91.5 KRCC's Looking Up

This week on Looking Up Hal informs us about a beautiful cosmic conjunction in our evening sky. There are things in our Colorado night sky that are really interesting, and there are things that are really beautiful to look at, and there are some things that are both. For the next few days, we get both!

This week on Looking Up Hal speaks of the star Furud, which means "the solitary one". I’m sometimes asked how I pick what objects in the Colorado night sky to talk about. Sometimes I pick things that are beautiful and other times I pick things that are inherently interesting, and sometimes it’s both. And then there is today’s topic, the star Furud.

This week on Looking Up Bruce Bookout sets his sights on the Earth's precession. During a recent 80’s musical flashback, I wondered about a fundamental part of our movement in the universe. It is well understood that our spherical earth spins on its axis providing the basic unit of time defined as a day. That spin establishes an axis of rotation that we further define by having poles on the surface of the earth; in the north and south. And like a top spinning in space, the Earth wobbles, or more

This week on Looking Up we are California Nebula dreamin'. We humans like to find order in chaos, and we have a trait, called Pareidolia, which leads us to try to see patterns in, well, lots of things. That’s why we think we see a man in the Moon, and why some folks thought they saw a face on Mars.

This week Looking Up reaches a milestone episode. For some reason that I’m sure sociologists and anthropologists fully understand, humans tend to like things in nice round numbers, or at least I do. And so, the topic of this week’s episode of Looking Up is, well, Looking Up, as we’ve reached the 250 th edition of our little astronomy show.

The planet Mercury will transit the sun on November 11th, and you're invited to the party! Today I want to invite you to a very special party here at KRCC, coming up a week from today. It’s a very special event that rarely happens, and if you miss this one, you’ll have to wait years to see it again. I’m talking about the transit of the planet Mercury across the face of the Sun!

Bruce Bookout steers this week's episode of Looking Up and guides us to the constellation of Aquarius. Constellations are fickle things. Defining what shape you see and what that means is all derivative of your culture and what that pattern appears to be. We call this pareidolia; the tendency to interpret a vague stimulus as something known to the observer, such as seeing shapes in clouds or seeing faces on Mars.

This week on Looking Up Hal kneels at the throne of Cassiopeia in order to pay homage to the star Ruchbah. Today I’d like to tell you about an interesting star, high in the Colorado night sky right now, the star Ruchbah. Ruchbah is the 4 th brightest star in the northern constellation of Cassiopeia. In Arabic, Ruchbah means “the knee” which makes sense, given that Cassiopeia is supposed to be a queen sitting on her throne.

This week on Looking Up Hal goes to Plan B, which is always good to have if you're heading into outer space. I don’t know about you, but I like to have backups for things in my life. I carry an extra pen, and I like to have a backup plan if I’m going out. So, it seems reasonable that we have a backup north star, or pole star.

This week on Looking Up we go on a planet hunt with Hal. How many of the 8 planets can you see? (sorry, Pluto fans, there are 8). I admit, it is a bit of a trick question. But the month of October is an especially great month for planet watching, in which you can see SIX of the 8 planets, though you’ll need a telescope to see some of them.