The celestial teapot is steaming
Right around 9 p.m., when evening twilight has faded over Butler, cast your eyes toward the low southern sky, and without too much difficulty, you'll see a teapot hanging diagonally by its handle.
A distinct triangle of three bright stars makes up the spout on the lower right side, and a trapezoid of four stars on the upper left makes up the handle. A single star marks the top of the teapot between and above the handle and the pot.
This celestial teapot is more formally known as Sagittarius the Archer. By the way, I love the star's name on the upper left corner of the handle. It's Nunki, pronounced nun-key. It's a star 228 light years, or 1300 trillion miles away. If you put Nunki side by side with our sun, it would be over 3000 times brighter than our sun, with over four times the diameter of our home star.
According to Greek and Roman lore, the constellation Sagittarius is supposed to outline a half-man-half horse flinging an arrow to the west. With a bit of imagination, you can see that. The spout stars outline the bow, with the arrow tip at the tip of the spout. The four stars of the handle would be the cocked elbow of the shooter.
The top of the teapot would be his head. Seeing Sagittarius as a teapot is so much easier though and a lot more fun as far as I'm concerned. The teapot nickname is relatively new to stargazing, evolving in the last century.
Suppose you're lucky enough to stargaze at Sagittarius, or "the teapot," in the glorious dark skies of the countryside. In that case, you'll easily see a band of light arching overhead, stretching from the northern horizon to the southern horizon.
The famous Milky Way band is the thickest part of our home galaxy. You cannot help but notice that the Milky Way band runs into Sagittarius.
As a matter of fact, the center of our Milky Way Galaxy is right in the direction of the little teapot. Downtown Milky Way would appear a lot brighter in our sky, but there's a great deal of obscuring interstellar gas and dust in the way. Some astronomers believe that if it weren't for all that gas and dust, the part of the sky around Sagittarius would be brighter than the full moon.
Nonetheless, that part of the Milky Way band around Sagittarius is still fairly bright and loaded with fun stuff. It's a bustling part of the sky, and even with a small telescope or binoculars, you'll find many star clusters and nebulae. Some of the better ones include the Eagle Nebula (M16), the Swan Nebula (M17), and the Trifid Nebula (M20). The M numbers are Messier catalog numbers. The Messier catalog comprises most of the brighter clusters, nebula, and galaxies available in the night sky.
Look above the teapot's spout; it resembles a puff of steam. That puff is astronomically known as M8 but is better known as the Lagoon Nebula, a bright emission nebula. It's one of the larger and brighter star factories we can see in the sky, and you don't need a souped-up telescope to check it out. This massive cloud of hydrogen is the raw material to mass-manufacture stars. The Lagoon is over 4,000 light-years away and roughly 100x50 light-years in diameter. Just one light-year equals close to six trillion miles.
Stars form when denser pockets of hydrogen gas within the nebula gravitationally collapse into a dense ball of gas, causing the temperatures in the core of these condensed balls to rise millions of degrees. When these beyond-incredible temperatures are reached, the highly complicated process of nuclear fusion begins, and the ball of gas lights up into a star. Even with a small telescope, you can see many new young single stars, clusters of stars, and more stars on the way in the Lagoon. These new young stars are very hot and huge producers of ultraviolet radiation. All this radiation energizes the surrounding hydrogen gas and causes it to glow like a fluorescent light.
Very early Sunday, Monday and Tuesday morning, about an hour before sunrise, see if you can spot Comet Nishimura. It’s far from spectacular though; you’ll probably need binoculars to see it.
You’ll need to have a super clear view of the east-northeast horizon. Around 5:45 a.m., look for a fuzzy “star” with a tail pointing to the upper left. It’ll certainly be a challenge spotting it with the building morning twilight but give it a try.
You can use the very bright planet Venus to find it. Comet Nishimura will be about 25 to 30 degrees to the lower left of Venus. That number of degrees is slightly less than the three widths of your fist held at arm’s length.
The waning crescent moon will also be hanging around that part of the sky. Make sure you stop looking for the comet after 6:15 a.m. or so because you don’t want to take a chance of catching the sun in your binoculars. You could greatly damage your eyes or worse!
Mike Lynch is an amateur astronomer and retired broadcast meteorologist for WCCO Radio in Minneapolis/St. Paul. He is the author of "Stars: a Month by Month Tour of the Constellations," published by Adventure Publications and available at bookstores and adventurepublications.net. Contact him at mikewlynch@comcast.net.
