2020: The Year the Universe Got a Little Closer

To any casual observer, 2020 has been an unprecedented year insofar as awfulness is concerned and with regards to the sheer scale and multitude of compound tragedies and crises that have befallen humanity in general, and specific countries in particular. This year is unsurpassed in living memory. My country, Lebanon, has had to endure more tragedies than most. But, since the start of the year, I have turned my eyes heavenward to the velvet pitch blackness of the clear skies far away from city lights to observe the only reassuring predictable constant in our turbulent lives: the universe and the amazing show it puts on nightly. And it has been a uniquely bountiful year for astronomers, professional and amateur, as well as for astrophotographers and casual stargazers. 

Jupiter


In the summer, we saw C/2020 F3, otherwise known as Comet Neowise, grace the northwestern skies just above the horizon. It was the brightest comet in the northern hemisphere since Hale-Bopp in 1997. It could be seen even by people living in city centers and around areas with serious light pollution. Also in late summer and autumn, we saw Mars, our closest doppelganger planet, appear at its biggest and brightest follow the line of the ecliptic nightly, traversing the spine of night from east to west. Jupiter and Saturn dominated the summer sky as their orbits brought them closest to Earth in July and they were the brightest objects in the night sky. Even with my modest six-inch reflector and a very basic planetary camera, and without calibration or tracking to facilitate long exposure shots, the few images I took of the planets were reasonably impressive for an amateur of amateurs I consider myself to be. 


Mars

Our Moon


In fact, the year was chockfull of celestial events, including two solar eclipses and two super moons, and all crowned with the celestial event of the millennia in the closing days of the year, a once-in-860-year event, the great conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn. The planets appear in the south-western sky as two star-like objects very close to each other, a bright star and a dimmer one on top. The planets were closest to one another from our Earthly perspective on December 21, but they will remain visible just above the horizon, at or just after sunset up until New Years, after which the planets will appear too low in the horizon to be clearly visible.  



The conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn


While these events are of little scientific significance to “serious” astronomers with ‘PhD’ after their names, they have helped distract humans on our benighted planet from the anxiety causing events that define our every waking moment. They remind us that there is something greater than human kind’s petty problems, that the universe is a wonderful and beautiful place worth exploring, even if as yet most of us can’t travel beyond the gravitational prison of our home planet. Astronomy is the entry level science for most lay people, especially the young and easily bored, you could say it’s a glamorous science, the frontline cadre of bespectacled math and physics geniuses who will likely be the first to make first contact with any aliens, whether they arrive in a spaceship as little green men or aboard an asteroid fragment as single cell organisms. 


Saturn


It is so important right now that we keep interest in the sciences top of mind for governments, for education authorities and for the young, despite the crippling chaos gripping the global system. Science education is the future for any society seriously planning to reemerge from this depression as a productive and useful member of the global community. Through science innovation and applied technologies countries generate proprietary technologies that are used to produce innovative products and services that will be needed by other countries. This is how countries become more productive and less consumptive. So, if the night sky stirs the imagination of the next generation of science geniuses, then astronomy has done its job.

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