From star showers to eclipses: vibrant celestial shows worth seeing in December

Hardly anyone will remember the outgoing year with a kind word. However, at the very end, he promises to improve, at least in the eyes of astronomers and everyone who likes to watch the starry sky, writes Air force.

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At the end of 2020, the year has prepared several impressive nightly performances that can be watched right from home, without any telescopes or other expensive equipment.

This December we will be treated to a merging of two planets, a magnificent shower of stars and even a total solar eclipse. True, to enjoy the spectacle, you will need one important condition - a clear sky. Well, it’s also useful to protect your eyes during an eclipse, and it would be nice to get accurate information about when and where to look.

So, the program of celestial representations in chronological order:

December 13-14: Geminid meteor shower to be seen worldwide

In recent months, we have already been able to observe different meteor showers, but in December we will just have a royal star rain.

“Meteor showers are typically observed as the Earth passes through the tails of comets,” says austronomer Patricia Skelton from the Royal Observatory Greenwich. “But the Geminid meteor shower has a different origin, it is the tail of asteroid 3200 Phaethon.”

Every year, when our planet is caught in a stream of debris from this asteroid, the night sky is colored with shooting stars, sometimes 150 per hour.

Meteors enter the dense atmosphere at a speed of about 35 km per second and, burning, leave yellow, blue or green streaks in the night sky. The clearer and darker the sky, the better the starfall is visible, but in December it will be so strong that it can be observed even in cities with strong light pollution.

Another good news is that unlike last year, when the meteor shower coincided with the full moon, this time the stars will fall on the new moon and the sky will be noticeably darker.

December 14: total solar eclipse

To be completely accurate, a total eclipse can only be observed in Chile and Argentina, and there is no doubt that if there were no pandemic, many would rush to Patagonia to admire this phenomenon. However, in the age of live broadcasts on the Internet, it will be possible to observe the eclipse anywhere in the world and at any time (if recorded).

If you are so stubborn and fearless (or just live in those parts), then do not forget that looking directly at the sun without protective glasses is an extremely dangerous activity.

Within 24 minutes, the young Moon will pass in front of the solar disk and completely eclipse the daylight for a little over two minutes.

“The Moon is much smaller than the Sun, but it is much closer to the Earth, so it can eclipse the entire solar disk,” recalls astronomer Tanya de Sales, also from the Greenwich Observatory.

During the eclipse, it will darken especially strongly at the southernmost tip of Latin America.

There the sky will be closely watched by representatives of the Mapuche people living in Patagonia.

For them, the Sun symbolizes masculine power, while the Moon symbolizes feminine power, so the moment of their connection means a lot for the natives. Their language even has its own term for a solar eclipse, which translates as “death of the Sun.”

“Solar eclipses have been recorded around the world for almost five millennia,” says Tanya de Sales. “It’s easy to imagine that a total solar eclipse has always served as a bad omen, because the Sun seems to be eaten, and for a few minutes the day becomes night.”

While partial solar eclipses can occur up to five times a year, a complete solar eclipse occurs only once every XNUMX months.

If you like to make long-term plans, then the next total solar eclipse will occur in Antarctica in December 2021, then in Indonesia and Australia in April 2023, then in the USA and Canada in April 2024, in southern Europe and Greenland - in August 2026 and in most of North Africa and the Middle East in August 2027.

December 21: the great conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn

Jupiter and Saturn are some of the best planets to observe as they are bright and easily visible in the night sky.

Great conjunction is the moment when, from the point of view of the observer, the planets converge and begin to shine as a whole. This is exactly what should happen on the night of December 21st.

If you look with the naked eye, the distance between the planets will not exceed a tenth of a degree, but this is only an optical illusion, since in fact the Earth and Jupiter are separated by more than 800 million km, and approximately the same distance remains between Jupiter and Saturn.

And if you have good binoculars, or better yet, a telescope, you might even be able to spot Jupiter's four moons - Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto.

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This moons are also called the Galilean satellites, in honor of the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei, who in 1610 observed them through a telescope invented by him a few months earlier.

A Saturn-Jupiter conjunction occurs once every 19-and-a-half years, but as Patricia Skelton's Royal Observatory colleague Ed Bloomer says, this one will be special because the planets will be at their closest approach since the XNUMXth century - a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence.

“By observing the movement of the planets, people understood the principle of the solar system long before they could go into space,” continues the astronomer. “This celestial mechanics revealed a lot about the physical processes behind it and created a basis that made it possible not only to better understand the cosmos, but also to make many scientific breakthroughs on Earth itself.”

Well, as an additional bonus, the solstice will occur on December 21, the first day of astronomical summer in the Southern Hemisphere and winter in the Northern Hemisphere.

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