The Moon takes a month or 'Moonth' as it used to be described hundreds of years ago to go once around the Earth. If we take the old word moonth we get the modern day word month.
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The full moon in February which will be on February1st this year is called the Snow Moon. This is the month when we are most likely to see snow and to have the coldest weather of the year.
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Alfred Compton a Publican from Barnsbury Terrace in London, I don’t know what pub he ran ordered a 3.75 inch telescope from Thomas Cooke & Sons in 1864. The instrument had a focal length of 4 feet.
This particular instrument was made in York but sent down to
the Cooke & Sons shop in Southampton Street London to be collected
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Academy Newspaper Saturday 16th May 1874
Mr. Brett, the well-known artist, has, from a consideration
of the shadows. cast by certain oval-shaped white markings on Jupiter, given
reason to conclude that we do not see the true body of the planet, but only a
semi-transparent stratum of vapour or liquid. In connexion with this idea, we must remember that Jupiter is,
on the whole, very little more dense
than water, so that there seems a
strong probability that a considerable portion of its visible diameter
is composed of vapour.
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On Friday 30th January if you look to the southeast, you will see a spectacular rectangular shape of four objects.
The Moon, Jupiter the largest planet in the solar system and the two brightest stars in the constellation of Gemini the twins, Castor and Pollux form this rectangle. You can see this as soon as it gets dark.
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It is always difficult to know where to start a story but here we will begin around 35 million years ago when the Earth was hit by a meteorite, this did not cause the death of the dinosaurs they had been wiped out earlier around 66 million years ago when a much larger meteorite struck the Earth, that meteorite was about 9 miles wide and struck near the Yucatan peninsula in Mexica and produced a crater about 110 miles in diameter.
The meteorite we are talking about was smaller than the one
that killed the dinosaurs but it is very important to our story. This is because it is not only the first
impact crater identified in or near Britain, but it’s a Yorkshire meteorite
crater!
The meteorite would have been travelling at about 25 miles
per second when it struck the Earth, and was about 120 metres across and
weighed around 2 million tons, it crashed into what is now the North Sea about
60 miles off the Yorkshire coast, this I think is close enough to be classified
as Yorkshire!
This impact would have devastated the area around what is now Britain, northern Europe and Scandinavia. The crater which is called the Silver Pit Crater is about 1.5 miles wide. At the time that the meteorite struck this area was still under about 150 metres of water, the crater is now located about 0.5 miles under the sea bed covered by shale and sand. The name Silver pit comes from a long valley called the Silver Pit Valley which is in the bed of the North Sea.
It was discovered in 2002 by a company looking for new oil
and gas fields. While looking for these resources the oil and gas companies
produce three-dimensional maps which tell them whether or not it is worth
drilling in the area. It was during the course of this routine exploration that
the data collected indicated that there was a crater below the sea bed in the
North Sea. The 3D map shows a
spectacular set or rings sweeping out around the crater.
There are suggestions that the ring like structures of the crater that have been discovered are rare on craters discovered on Earth, however they do appear to be similar to those that are seen on Europa and Calisto two of the large icy moons that orbit Jupiter. These are moons that scientists speculate could be places where life might exist in our solar system. Europa and Calisto are two of the four large moons that were discovered by Galileo back in 1609 when he first used his telescope to look at the night sky. The other two moons he discovered are Io and Ganymede.
And if we were able to look at the Earth around 35 million
years ago we would see a very different world, the Earth was in the middle of
the Eocene period, the term Eocene comes from the ancient Greek meaning the
‘dawn of modern fauna’ which appeared during the period. It was then that
animals that we might recognise today started to appear such as hoofed animals
and the first small horse like animal.
It was also at this time that huge mammals such as Brontotherium and
Embolotherium roamed the Earth. These looked like massive Rhino type of animals
and no doubt were among the prey of the largest land carnivore mammal ever to
have lived on Earth the Andrewsarchus.
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Join me, Martin Lunn MBE every Monday evening from 7.00 pm-9.00 pm on the award-winning Astronomy Show on Drystone Radio, probably the only regular astronomy show on any radio station in the country.
I will take my weekly look at the night sky and look at all
the latest news in astronomy. There will be the astronomical anniversaries this
week plus the latest news from the astronomical societies in the north of
England.
The Astronomy Show every Monday evening only on Drystone Radio live online at www.drystoneradio.com DAB radio in Bradford and East Lancashire, or 102 and 103.5 FM and can also be heard later on the Drystone Radio Podcast.
Academy Newspaper Saturday 11th April 1874
A VALUABLE series of drawings of Jupiter made with the
three-feet reflector of Lord Rosse’s observatory has been chromo-lithographed,
and the impression presented with explanatory notes by Lord Rosse to the Royal
Astronomical Society for publication in the next number of the Monthly Notices.
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