utah to witness, I was surprised by the trail markers, which now were posted at closing at 9 p.m., well after sundown. Chaco was still on its summer hours. Suddenly, I could explore a light-and-shadow relationship that might have had calendric implications 1000 years ago. * The pathway up to North Mesa from the Great House called Kin Kletso always intrigued me. At the midpoint of the rocky climb, created by a massive natural split in the yellow canyon walls, were spirals and a smoothed altar where the stone was depressed into two narrow bowls from countless small quantities of corn that had been ground by manos into offerings by an Ancestral Puebloan priest. A compass bearing that I had made with Liz Churchill in 2000 showed that it was near the winter solstice sunset position. I photographed the passageway near sunset on October 17, certainly not the winter solstice, but the corridor was becoming lit by the setting sun. From that observation, I am far from convinced that it is a winter solstice marker. Still, something must have been happening there for the site to have been solemnized with the remnant altar depressions. * Another photo that I wanted very much to attempt was the north-south wall at Chaco's most significant structure, Pueblo Bonito. I wanted to show Polaris, the North Star, shining above it. The directional concept had been proven conclusively by the meridional, mid-day sun, which is always due south, north of the Tropic of Cancer. The wall casts no shadow at high sun, meaning it was most likely astronomically aligned. However, photographing it with Polaris shining above it was something I had never seen published and failed at an attempt made 23 years earlier with film photography. Now I could retake this image because Chaco closed well after sunset while we were there. Photos of the sun-drenched pathway through the climb to North Mesa and the North-South wall at Bonito with Polaris above it, as well as a few other images, can be found here. Ad Astra!

1423 November 26, 2023: Grateful Thanks: Update on the Observatory: I have been working for the past three years on a project to build a backyard roll-off roof observatory with friend and former student, Adam Jones. I'm not a construction geek and find it more relaxing to putter in the yard and garden, teach, travel, or write StarWatch articles than measure, cut wood, or fabricate a complex structure like an observatory. But Adam is a master builder, not by professional training—that was in meteorology—but as someone with an exceptionally keen mind and the ability to solve problems rapidly better than anyone I know. * Actually, Adam is pretty good at any task he tackles. Year one was the footers and foundation; year two saw the framing and the structure take shape to scores of questions from neighbors and people walking the Rail Trail in the back of my property. * This year, most of the work occurred internally without outside changes, steps to and the concreting of the observing floor, a mini-split for air conditioning and heating, and the electrical work. People asked if the project was dead. It was very much alive internally. * However, the recent installation of the roof framework, steel rails that will allow the top to roll off the building, the wheels and their support structure, and the massive posts that brace the roof, that allow the sky to be visible to the telescope, have dramatically changed the look of the building. Friend Harry Hodge of Schnecksville, who has worked with steel fabrication for over 40 years, handled that aspect of the project. Harry procured the steel and welded the bolts through which the two I-beams and mounting track could be attached to the building among many other contributions. Adam drilled the holes into the top framework of the building independently of Harry's work. The tolerances for fitting the bolts welded to the I-beam to the wooden framework of the building were 1/32nd of an inch. When Dave Hodes of Witt's Tree Service of Catasauqua lifted the two 500-pound beams onto the framework of the building and posts, the fit was perfect. The six-story, 80,000-pound crane was provided by Witt's for free. * In a roll-off observatory, the A-shaped roof has to be constructed on the rollers that will transport the top away from the structure. It must be a perfect rectangle, not even slightly in the shape of a parallelogram, and perfectly leveled so that when the roof is rolled back, it doesn't snag. Tolerances are around 1/16th of an inch in leveling accuracy as well as in the rectangular shape of the roof. Adam has maintained and exceeded this precision throughout the entire project. * It will still be another year before the facility is functional, but friends like Peter Detterline, Harry Hodge, Dean Bauer, Jose Rivera, Rick Cantelmi of Cantelmi's Hardware in Bethlehem, Sergio Fernandez, Jesse Leayman, neighbors Steve and Bridget Denton, Michael Pontrelli, Jon Detterline, Leonard Witt, Dave Hodes, and Glen Hayes have volunteered their time, equipment, muscle, and discounts to make this project successful and a dream come true for me. Incidentally, in addition to Adam, Peter, Jesse, and Jose are former students of mine. Grateful thanks to all of these individuals. Photos can be found below, particularly on crane day. Ad Astra!

[November Star Map]

[November Moon Phase Calendar]