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Epilogue for Star Charts

With this Star Chart, tenth in the series starting from August 2001, we come to the end of our brief journey through the sky in which we aimed at familiarising you with some well-known ‘skymarks’ – Scorpius, Leo, Southern Cross, Orion, Sagittarius, Saptharshi Mandala, Pegasus, ... . We started off with Scorpius /Sagittarius in August 2001 and if around 9 pm you look at the south-east corner of the sky currently you will be able to see Scorpius rising. You will also notice that Mars which was in Scorpius/Ophicus in August 2001 is now in Taurus after travelling through Sagittarius, Capricorn, Aquarius, Pisces and Aries. It also executed a retrograde motion during this period. It would be interesting to keep a record of the positions of the currently visible planets, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and Venus and calculate the periods of their revolutions around the sun. There are many sites in the Internet with the help of which one can keep track of interesting astronomical happenings like the appearence of comets, positions planets, etc. The following website contains a very useful sky simulator which will give you the sky chart at any desired time /location: http://www.fourmilab.com/yoursky/ This site also contains many interesting links. You may also be interested in knowing about the identification of the twenty-seven stars according to the Indian Calendar. For example the following have been fairly well accepted: Ashvini (Hamal in Aries), Rohini (Aldebaran in Taurus), Jyestha (Antares in Scorpius), Chitra (Spica in Virgo), etc. I found the following interesting article on the web: http://www.geocities.com/vijayabalak/stars/nakshathra.html. I would also recommend the book Hello Stars, Usha Srinivasan, published by Vigyan Prasar, C-24, Qutab Institutional Area, New Delhi 110 016.

End of April and the first half of May 2002 all the five visible planets will be simultaneously visible in the early evening sky: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Saturn and Jupiter in that order from the western horizon. For example between May 12 -15 around 7 pm. you should be able to see this glorious sight with also few days old new-moon nearby.

Resonance wishes you many, many years of happy star gazing!

 

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