Whats in the Sky: May brings Eta Aquarids meteor shower

The Eta Aquarids meteor shower will peak on May 4. This shower consists of dust and debris in the orbital path of famous comet Halley. This is an early morning event, which will be best between 2-4 in the morning. OK, if you are up that early on May 4, be sure to check out the Moon in the eastern morning sky. To it’s left will be the planet Mars, and to the right Saturn. 

I did not travel to see the April 8 eclipse at totality, but I was able to show the partial eclipse to students at Trout Lake School. We used a telescope with a solar filter, enabling people to see the Moon “taking a bite” out of the Sun, and also several large sunspots. It was chilly, and clouds blocked our view for a time, but all enjoyed the event.

I was able to see comet Pons-Brooks last month, although it was not easily visible. I could see it with binoculars, but did not see it with the naked eye. The comet has disappeared below our western horizon in May. Similar to comet Halley, Pons-Brooks will return in about 70 years.

A bit of news I picked up recently involves Voyager 1, the space probe that is the farthest thing from Earth that we have launched. We still are able to communicate with Voyager, even though signals take about 22 hours to reach us. Last year communication from Voyager became garbled, but NASA was able to fix things recently. The news made me think about Voyager’s immense distance from us, and the incredible scale of our solar system, the distance to other stars, and the size of our Milky Way galaxy.

It is amazing that we are still communicating with Voyager. It was launched in 1977! Jimmy Carter was president, and “Star Wars” was the most popular movie. The majority of Americans living today were not born yet.

Voyager visited Jupiter in 1979, Saturn in 1980, snapped the famous “Pale Blue Dot” photo of a distant Earth in 1990, and entered interstellar space in 2012. Even at a speed of some 38,000 mph, it took that long, about 35 years, for the probe to leave the solar system. 

So, Voyager’s next visit will be a nearby star, you might say? It will be a while. Our nearest neighbor, Proxima Centauri, is about 4.25 light-years distant. Voyager, in almost 50 years, has covered about two-tenths of one percent of a light year. At that speed, it will take Voyager some 7 million years to cover the distance to our nearest neighbor star!

Another way to think of this immense distance is by a scale. Imagine if we could shrink our Sun to the size of a basketball. At that scale, Proxima Centauri would be (roughly) another basketball, more than 4,000 miles away. Space is quite empty! Even more staggering is the size of our Milky Way galaxy, about 100,000 light-years in length. Imagine if we were to shrink our entire solar system down to the size of a quarter. At that scale, the Milky Way would cover most of the United States.

So, enjoy May’s dark skies, be it the meteor shower, a glimpse of the Moon and planets, the glow of Earth’s beautiful Moon, or the change of constellations with the seasons. But also, simply take in the view, and consider with humility the simple immenseness of our Universe.