The Sky This Month
Perseus
Brian Biggs
Welcome to our night-time sky. Please enjoy
this month’s tidbits of knowledge. We are
lucky to live in a dark-sky area where the
heavens can shine through. I hope you enjoy
the sky and perhaps learn a thing or two.
Happy star gazing!
Don’t Worry About Medusa – Perseus killed her long ago.
Surely you remember Medusa – the girl with snakes for hair
who turned everyone who looked at her into stone. Or was
that an old girlfriend of mine? Perseus was a smart guy. He
shined his shield to a mirror-like finish and using the shield as
a mirror to locate a sleeping Medusa, he cut her head off with
his sword. Perseus was immortalized as a constellation for
his efforts and shows up in August with meteoric glory. The
Perseus meteor shower runs this month from August 10-14,
peaking on August 12th. If you are lucky, you could see about
one meteor per minute. There is a new Moon on the 14th, so
there will be dark skies for seeing lots of shooting stars. Look
just west of overhead after midnight to see the most meteors.
The Demon Star – You are undoubtedly familiar with the
eclipse of the Sun and the Moon where the light intensity dims
and then brightens again. Scientists are using eclipses outside
the solar system to locate planets that orbit distant stars. When
a planet passes a star through our line of sight, the star’s
brightness dims ever so slightly, because the planet blocks some
of the light coming from the star. Highly sensitive instruments
are required to notice this miniscule dimming. In older times,
before there were telescopes, star gazers were able to notice
another stellar eclipse. That star is the second brightest star
in the Perseus constellation. The star’s name is Algol, but it
was also known as the Demon Star since its periodic dimming
was associated with bloody violence. Algol is normally
magnitude 2.1, but dims every 2.87 days to Magnitude 3.4.
(I guess the world was pretty violent back in the day!) This
dimming occurs because of an eclipse that lasts for about 10
hours. However, there is not a planet passing by. Rather, there
are two stars passing by. Algol is actually composed of three
stars. Two small stars, Algol A-B, tightly orbit each other, and
they in turn orbit a larger star, Algol C. When the two dim
stars pass the bright large star, the brightness dims enough for
the human eye to notice.
If you have sufficient patience, you can locate Algol on a star
chart and observe the dimming yourself.
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—Brian Biggs, Amateur Astronomer
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August 2015
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