Its “The time of the year” again

Exactly a couple of years back I posted http://neilghosh.com/2008/11/15/significance-of-birthday/ saying about the reason why Birthdays does not really have anything to to your behavior.

Recently I spotted two very important objects in the sky with my new Celestron 15x70 Binoculars. Even though these are supposed to be visible in naked eye in a very dark sky I had to use Binoculars just to avoid urban glare/pollution of Hi-Tech City  Hyderabad. Presence half moon also added to the hindrance.

TIP: If you can find thus pentagon of the constellation of Pisces  and then locate the trapizium of stars situated at the south east of it.
Uranus at the mid way now a days .Also Jupiter is nearby .

First object was relatively very close to earth among all object we see in sky.It was +5.79 magnitude planet Uranus, the penultimate planet from the Sun about 20 astronomical units away from earth.1 AU is the distance between the Earth and the Sun .It was little difficult to spot in the sky without a map.I used the software Cartes du Ciel in the night mode (red screen ) to locate Uranus. Jupiter was close to it which was dominating the sky after moon.Using the chart I could sport the greenish looking planet easily.

 

Now It was turn for Andromeda  Galaxy M31.This was also very easy to spot as it is situated between the Andromeda constellation and Cassiopeia's head. Advantages of binoculars is that you can see the neighboring starts together in the same view so that you can locate the target relative to them. Telescopes cover so little space in sky at a time that some times it is not suitable for spotting object without detail guide.The Galaxy was of magnitude +3.50 and could have been seen easily with naked eyes in very dark sky.This is the only object outside our own galaxy (Milky way ) that we can see via naked eyes. This is also our neighboring galaxy 2.5 million light years away.Basically we see a snapshot of this galaxy which was taken  2.5 million years ago from now.

Also I managed to see Jupiter’s Moons Callisto , Europa , Ganymede through the binoculars , Interestingly the JAVA IDE Eclipse’s versions are named after them .