Do you know when the Earth is nearest the sun? It’s January 4th, during what is typically the coldest part of our winter. Seasons are caused by the tilt of the Earth’s rotation axis, not by our distance from the sun.
When the northern hemisphere is tilted away from the sun in late December and January we experience deep winter, while the southern hemisphere is tilted toward the sun and experiencing summer.
iSeeChange is a participatory environmental reporting project led by Julia Kumari Drapkin at KVNF. It generates story topics from users' weather observations, and then taps scientists to explain the whys and hows. This bottom-up crowd-sourcing has foreshadowed some of the nation's biggest recent weather stories—weeks and sometimes even months in advance. Stories sourced from the KVNF community have been reported throughout 2012.
Bark beetles flourish with dry warm weather, which makes 2012 the perfect year for them to take advantage of weakened pine trees. But this year's record setting warm dry weather made for a surprise bumper crop among fruit tree farmers in the North Fork Valley. For iSeeChange and KVNF, Julia Kumari Drapkin takes a look at what changes in this year's growing season boosted the bumper.
Produced by Julia Kumari Drapkin, the iSeeChange project at KVNF is part of Localore, a nationwide production of AIR designed to accelerate transformation and extend public service media to all Americans. KVNF was selected as one of only 10 Localore stations across the country—learn more at airmediaworks.org. Localore is funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the Wyncote Foundation, the John T. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Interactive storytelling partner Zeega co-produced TheAlmanac.org with iSeeChange.
This month marks an anniversary for Western Slope Skies. Our first broadcast was in November of 2011 and Jupiter was the topic. Once again this year, Jupiter will be the brightest object in the night sky. It rises in the east during evening twilight in late November.
Hear about how climate change may be affecting spiders and other insects.
It’s Halloween. Costumes are ready, the candy is bought, and houses are decked out with pumpkins and scary decorations. Some of those decorations include black cats, bats, and spider webs. In the last couple of months, residents on the Western Slope have reported to KVNF’s iSeeChange Project they’ve been seeing more spiders than usual this fall, particularly BLACK WIDOW spiders. Reporter Julia Kumari Drapkin has this story.
During these late October evenings, a bright moon rises in the east as sunlight and twilight fade. The full moon that occurs nearest the first day of fall is known as the Harvest Moon. The next full moon after that is known as the Hunter’s Moon. This year, there is a Hunter’s moon on October 29th.
One summer, when I was growing up, it was common to hear about sightings of the “northern lights” over Grand Mesa. Most of the stories came from high school kids staying out too late on dates. At the time, I scoffed at those stories, but have since learned that that summer happened to be during a particularly active sun cycle.
Albireo is a beautiful double star in the constellation Cygnus, the Swan. If you heard the previous edition of Western Slope Skies, you learned about the Summer Triangle, which includes Deneb, the tail of Cygnus. Albireo is the head of Cygnus and is dimmer than Deneb.
Many stars have Arabic names dating back hundreds of years. For example, Deneb means ‘tail.’ Because of the history involving several languages, the current name Albireo, while appearing to be Arabic, is actually meaningless.
As these early fall days grow shorter, our western slope skies are still dark at 6:00 AM. So, this is a great time to see a celestial spectacle in the morning without having to get up too early. From September 29 through October 7 the brilliant planet, Venus, often called the morning star, will be moving past Regulus, the brightest star in the constellation Leo.
The Summer Triangle dominates the summer sky. It crosses the hazy band of the Milky Way, which is split into two by a large dust cloud near the star Deneb.
The points of the triangle are three of the brightest stars in the summer sky, and each is the brightest star in its own constellation. The brightest is Vega, in Lyra; second is Altair, in Aquila; and third is Deneb, in Cygnus. Even city-dwellers with glowing, light-polluted skies can find the Summer Triangle.
On clear August nights, the Milky Way extends brilliantly from our southern horizon, creating a beautiful vision of stars, reflected light, nebulae, gas and dust. As darkness falls, and you step outside, it first appears as a band of clouds reaching across the sky. These "clouds" are actually stars that cannot be distinguished from one another with the unaided eye. In the southern portion you will be able to pick out constellations like Sagittarius, the Archer, more commonly known as “the teapot”, and Scorpius, the scorpion, pinchers reaching upward, tail trailing.
During the wee morning hours from August 9th to the 14th, you may see tens of meteors per hour streaking across our Western Slope Skies. This is the annual Perseid Meteor Shower, one of the most reliable of about 20 meteor showers that occur during the year. Meteors, sometimes called “shooting stars”, are actually debris from comets or asteroids that have entered earth’s atmosphere at high speed. The Perseid Shower consists of icy and rocky debris from Comet Swift-Tuttle, a 17 mile-wide comet that last passed near Earth in 1992.
On August 5th, the planet Mars will be invaded by an alien spacecraft – a robot probe from planet Earth! On Tuesday evening, NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory, also known as Curiosity, will arrive at Mars.