We Need A Challenge
 | Author:
Jeff Ross
Contributor |
Welcome! In this column I will mostly write about what you and I can hope to see in the night sky with an unaided eye. Sometimes we might want to grab a pair of binoculars to help or maybe even check out the tabletop telescope from the Broadwater School and Community Library but first and foremost it will be about what we can see in the night sky without those aids.
In this first edition, though, I’m going to break that rule and take us back in time to this week in July 1969. I had just barely turned 13 and the United States was poised to launch our first manned mission to our nearest astronomical neighbor—the Moon.
Launch from Cape Kennedy was on July 16, 1969, at 7:32 am MDT. The three astronauts aboard were atop a Saturn V rocket 363 feet tall and weighing 6.2 million pounds. The first of three stages was fueled with 203,400 gallons of kerosene and 318,000 gallons of liquid oxygen and when ignited generated 7.6 million pounds of thrust.
That’s a big rocket yet I re¬member watching the launch on a black and white TV from our home outside Columbia Falls and it seemed like it took forever for it to clear the launch tower. That forever was probably 3 seconds, tops, and then it was on it way to the Moon.
President Kennedy chal¬lenged us to go to the Moon in a speech at Rice University on September 12, 1962, when we barely had the capability to successfully launch a human into orbit. Less than 9 years later Neil Armstrong stepped off the Lunar Module lander onto the surface of the Moon.
Do we need a similar chal¬lenge now? I think so.
Step out into a warm summer night and immerse yourself in the night sky above. The Last Quarter Moon rises around mid¬night and is directly overhead at dawn. The Big Dipper is its most iconic during summer when the dipper points up almost all night long.
Mercury is currently too close to our Sun to be visible from here. Venus rises at about the end of morning twilight so might not quite be visible in the east. Mars, Jupiter and Saturn all clear the eastern horizon right around midnight and are visible for the rest of the night—short as that might be in these sum¬mer months.
With Clear Skies, of course!
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PhotoCredit: Nasa
Image 1 Caption: Launch of Apollo 11
