12/28/2020 – Ephemeris – Some astronomical events of 2020

This is Ephemeris for Monday, December 28th. Today the Sun will be up for 8 hours and 50 minutes, setting at 5:09, and it will rise tomorrow at 8:19. The Moon, 1 day before full, will set at 8:01 tomorrow morning.

Let’s look at some astronomical and space news for this past year. A year ago the bright red star in the constellation Orion Betelgeuse underwent an unprecedented amount of dimming. It had pretty much recovered its brightness since. The best idea was that it ejected a cloud of dust that obscured part of the star from us. NASA’s Commercial Crew program came through this year with the successful launching of two crews to the International Space Station aboard the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and Crew Dragon Capsule. Boeing stood down this year after the failure of their uncrewed Starliner capsule to reach the space station last December. They will try another uncrewed attempt in a few months. I’ll have more tomorrow.

The event times given are for the Traverse City/Interlochen area of Michigan. They may be different for your location.

Addendum

Orion’s named stars including the belt stars. Betelgeuse is the bright red in the upper left. Created using Stellarium.

This comparison image shows the star Betelgeuse before and after its unprecedented dimming. The observations, taken with the SPHERE instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope in January and December 2019, show how much the star has faded and how its apparent shape has changed. Betelgeuse is one of the few stars close and large enough to be able to image its disk. Credit: ESO/M. Montargès et al.

Astronauts Shannon Walker, Victor Glover, and Mike Hopkins, and astronaut Soichi Noguchi inside the Crew Dragon capsule. Credit: SpaceX.

SpaceX Crew-1 Dragon capsule docking with the International Space Station. Credit: NASA