"If you live in Asia and Australia you have a rare opportunity for an observing adventure," writes Sky & Telescope's Moon columnist, Chuck Wood, on LPOD, Lunar Photo of the Day:

On June 10th at 18:25 Universal Time, the Japanese lunar orbiter Kaguya (formerly named Selene) will end its two years of science with a final impact experiment. The location of the impact is very near the southeast limb, close to 80.4º E, 65.5º S This time and location are according to an update early on June 10th by the Japanese aerospace agency JAXA.

Wood writes, "This area will be in shadow as the Moon has just passed full, but easy to find just beyond the terminator south of [the crater] Janssen. Visual observations and video monitoring may be rewarded with a bright flash or (possibly) a cloud of ejecta that rises into sunlight as the large spacecraft rams into the surface at 6000 km/hr. . . .

"There is a possibility that Kaguya might impact 1 or 2 orbits (2 or 4 hours) earlier — it is very close to the surface, and both unexpected topographic highs and gravity anomalies may hasten its demise. . . ."

Here is Wood's entire article, with images showing where to watch.

Here's a Kaguya image gallery.

Japanese TV has been broadcasting high-res video from Kaguya as it skims over the lunar landscape. I hope they can keep the camera going right to the final moment.

A Warmup for the LCROSS Impact!

Observers in western North America and in Hawaii should be better positioned to watch NASA's own Moon-impact experiment — which has been delayed and will probably now happen between October 7th and 11th. This event is the subject of a feature article in the June Sky & Telescope. Two craft in the LCROSS mission will hit inside a permanently shadowed polar crater four minutes apart. Many instruments in orbit and on Earth will watch for any signs of water vapor in the ejecta.

Countless amateurs will also be watching; NASA mission specialists say signs of the LCROSS impacts may be detectable in 10-inch or larger telescopes.

The date, time, and place of the LCROSS impacts have yet to be finalized. Here's the NASA site for observations, and here's the LCROSS_Observation Google Group for planning and discussing observations and the latest mission news.

The Moon will be only about 16 hours from full when, on Saturday evening June 6th in the Americas, it will cross the 1st-magnitude red supergiant star Antares. The occultation will be visible across much of the United States and Canada, all of Central America and the Caribbean, and northern South America. Surrounding areas get a still-spectacular near miss.

In a telescope, you’ll see the round Moon’s most shadow-marked rim creep up to fire-colored Antares. The star will blink out behind the invisible dark limb just before it reaches the brightly sunlit lunar mountains and plains. Antares has such a large angular size for a star (40 milliarcseconds) that, seen from locations where it grazes the Moon’s edge, it may appear to fade down for a second or less rather than snapping out instantly.

In North America, Antares disappears some time between 9:40 and 11:20 p.m. EDT, depending on your location. See the IOTA website for a timetable with local details.

Antares will reappear up to an hour or more later from behind the sharper bright limb, with the Moon now higher in the southeastern sky.

Antares and Aldebaran are the only strongly reddish stars that are near enough to the ecliptic, and bright enough, ever to be seen well on the Moon’s bright limb. For these rare few seconds, to me they look like a fire on the Moon.

If you've looked at Saturn through a telescope recently, clearly the planet is not its usual gorgeous self. Those famous rings are angled nearly edge-on to our line of sight, appearing like a spear through Saturn's midsection.

Like the rings, the orbits of Saturn's major satellites are also seen nearly edge-on this year. As a result, the satellites now pass in front of and behind Saturn, casting their tiny shadows onto the planet's face and ducking in and out of its shadow, just like the moons of Jupiter do.

Saturn is about twice Jupiter's distance from us, however, and only Titan is a match for Jupiter's Galilean moons in terms of size. Nevertheless, notes Belgian astronomer Jean Meeus, the classic guidebook Saturn by A. F. O. Alexander describes Titan's shadow on Saturn being seen "quite easily" in a small refractor as early as 1862.

Meeus calculated the Titan timetable below so that you can try for yourself. The dates and times are in Universal Time. Oc refers to an occultation of Titan behind Saturn's limb. Ec means eclipse in Saturn's shadow. Tr is a transit of Titan across Saturn's face. Sh refers to Titan casting its shadow onto the planet.

An occultation or eclipse begins when Titan disappears (D) or reappears (R). A transit or shadow passage begins at ingress (I) and ends at egress (E). Each event is gradual, taking several minutes.

Titan and Its Shadow on Saturn
Date	UT	Event		Date	UT	Event
Apr. 5	9:21	Ec. D.		May 23	6:30	Ec. D.
Apr. 5	13:37	Ec. R.		May 23	12:06	Ec. R.
Apr. 13	7:22	Sh. I.		May 31	4:32	Sh. I.
Apr. 13	11:51	Sh. E.		May 31	10:00	Sh. E.
Apr. 21	8:20	Ec. D.		June 8	5:39	Ec. D.
Apr. 21	13:10	Ec. R.		June 8	11:31	Ec. R.
Apr. 29	6:22	Sh. I.		June 16	3:40	Sh. I.
Apr. 29	11:16	Sh. E.		June 16	9:18	Sh. E.
May 7	7:23	Ec. D.		June 24	4:50	Ec. D.
May 7	12:40	Ec. R.		June 24	10:53	Ec. R.
May 15	5:26	Sh. I.
May 15	10:39	Sh. E.

If you manage to snap a shot of Titan crossing Saturn's disk, please share it with other visitors by posting it to our online photo gallery.

Venus hung extraordinarily high and bright in the Northern Hemisphere’s evening sky during January and February, 2009. But in mid-March, Venus started to plunge toward the sunset horizon, appearing more than 1° lower on each successive evening.

But for telescopic observers, this is the most exciting possible time to view Venus. On March 27th, our sister planet will be at inferior conjunction — as close as it will come this year to being directly between us and the Sun. As that date approaches the crescent seems too thin to be real, and it sports exotic cusp extensions as shown at right. The crescent spans nearly a full arcminute from tip to tip in late March — big enough to be seen easily in steadily supported binoculars.

Near inferior conjunction, the only way to get a clear telescopic image of Venus is to view the planet in broad daylight. When doing this, you must be extremely careful not to aim your telescope (or its finderscope!) at the Sun, or you may end up permanently blind. By far the safest procedure is to view Venus in mid- to late afternoon, when both it and the Sun below it are getting lower in the sky. Place your telescope just inside the shadow of a building, so that no part of the scope is sunlit. Use binoculars or your finderscope to scan above or upper right of where the Sun would be if you could see it, and you’ll soon locate Venus. You can use our Interactive Sky Chart or your favorite planetarium software to find the precise distance and angle between Venus and the Sun on your date.

Once every 8 years — and this is one of them — inferior conjunction also provides a special treat for naked-eye observers. Because Venus passes more than 8° north of the Sun, it should be visible at both dawn and dusk for at least three days centered on March 23rd at latitude 40° north. The farther north you live, the longer the period of dawn-and-dusk visibility will be. Find a spot with unobstructed horizons to the east and west, and scout the sky with binoculars before attempting a naked-eye sighting.

Late word out of the IAU's Minor Planet Center: a small asteroid will pass close to Earth tomorrow (March 2nd) at 13:44 Universal Time. How close? The MPC's Timothy Spahr calculates that it'll be 0.00047 astronomical unit from Earth's center. That's only about 40,000 miles (63,500 km) up — well inside the Moon's orbit and roughly twice the altitude of most communications satellites!

This little cosmic surprise, designated 2009 DD₄₅, turned up two days ago as a 19th-magnitude blip in images taken by Rob McNaught at Siding Spring Observatory in Australia. It was already within 1½ million miles of Earth and closing fast.

Thankfully, the news media have become less sensationalistic when it comes to these asteroidal close calls — especially since one actually struck our planet last October 7th, at night, and the impact went virtually unnoticed.

So why post this? Well, we figured someone might want to watch it zip by at up to a half degree per minute! Even though it's small, likely no more than 100 feet (30 meters) across, it'll brighten to magnitude 10½ at its closest — easily within reach of an 8-inch backyard telescope. That's the good news.

The bad news is that the point of closest approach occurs over the Pacific somewhere west of Tahiti, so the most likely viewers are in Australia, Japan, and maybe Hawaii. Sure, you could look before or afterward, but it'll be brighter than 13th magnitude only for a few hours.

If you want to give it a try anyway, you'll need to generate an ephemeris of positions for your specific location, due to the wide parallax of an object so close to Earth. And if you manage to spot it, be sure to add a comment below to let us know.

By the way, this isn't the closest "near-miss" asteroidal fragment on record. According to the MPC, tiny 2004 FU₁₆₂ skirted just 4,000 miles from us on March 31, 2004.

A few meteors emanating from Regulus seems not the sort of thing that would drive observers out of their warm beds into frigid nights to observe. It's nothing like the Leonids in November 2001. Those were something else. My wife, Wendee, and I traveled to an old Aboriginal rock garden some 70 km south of Alice Springs, Australia, where, in a few brief hours, we counted 2,164 meteors, including more than 300 after morning twilight had started!

With a shower like that, who cares about its poor cousin, the Alpha Leonids? There should be a law against observing even less-active showers.

Very little is known about the Alpha Leonids. According to Gary Kronk, the shower was virtually unknown before it showed up in a 1948 book on meteors by German astronomer Cuno Hoffmeister. It was actually Zdenek Sekanina, however, who first listed the stream as a result of two radio sessions reported during the 1960s. The average rate hovers around three faint meteors per hour.

Thus it seemed a good idea to watch for them, but only while multitasking. My strategy was to look for them surreptitiously, as I searched for comets on the morning of Friday, February 6th. I often conduct this opportunistic activity, making an informal study of meteors that appear in the sky.

During that predawn hour, which began when the waxing gibbous Moon set at 5 a.m., I actually spotted two meteors moving swiftly through the field of my 32-mm Nagler eyepiece. The first one clearly came from the direction of Regulus, which was then high in the west. That one was probably an Alpha Leonid.

The second meteor came directly out of the north; I could tell simply by moving the telescope slightly in the direction from which the meteor made its first appearance in the field of view. That little meteor could have been a Canid, but there's debate as to where the radiant is. Although the constellation of Canes Venatici seems an appropriate place, the radiant appears to be in Canis Minor.

A discussion on the boards of the Bad Astronomy and Universe Today Forum supports this idea. The meteor I saw might have been from a shower whose radiant is in Canes Venatici — or perhaps it was just a sporadic meteor. I also photographed a meteor coming from the north through Obadiah, my 12-inch Schmidt camera.

I've always enjoyed the minor showers, because taken together they produce most of the meteors seen during the course of a year. In July 1956 my interest in astronomy might have been sired by the sighting of a single meteor from the Omicron Draconid shower. Although I was only 8 at the time, I remember being excited from that experience. Almost 60 years later the sight of a meteor, even a faint one, is moving.

What's coming later this year with meteors? The Lyrids (April 21–22) and Eta Aquarids (May 5–6) are moderate showers, though the Eta Aquarids are active only for the last two hours of those nights. The Delta Aquarids (maximum July 28–29) will be hurt only a little by a first-quarter Moon, and the Perseids (August 12–13) will have a last-quarter Moon to interfere. The Orionids (October 21–22) will be just after new Moon, and the Leonids (November 17–18) will also occur under a dark sky. And, finally, the Geminids (December 13–14) will appear this year under a moonless sky.

But don't forget the other nights and the minor showers visible throughout the year. Who knows what meteors will appear? I can guarantee that you’ll have some success if you watch enough.

Last Wednesday, January 28th, a group of astronomy enthusiasts gathered at Rancho Hidalgo, New Mexico, a few miles east of the Arizona border, to rededicate Clyde Tombaugh's monstrous 16-inch telescope. Just one of 37 instruments that Pluto's discoverer completed during his long and productive life, this mighty 16-inch f/10 reflector has a fascinating history. And a new chapter is about to begin.

In the 1930s, Tombaugh began grinding and polishing the 16-inch mirror during the twilight of his planet-hunting years at Lowell Observatory. But the project was set aside in the middle of that decade when he moved to New Mexico's White Sands Proving Grounds to begin a job on the ground floor of the nascent Space Age.

By the mid 1950s, Tombaugh had moved to the astronomy program at New Mexico State University, and his thoughts returned to the 16-inch telescope. He built a massive steel mount for it in his suburban Las Cruces backyard. Requiring about a ton of steel, the completed scope involved about 1,500 hours of labor. From the mid 1960s onward, Tombaugh used the yoke-mounted instrument to study the planets.

When Tombaugh moved to a new house in 1966, the telescope moved with him. Longtime family friend and colleague Jed Durrenberger related an aspect of the move that I included in my 2006 biography of Tombaugh. At one point the two men had to muscle the mount down a wooden plank. Durrenberger wasn't at all confident of success, but Tombaugh assured him that the plank would hold. When they started moving the mount, everything went well for a few seconds, but then it started sliding on its own, plummeting down the plank. The wood snapped, slamming the plank into Tombaugh's thigh and hitting Durrenberger in the chest. The mount landed safely on the ground, but it had left more than a memorable impression on the two friends. Tombaugh was notorious for carrying so much stuff in his pants pockets that Durrenberger referred to him as "a traveling toolbox." The plank's impact left Tombaugh's thigh with a visible impression of everything that was in his pocket.

The telescope's massive steel superstructure was so sturdy that Tombaugh made a decision not to put a structure of any sort around it — no dome, no sliding roof, nothing. The telescope simply stood outdoors against the elements with its optics protected by firmly fitting covers.

By the mid-1980s Tombaugh and I began a close friendship, which lasted the rest of his life. One evening we set up the 16-inch telescope to look at Saturn. The seeing was almost perfect.

"Clyde," I inquired, "can this telescope reveal the spokes within Saturn's B ring?"

"It sure can," he replied. "I've seen them myself."

"I'm glad to hear you say that," I added, "because I am seeing them right now."

After Clyde's death in early 1997, the family decided to sell the 16-inch telescope. After several false leads, my wife, Wendee, suggested to Gene Turner of the Arizona Sky Village, that the telescope might be a perfect addition to his growing astronomical community. Turner enthusiastically agreed, and the telescope was eventually relocated in 2008 to a new site he is developing at Rancho Hidalgo, New Mexico, about 15 miles east of the Arizona Sky Village. He plans to use it as the star of an educational program.

Turner loved and admired Tombaugh, and he shares my opinion that Pluto should remain a major planet. In fact, it's a covenant that people living at Rancho Hidalgo must accept Pluto as a major planet. And they're in good company. In 2007 New Mexico passed a statute declaring that Pluto is a major planet and that the day of its discovery, March 13th, will be "Pluto Planet Day" throughout the state.

I spent many hours with Tombaugh during his final years, and I was aware of his sadness over the potential demotion of his discovery. I believe that the science part of the man accepted what he believed was coming, but the human part never could. That's one of the reasons why I too support returning Pluto's status to that of a major planet.

Tombaugh has left us, but his legacy survives. For those of us who knew the man, every time we look at the night sky, we remember him. Every time we debate the question of what is a planet, we remember him. Every time we discuss cosmological issues, we remember him. And his great telescope, which now stands beneath one of the best astronomical skies in the world, will bring these memories and inspiration to new generations.

Like many people around the world, last Tuesday Wendee and I were wrapped up in coverage of Barak Obama's inauguration as the 44th president of the United States.

As we listened to the inauguration speech and Obama's comment that fixing our nation's woes will take all of us, we thought how appropriate this idea is for this International Year of Astronomy (IYA). At a time when much of the government's attention is being focused on the economy, motivating people to become interested in the night sky is going to be largely up to those of us in the astronomical community.

With a lifelong love of astronomy, I've seen economic downturns in the past. A recession was taking place early in 1961, shortly after I first looked through a telescope and discovered how much fun observing can be. With adults fretting about jobs and the state of the economy, I remember my dad telling me, "Everyone has a job to do, and yours is to do well in school." Regrettably, I didn't always do my "job" well. Sometimes I paid for my hours outdoors with a telescope with low marks at school.

Our current recession makes the 1961 downturn look tame. But as amateur astronomers, we can still share with others that sense of magic that brings us outdoors to look at the night sky. It's a low-cost activity, and the look on a viewer's face as he or she sees Saturn or some other "Wow!" object for the first time is beyond price.

The inauguration got me fantasizing about politics and astronomy. What if there were astronomical qualifications for holding public office? In order to be on a city council, perhaps a candidate should have some experience looking through a telescope, having spotted, say, all the Messier objects or identified 300 craters on the Moon. Maybe running for national office in the House of Representatives should require an active career observing variable stars or doing astrophotography. The Senate? How about some original contribution to astronomy being a maxim. And the presidency? A minimum of two comet discoveries should be the requirement.

Alas, such a regime would likely bestow some very capable, but thoroughly impractical leaders! Not the best way to run the world. But for those of us with our heads above the clouds, the thought is fascinating indeed.

In the real world, the IYA is getting better with each passing week. This is a great year to remind ourselves why we got into astronomy in the first place, and why we need, so desperately, to encourage that passion in future generations.

Even before taking office as the 44th president of the United States, Barack Obama called on Americans to make an ongoing commitment to community service. With that in mind, last Tuesday evening, January 13th, we conducted our first "National Day of Service" event. Just one week before the inauguration, a group of students and their parents, teachers, and amateur astronomers gathered at the Corona Foothills Middle School in Tucson, Arizona, for a community star party. While it wasn't the first event listed on the USA Service website, it was undoubtedly the first one to leave Earth and head to the cosmos.

The star party, sponsored by the National Sharing the Sky Foundation, was very successful. Although we've held similar events each month for the past year and a half, there was something magical in the air this time. For two hours we toured objects in the night sky. There was dazzlingly bright Venus in the west, the distant Andromeda Galaxy high overhead, and the Crab Nebula in the east.

These star parties are part of a slow process to inspire people, particularly youngsters, to become interested in the night sky. It's a big challenge even in this International Year of Astronomy, which is tailor-made for such efforts.

I find it interesting to note how the journey to learn about the night sky courses through individual families. At an earlier event there was an occasion when a child was looking through the telescope, listening carefully as I introduced her to the wonder of Jupiter's Galilean satellites. Then her parent, who was standing in line but apparently not listening, took a cursory look in the eyepiece and asked, "What are those dots next to the Moon?"

My first reaction was one of disillusionment; how can we inspire young people when their parents appear so uninterested? But, with time, answers begin to emerge. By encouraging the entire family to keep looking through the telescopes, both parents and children begin to grasp the ethereal beauty of what they are seeing. Jupiter's "dots" became moons, worlds in themselves, and the planet's shape, flattened because of its fast 10-hour rotation period, became more distinct, bearing no relation to the real Moon (which, by the way, wasn't even in the sky on that particular night).

Last Tuesday, after looking at Venus, we were able to venture well beyond our cosmic neighborhood to an object not a few million miles away but more than 2 million light-years away. In addition to looking at the Andromeda Galaxy and its 400 billion suns filling the eyepiece, we also imagined it in terms of philosophy. Some 3 billion years from now the Andromeda Galaxy and the Milky Way will probably begin colliding, eventually resulting in the evolution of a giant elliptical galaxy. It gave our group pause to wonder at the amazing sights they were eating up.

Our final view of the evening was a journey more through time than space. The Crab Nebula is the remnant of a great supernova explosion that was seen in AD 1054. But there's more left than just the bright cloud of dust and gas we were looking at. The cloud is home to a rapidly spinning pulsar that emits a powerful radio signal. You can hear its call on the Web.

In this time of renewal, we think that one good community-service project is to help people become inspired by the beauty of the night sky. Last week, in a small way, we did that. As this pivotal year continues, we're determined to give as many people as possible a reason to look up.

I have many memories associated with New Orleans. My first trip there to visit relatives was on a train during the 1950s. I remember a big crowd pushing its way onto the train and there being nowhere near enough seats for our family of six to sit together. Then suddenly our family was ushered to a different section of the train with lots of comfortable chairs and plenty of quiet. Dad explained that the staff was just being nice to us. It was much later that I learned that he must have paid a fortune to move us up to the first-class section. On another trip to the Crescent City, this time aboard an Eastern Airlines Constellation, I suddenly decided that I had enough traveling for one day, and I politely inquired if the flight attendant could let me off in midflight.

Those were the days before the sky became a major influence in my life. As I grew older, in addition to visiting my grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins, the city's Pontchartrain Astronomy Society became increasingly important to me. I enjoyed the club's enthusiastic membership and inspired leaders. Barry Simon and Mike Sandras, in particular, have become long-time friends, and I have fond memories of watching the 1984 annular solar eclipse with them as it passed near the city.

Then came hurricane Katrina in August 2005. The following March I visited a city transformed. Sections of the once mighty metropolis now looked like a moonscape. I was there to lecture to a group of middle-school children about the wonders of the night sky in what seemed like the midst of a holocaust.

But New Orleans has reawakened during the intervening years. Where whole city blocks were in ruins, manicured lawns and new houses have sprouted. On the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain, Joseph Aymond has constructed the most amazing amateur observatory I have ever seen. Completed after the storm, he was taking no chances with the weather. A fully equipped Meade 16-inch telescope is housed in a building strong enough, Joseph insists, to withstand the direct hit of an F5 tornado, the mightiest possible twister. (If you’d like to see the details of his steel structure, visit the Ultimate Private Observatory.)

Nearby there's a beautiful field and smaller observatory housing an elegant vintage Celestron telescope. The field is available to any PAS member, and though Sandras, the club's current president, thinks the site is a bit underutilized, I think that with New Orleans's continued recovery and the International Year of Astronomy gaining momentum, this observing site will see much more use.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Pontchartrain Astronomy Society, and I was recently there to help them celebrate. The evening highlighted what can be accomplished in amateur astronomy in this brave new world of 2009. The society has a brilliant past, but its future, along with that of its host city, is bright indeed.

As the new year opens, let's raise a glass to the International Year of Astronomy, a year-long celebration of Galileo's first look at the night sky through a telescope in 1609. By today’s standards, the Italian scientist didn't have much of a telescope. Consisting of a yard-long paper tube and two pieces of glass, it was more of a spyglass than a telescope. But combined with Galileo's keen eyesight, it was telescope enough to locate the moons of Jupiter and the phases of Venus, and thus redraw the boundaries of astronomy for all time.

Four hundred years later I can hardly imagine anything more fun and relaxing than looking through a telescope. In this new weblog I'll often reflect on what I've seen over the years through my own collection of telescopes. But I want to start by talking about one wonder of astronomy that can be seen without a telescope — and it's one that launched my interest in astronomy.

It was July 4, 1956, and I was at Twin Lake Camp in Vermont when I saw my first meteor. It was a faint 2nd- or 3rd-magnitude slow-moving speck of dust probably thrown off from Comet Metcalf (C/1919 Q2), but it was enough to spark my lifelong passion for astronomy. A few years later, on the bitterly cold evening of January 2, 1962, I made my first attempt to view the annual Quadrantid meteor shower. I didn't keep records that night, but I doubt I saw many meteors. Nevertheless, I always think about the Quadrantids when a new year begins.

Twice during the 1980s, Rolf Meier, the famous comet discoverer from Ottawa, Canada, came by to visit at Quadrantid time. We tried to record the meteors and then use trigonometry to calculate their heights. When our solution gave an altitude of 6 kilometers, we knew we were doing something wrong! It's a good thing meteors don't usually survive that deep into the atmosphere; otherwise they’d be hitting airplanes all the time.

Because the Quadrantid shower has a very sharply defined peak in activity, three things must converge to make it a favorable year to view the meteors. The Moon must be down during the predawn hours; the sky must, of course, be clear; and the peak must coincide with those dark hours above a particular observing site. On January 3, 2004, I joined astronomer Clark Chapman and his wife for a Quadrantid watch from their home in Colorado. The fact that we were soaking in a hot tub kept us from being bothered by the subfreezing Rocky Mountain temperatures.

A brief spurt of 15 Quadrantids during 2006 sparked my decision to write an observing guide to meteor showers. As meteor showers came and went that year I wrote about them, and in the process I came to really appreciated how meteors can inspire people. The fleeting sight of a bright meteor captures the magic of the night sky in a very special way.

This year's Quadrantids peaked during the morning of January 3rd, and they were especially favorable for my location in Arizona. Usually during the half of the month that is Moon free in the predawn hours, I set up and run my automated comet-search program, which uses five or six telescopes. When they're all working, I log an hour or so of visual observing with Miranda, my 16-inch f/5 reflector. But Quadrantid night was different. After starting the automated survey, I sat down on a comfortable lawn chair and started counting meteors. Since I had seen four meteors while getting the survey setup, I had an inkling this was going to be a good night.

Quadrantid rates varied considerably. Sometimes there would be two or three meteors a minute, while others times I'd see only one in about three minutes. Twice I saw two meteors within a single second of each other! When dawn began, I stopped counting with a total of 88.

The next decent meteor shower this year will be the Lyrids in late April. I encourage everyone to go outside and get inspired as these tiny specks of cometary dust scratch the night sky.

When Giuseppe Piazzi discovered the first asteroid, 1 Ceres, on January 1, 1801, it was magnitude 8.0. This year you can see it nearly three times that bright, at magnitude 6.9, from mid-February through the first week of March. In fact, this is as close and bright as Ceres will become in our lifetimes.

Ceres reaches opposition on February 25th. Using the best available orbital elements and perturbation corrections, S&T’s Roger Sinnott finds that “on February 25th at 23.6 hours UT, Ceres will pass closer to Earth [1.583198 a.u.] than it has been since 1857. Ceres won’t be this close again until 4164!”

This happens because the asteroid is at perihelion, its closest to the Sun in orbit, just two weeks earlier. Winter oppositions of Ceres (winter in the Northern Hemisphere) are when it gets especially close and bright.

You can spot it with binoculars in Leo using the chart at right. (Click here for a full-page, printable, black-and-white chart in PDF format.) A typical binocular’s field of view is about 6° across; compare this with the ticks 10° apart on the chart's right edge.

Ceres is magnitude 7.9 on January 1st, 7.2 on February 1st, 6.9 on March 1st, 7.4 on April 1st, and 8.0 on May 1st. The chart shows stars to magnitude 8.0.

With a diameter of 590 miles (950 km), Ceres is by far the largest asteroid and has enough gravity to pull itself into a reasonably round shape, making it the smallest known “dwarf planet” under the new, 2006 classification of the solar system’s minor bodies. It’s estimated to contain a third of the asteroid belt’s mass. NASA’s Dawn spacecraft is on its way to take up orbit around Ceres in 2015, after dallying at Vesta starting in 2011.

About a decade ago, mid-November's normally benign Leonid meteor shower exploded like fireworks into prominence, giving us dazzling displays of shooting stars almost too numerous to count.

I remember these celestial spectacles as if they were yesterday. In 1999, I was flying in a research jet in the darkness over Sicily with a team of NASA scientists and veteran amateur meteor counters. Out of the plane's window I could see meteors raining down from space, a deluge so intense it appeared as if Earth were under attack.

A year later I sat with my wife and some friends overlooking a smooth-as-glass lake in western Massachusetts. In the predawn quiet we savored the sight of Leonids streaking into view all across the sky, sometimes arriving two and three at a time.

If new predictions by meteor specialists hold true, we could be in for a repeat of this celestial treat next year. That's because a few weeks ago, despite strong interference from moonlight, observers in Europe, Asia, and the U.S. counted upward of 100 meteors per hour, as plotted at right. Yet the expectation was closer to 10 — so why the outburst?

The Leonids are bits of debris spread along the orbit of a periodic comet named Tempel-Tuttle, which has a 33-year-long orbit that can bring it rather close to Earth. (In 1366, for example, it passed only 2 million miles from us, one of the very closest passes that any comet has made in recorded history.)

Each time it rounds the Sun, Tempel-Tuttle spews out a ribbon of dust that remains fairly concentrated for centuries as it follows the comet around in orbit. During the 2008 pass, Earth came rather close to the debris ejected in 1466, about 16 orbits ago. Although aware of this stream's proximity, few meteor specialists expected much from it. (One who did was Russian dynamicist Mikhail Maslov.)

With the sudden realization that this 542-year-old ribbon of rubble still packs a punch, everyone's gone back to the drawing board to recalculate next year's circumstances. The main peak of activity will come on November 17th and involve contributions from the comet's spewings in 1102, 1466, and 1533. On that much, at least, three teams' calculations agree. But otherwise their results, like the meteors themselves, are scattered:

• Jérémie Vaubaillon (Caltech) is the most optimistic; he predicts a theoretical maximum of 500 Leonids per hour at 21:43 Universal Time.

• William Cooke (NASA Marshall Space Flight Center) is more equivocal, saying that the shower will top out at nearly 300 — give or take 100 — at 21:44 UT.

• Maslov predicts a peak of 150 to 160 per hour at about 22:00 UT.

Fortunately, the Moon will be just past new on that date, so skies should be good and dark. Unfortunately for those of us in the Americas, this outburst will be rather short (lasting an hour or so) and occur at or before sunset. Observers in Asia will have the front-row seats — though conceivably, Cooke notes, there might be a nice show over North America when darkness falls hours after the peak.

So if I don't get to China for next July's terrific total solar eclipse, I might head over there a few months later to watch hundreds of bits of cometary dust incinerate themselves in a blaze of glory.

Anyone looking southwest in evening twilight as November turns to December will witness a close pairing of the two brightest planets, Venus and Jupiter. On November 30th and December 1st they’ll be separated by only 2° — about the width of your finger held at arm’s length.

And on the evening of December 1st, skywatchers in the Americas will see the crescent Moon joining the two planets to make a remarkably compact celestial triangle. It’s sure to turn heads.

The illustration at right shows the scene. (Reload or click here if no illustration is visible.) It's plotted for observers in the middle of North America (and the alignment of the Venus-Jupiter pairing is exact for December 1st), but it’s close enough to give a good idea of how the scene will look from anywhere in North America on the evenings in question.

Although the three objects appear close together, appearances in astronomy are deceiving. The Moon is only 252,000 miles away, less far than you may have driven in your lifetime. Right now Venus is 370 times farther away, at 94 million miles. And Jupiter, at 540 million miles, is nearly six times farther than Venus.

If the sky is cloudy for this event, don't despair. Venus and the crescent Moon will have another spectacular twilight pairing (though without Jupiter) on December 31st, New Year's Eve.

This week's planet conjunction marks the second time this year that Venus and Jupiter have mimicked a brilliant "double star" in our sky. Back on February 1st, they appeared together in the eastern sky before dawn. At that time they nestled even closer together — only ½° apart.

The last time these two planets were paired in the evening sky and easily seen was September 2005, when they appeared about 1½° apart. They won't be this close together and well placed for evening viewing again until May 2013 (1° apart).

Special Treat for Europeans

Across much of Europe, even people who never normally look up should watch the western twilight on Monday evening, December 1st. The Moon will be right next to Venus and Jupiter. But the real show happens when the Moon's dim, earthlit edge occults (covers) dazzling Venus itself. The second act happens roughly an hour or more later, when Venus reemerges into view from behind the crescent's bright edge.

At locations where the twilight sky has darkened enough, all you'll need are your eyes. But binoculars or a telescope will give a much grander view — and will also allow you to watch the occultation where it happens in a bright sky, even before sunset. Actually, with Venus a full 43° from the Sun, you may be able to pick it up in daylight with your unaided eye, depending on the clearness of the air.

Venus will appear small and gibbous in a telescope, 69% sunlit and 17 arcseconds across (a hundredth the diameter of the Moon). Because of Venus's significant angular size, its disappearance and reappearance will each be gradual, taking 30 seconds or more.

Have you seen Venus yet this autumn? If not, then this evening is a great time to start.

Although Venus has been visible in the evening twilight for several months now, it's been pretty low by the time the sky gets dark. But the situation has been improving rapidly since the beginning of November. By mid-month, Venus is about 15° above the southwestern horizon a half hour after sunset for people at mid-northern latitudes, making it quite easy to see. And it's still above the horizon an hour after that, when the sky is fully dark.

But the evening of Monday, November 17th, is special for observers in the America. That's when Venus passes just a few arcminutes away from Lambda Sagittarii, also known as Kaus Borealis, the star at the top of the Sagittarius "Teapot." Venus is 600 times brighter than Lambda, so the star will be hidden in the planet's glare if you try to view it without optical aid. But any telescope, or even steadily supported binoculars, should show Lambda shining off Venus's edge. If you have a telescope, note also that Venus is distinctly off-round. It's now in its gibbous phase, 74% illuminated.

Next turn your telescope to Jupiter, 13° to Venus's upper left. You'll see that Callisto, the outermost moon, is just about the same distance from Jupiter as Lambda is from Venus. (Click here for our interactive Javascript applet showing the positions of Jupiter's moons.) And Jupiter outshines its moons by just about the same margin that Venus outshines Lambda. So just this one night, you get to see Venus as it would appear if it had a moon like one of Jupiter's.

Click here for more information on observing Venus.