The week of September 19-25 takes us from Lunar Day 24 to New Moon. This week we will highlight the moon crater Schickard, viewable early Tuesday and Wednesday mornings, and Jupiter and Saturn, viewable throughout the week.
Schickard: [SW/P4] When you look at Schickard, you should immediately notice something unusual: Schickard’s floor has stripes! It is dark on both the north and south ends, but there is a wide central stripe of lighter material. You are looking at terrain that is made up of two different chemical compositions and is a result of a combination of lighter highland material that was blown in from the formation of the Mare Orientale basin and dark basaltic material (molten lava that welled up from underneath) on the northern and southern portions of Schickard.
OF ADDITIONAL INTEREST IN SPACE
The autumnal equinox is on Thursday, when day and night are of approximately equal length (hence the term equinox, “equal night.”)
On September 14, 2020, astronomers reported identifying potential life on Venus. Astronomers looked at Venus’s atmosphere and cloud structures with the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) in Hawaii and the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) observatory in Chile. They found phosphine, a poisonous gas they determined would be produced by life on a rocky planet like Venus.
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It is highly recommended that you get a copy of Sky and Telescope’s Field Map of the Moon, the very finest Moon map available for use at the telescope. It is available for $10.95 at www.skyandtelescope.com and on Amazon. All features mentioned in this blog will be keyed to the grid on the Field Map and will look like this: Plato: [NW/D9]
Credits:
Courtesy of Gray Photography of Corpus Christi, Texas
Lunar photos: NASA / USGS / BMDO / LROC / ASU / DLR / LOLA / Moon Globe. Used by permission
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