Friday May 3rd Saturn 0.8- of a degree left of the Moon this morning
Sunday May 5th – Eta Aquaria Meteor Shower ZHR=50
Monday May 6th – Mercury and Moon ~ 4-degrees
Tuesday May 7th – New Moon
Week of May 5th to 11th – Saturn Mars and Mercury line up in the morning sky this week. Best on Wed the 8th.
May 9th – Mercury at Greatest Elongation in the morning sky.
May 15th – First Quarter Moon
May 16th – Moon and Juno just over a degree apart and Ceres stationary, so there’s some asteroids to hunt down.
May 16th – Lunar Straight Wall Visible
May 17th – Pallas at opposition
2 Pallas is the third-largest asteroid in our Solar System. It was the second asteroid discovered, after Ceres, and is a likely remnant protoplanet. Like Ceres, it is a carbonaceous chondrite, but doesn’t have the watery interior like Ceres.
During the planetary formation of the Solar System, many objects grew in size through the accretion process to approximately the size of Pallas. Most of these protoplanets were absorbed into other planets. Pallas, Vesta and Ceres are the remaining bodies from this early stage of planetary formation to survive within the orbit of Neptune.
Discovered by the German astronomer Heinrich Wilhelm Matthäus Olbers on 28 March 1802, it was considered to be a planet, along with the other asteroids of the time. The discovery of many more asteroids after 1845 eventually led to the separate listing of “minor” planets from “major” planets, and the realisation in the 1950s that these small bodies did not form in the same way as the larger planets.
May 18th – Internationally astronomy day – good work guys picking an 80% lunar phase
May 23rd – Full Moon
May 23/24 – I see for someplace there might be an occultation but in the UK the Moon Occults M4
May 27th – Ceres about a degree North of the Moon
May 30th – Last Quarter Moon
The Actual Astronomy Podcast 