A “Celestial summit” this weekend…

(This is a story from Yahoo news I archived here after the original Yahoo link went dead.)

File photo, Crescent moon occulting crescent Venus, October 28, 2006

The brilliant planet Venus arrives at the pinnacle of its current morning apparition next week, rising at, or shortly before 3:20 a.m. local daylight time, its earliest rising time this year or next. That works out to more than two hours before the first sign of dawn begins to light up the eastern sky.

At sunrise, Venus will have climbed nearly 40 degrees above the east-southeast horizon (10 degrees is roughly equal to your clenched fist held at arm’s length. So at sunup, Venus will stand nearly “four fists” up from the horizon).

Meanwhile, a much dimmer planet, Saturn, glowing with a mellow yellow light, rises shortly after Venus. And right in between the two planets shines the blue-white 1st-magnitude star, Regulus, in Leo, the Lion.

Next week, an ever-changing “Celestial Summit Meeting” will greet early risers as Venus interacts with Regulus, Saturn and a lovely crescent Moon in some very interesting celestial configurations.

The eye-catching array kicks off this weekend. On Saturday morning, Oct. 6, Venus, Regulus and Saturn will form a wide triangle with the Moon hovering high above them.

On Sunday morning, Oct. 7, the Moon will be strikingly positioned inside of the Venus-Saturn-Regulus triangle.

Venus will appear to speed to the south of Regulus on Monday, Oct. 9. Then finally, on Sunday, Oct. 14, Venus will pass to the south of Saturn.

Crescent Venus

In telescopes and even steadily-held binoculars, Venus is revealed this week as a wide crescent, but as it pulls ahead of Earth and speeds away in its orbit, its disk will shrink and it will display an apparent half-moon phase as seen in a telescope, soon after the start of November.

Saturn, in contrast appears much dimmer – about 1/120 as bright as Venus – primarily because it’s located about 17 times farther out in space than Venus as seen from here on Earth.

Another factor is that the famous ring system, which can be seen in any telescope magnifying over 30-power, is gradually closing as seen from our Earthly perspective. Their angle of inclination diminishes from 8.8 to 7.4-degrees during October. By the summer of 2009, the rings will appear edge-on to us and will be difficult, if not impossible to see, even in large telescopes.

Heart of Leo

As for Regulus, it marks the heart of Leo, a star pattern whose origins trace back to the earliest Mideastern peoples, especially those of the Tigris and Euphrates area. Among virtually all civilizations there, this constellation was accorded king-of-the-beasts status and regal symbolism.

And although it shines only 1/229th as bright as Venus and ranks at the bottom on the list of the 21 brightest stars, we know today that Regulus is also regal in an astrophysical sense. It’s a highly luminous blue-white star, and just as earthly kings were uncommon personages among the human population, a star like Regulus is also uncommon among the stellar population. Its spectral class is B7; one of the very small minority of those born with enough mass to occupy an exalted station near the top of the main sequence of star classification.

And lastly, its distance of 78 light-years means the light you see arriving from Regulus now started on its journey to Earth right around the time of the great stock market crash in 1929.

(Joe Rao serves as an instructor and guest lecturer at New York’s Hayden Planetarium. He writes about astronomy for The New York Times and other publications, and he is also an on-camera meteorologist for News 12 Westchester, New York.)

File Photo: Bright Star Regulus near the Leo 1 Dwarf Galaxy

From the Wikipedia article on Regulus:

Regulus (α Leo / α Leonis / Alpha Leonis) is the brightest star in the constellation Leo and one of the brightest stars in the nighttime sky. Regulus is approximately 77.5 light years from Earth’s Solar System. Regulus is considered the last first magnitude star in the sky because the next brightest star, Adhara, has a magnitude of 1.50, officially making it a second magnitude star. Of the brightest stars in the sky, Regulus is closest to the ecliptic, and is regularly occulted by the Moon…

Regulus is Latin for “prince” or “little king.” The Greek variant of Basiliscus is also used. It is further known as Qalb Al Asad, from Arabic قلب الأسد qalb[u] al-´asad, meaning “the heart of the lion.” This phrase is sometimes approximated as Kabelaced, or translated into Latin as Cor Leonis. In Hindu astronomy, Regulus corresponds to the Nakshatra Magha. It’s known as 轩辕十四 (the Fourteenth Star of Xuanyuan) in Chinese. Xuanyuan is the name of Yellow Emperor.

Map of the constellatioon Leo:

Where Are Burma’s Monks?

By KEVIN DOYLE Fri Oct 12

For much of late September, the road to the eastern gateway of Rangoon’s revered Shwedagon pagoda was a sea of maroon and saffron robes, as hundreds of Buddhist monks gathered to march in protest against Burma’s military government.

Now, two weeks after the junta brutally cracked down on the pro-democracy demonstrations, the small monasteries that line both sides of the road are mostly locked and empty, while wooden barricades and bales of rusted barbed wire that police used to seal off Shwedagon are stacked on the pavement. Police and soldiers armed with automatic weapons sit on stools outside the mostly silent monasteries. More are stationed at the entrance of the hilltop temple, the spiritual center of Burmese Buddhism. As many as a thousand monks lived and studied at these small monasteries in the shadow of Shwedagon. But troops now far outnumber the handful of monks that are still seen at Shwedagon and the downtown Sule pagoda, another focal point of the pro-democracy protests.

When the military and police moved to crush the demonstrators, they first went after the monks. Under cover of darkness, say several sources who did not want their names used, doors of monasteries were kicked in and the monks around Shwedagon, including some nuns, were bundled onto trucks and taken away. When asked where the monks had gone, one 30-year-old man who was at Shwedagon in the early days of the protests puts his wrists together in the sign of locked handcuffs. According to Burma’s state-run paper, The New Light of Myanmar, raids on 18 monasteries netted the authorities some 513 monks, one novice, 167 men and 30 women. The monks were summarily defrocked and interrogated and those found to be innocent were re-ordained and sent back to their monasteries. While the paper said that only 118 monks and laymen were still in custody, Rangoon’s pagodas remain empty and quiet; many say the figures are much higher than the state has reported. One Rangoon resident told me that the remaining prisoners will probably be released once the situation calms down, which he believed would be at least a couple of months.

Many who eluded the authorities have fled the city for the relative safety of their home villages, where they remain, still fearful of arrest for their roles in the protests. One man who helped shelter a young monk who had suffered a deep gash on the head while escaping from a monastery raid told me the monk had later fled for the provinces. He believes the attack on the clergy of this devoted Buddhist nation and the imprisonment of monks will come back to haunt the junta. “We believe that if you do good, you receive good,” he says. “If you do bad things you receive bad things. This will be the same for the military.”

To head off such an outcome, the generals are waging a propaganda war to win back Burmese hearts and minds. Burma’s state-run television broadcast footage over the weekend of military officers and their wives presenting gifts of rice and cash to an assembly of forlorn-looking, elderly Buddhist patriarchs in Rangoon. On Sunday, The New Light of Myanmar assured readers that the military was only targeting “bogus” monks and demonstration leaders with its purges. “Although authorities and security members pay respects to the real monks, they had to take action against those bogus monks trying to tarnish the image of the Sasana [religion],” the paper announced.

But many, even some members of Burma’s own oppressive security forces, remain unconvinced. On Monday evening, a 26-year-old member of the plainclothes security apparatus knelt to pay a final homage to the Buddha at Shwedagon before fleeing for the Thai border. The officer had taken part in the nighttime roundup of monks, and it still weighed heavily on his conscience. “I have had enough. I have to leave,” he said as he rose from his knees and started his journey to the border. Still, the nightly roundup of suspects continues under the darkness of a 10 p.m. curfew. One source with friends in the security forces says police are still trying to put names to faces on video footage of those who took part in the demonstrations. Police apparently carried out a nighttime arrest on Monday night near the guesthouse where I stayed, according to the manager, who whispered that to me after watching a story about Burma on the BBC the following morning.

As I traveled to the airport on Tuesday I noticed two elderly Buddhist nuns accepting alms at a large house on the outskirts of the city, the first adult clergy members I had seen doing this all week. But my line of sight was momentarily blocked by an image that better sums up a week in Rangoon in the aftermath of the pro-democracy protests. A fast-moving police wagon passed the two nuns; the arms of the detainees inside protruded through gaps in two iron grills along the vehicle’s side.

For just a moment I could see the frightened faces of the prisoners inside: Dozens of young teenagers, boys and girls wearing brightly-colored T-shirts, packed cheek-to-cheek, their outstretched arms and hands grasping at the world passing by outside.