Caoimhín's Content

Today, we are going to yet again take a look into the far future for some interesting events. We will be looking quite far into the future this time, decades and decades into the future, not just later this year or in a couple of years as we’ve looked at in the most recent couple of future events we’ve looked at.

We’re going to hop all the way to 2067. We’re staying in July, but back a few days to the 15th of July. While we’re moving forward through this time, I will mention a slight correction to a previous piece. I called the Full Moon in July the Strawberry Moon, when that is actually the Full Moon in June. The July Full Moon is the Buck Moon or the Hay Moon. I brought up these names due to the different meanings of “Harvest Moon”, and I guess hay kind of counts as a sort of harvest as well if we’re stretching things a little bit. Once we’re finally forward to the 15th of July, 2067 we can start looking for something interesting. Yet again, I don’t know exactly what I’m looking for other than the fact that I am looking at Mercury. Now in this particular instance, I have been told a little bit more. As you may know, sometimes I am told what constellation to look in, this time I have been told where to look from, but before looking for this event from the suggested location, I just want to have a look and see if we can see anything of note from our location here in Ireland. We’re looking very far into the future here, so of course this isn’t a near prediction for any of us.

Taking a closer look at Mercury, we won’t notice too much. From here in Ireland we’re seeing it with all the glow of sunrise. We will be seeing Mercury in the morning in July 2067. To see more, we will need to remove the extra light by removing the atmosphere. Then, even from Ireland, we can see that Mercury is very close to Neptune. They both happen to be in a really interesting area of the sky, between Orion and Gemini, with several nebulae. We’ll very quickly check those out while we’re here, they’re too interesting to ignore. Neptune is close to the Monkey Head Nebula in Orion. A lot of these nebulae, as I always say, they don’t have names that necessarily reflect what they look like, and the Monkey Head Nebula is no exception. Almost right behind Mercury is an unnamed nebula, or at least it’s unlabeled in Stellarium. It’s given the identifier IC 444, so that’s its number in the IC or the Index Catalogue of Nebulae and Clusters of Stars. It is usually shortened to IC rather than ICoNaCoS, and similarly to Automated Teller Machines being called ATM Machines, the IC is often called the IC catalogue.

If we were somewhere else, such as the North Pole, then we may see this conjunction a little bit differently. Of course it’s midsummer, so it should be summertime at the North Pole, but we will take a look either way. I was told to look at this from the North Pole, so that’s where we’re going to go. In Stellarium, I can’t click on 90 degrees north, about 88 degrees is the furthest that seems to be accessible on the map, but by directly editing the numbers we can get there. We’ll have to change the minutes and seconds of arc to zero, otherwise I think it will roll over and put us down south or possibly further away from north in some other way. That seems to work, so here we are at the North Pole in July. As it’s July, it’s not midsummer, but we are at the North Pole, so the Sun is up for the entire day and night, as one would expect. We’ll stop it there and come back to the 15th, the date in question, so we can zoom in to take a closer look. As we zoom in, even during the day, we can spot Venus. Mercury is a little further away from the Sun than Venus, it’s not coming up as it is so much fainter. We’ll have to take away the atmosphere to see it. From the North Pole, Mercury is in a very close conjunction with Neptune. By moving through time, we can get them to align almost perfectly.

It is a pity, this conjunction between Mercury and Neptune looks really cool. However, due to the best location being the North Pole and northern summer making it daytime, this occultation won’t really be visible to anyone, not at its best at least. We’ll take a closer look so we can see it in a bit more detail. Neptune looks tiny compared to Mercury, despite the fact that Neptune is this huge ice giant and Mercury is this tiny little planet, smaller than some Moons. Here, we are seeing Mercury directly in front of Neptune, and far closer to us, making them seem the wrong sizes. Mercury is small, but Neptune is far away. At the time of occultation, we’re also seeing this really nice, almost Half Mercury as well, which makes it look particularly visually interesting. Running through at real time, once they reach their absolute closest alignment, Mercury will be occulting Neptune almost perfectly. Almost perfectly, but not quite, as a little bit of Neptune is still visible.

It’s not quite a perfect occultation. I thought that maybe if we were maybe a degree or two south then it might line up better. It was worth a shot to test this out, but moving a degree further south allowed more of Neptune to be visible. Each full degree of latitude is actually a pretty big distance, about 111 kilometers. Even though the view from 90 degrees north isn’t perfect, it’s the best that we can get. Which is great, that is of course, still a really nice occultation to get. The only way to move from 90 degrees north is away, is to move further south and as we go further south we’re only seeing less of an occultation. If we go all the way down to 80 degrees, almost half of neptune is visible sticking out from Mercury. This is an almost perfect occultation, as perfect as it can get, as seen from the absolute northernmost point of the world, so that’s Mercury and Neptune.

Now, of course, we’re not going to see that from here in Ireland. We already checked, and we’re not going to see Neptune and Mercury occulting each other because of the glow of sunrise getting in the way. I’ll just return to the default location anyway, to bring us a back to a latitude with some night time in July. They are in the sky when they’re perfectly occulted, or when they were close to perfectly occulted when we were at the North Pole. They are significantly separated from Ireland even at the same moment in time as their maximum occultation. This is going to look better the further north you are, but the further north you are, the more likely it is for the Sun to be too high in the sky. We know that we’re going to have to move to get both of these objects in the sky this close together while the Sun is under the horizon. We want to move further to the west because further to the west, the Sun hasn’t risen yet, that’s our way of sort of moving the Sun backwards. We’ll just hop right over to Newfoundland, and this can be seen to be not far enough, the Sun is still above the horizon. We’ll hop way over to the opposite coast of Canada, and we’re nearly there, the Sun is almost at the horizon. At least, Mercury and Neptune are over the horizon when they’re at their closest, or nearly when they’re at their closest.

While moving across the globe, we’ve moved a little further north as well. As we’re so far north, that means there’s a good chance the Sun will be too bright, barely under the horizon due to the angles involved. It seems like, technically, it’s not too bright to see Mercury at least. As we take a closer look, it should be too bright to see Neptune. Stellarium reveals Neptune to us, but I don’t think that’s going to be very achievable from here on Earth with anything like a normal telescope, there’s too much orange yellow light in the sky, it’s going to be a bit too difficult. If we move closer to the equator, then the angles should improve. We’ll drop from 51 degrees north to 41 degrees north so that we stay in a straight line. Looking at the location map in Stellarium, our position may have seemed to have kicked out to the side, but a straight line down on a flat map isn’t straight on the globe, and vice versa. The way that the map distorts the lines of latitude and longitude, it means that going straight down doesn’t look straight. I know we’re going straight down because I just changed the latitude, not the longitude.

They’re below the horizon from 41 degrees north. They’re below the horizon for this location even though they were above the horizon a little further up. A little further up the effect of northern summer was greater, so we’re going to have to change time if we want to be able to hunt down exactly where we can see this at all. We’ll do this a little bit slower, just so that we can narrow in on the right place. We’ll go down a little less, let’s say to 49 degrees to start with. From there, we can see the Sun’s getting more under the horizon, and Mercury and Neptune, are almost starting to come more vertical in the sky. They are following the curve of the ecliptic, but they are still getting lower in the sky, because of the tilt. Moving south means the early sunrise of summer is less early, and the rising of the planets follows. Even though we are as far around on the Earth in longitude, the time of sunrise is a little bit different because of the tilt, so we’re getting things a little bit earlier a little bit further north.

If we continue moving down, we will reach a point where even if they don’t go under the horizon, they’re going to be extincted by a lot more air masses. That’s going to make it more difficult to see them, even though the glow of sunrise is out of the way, we’ve now given ourselves a new problem which is all of the air masses. Also, closer to the equator, they are that little bit further from a proper occultation as well, with almost all of Neptune visible, just touching Mercury.

This I think is the only video so far, other than looking forward to Halley’s Comet, where we’ve looked into the future and really only looked at one event, this occultation of Neptune and Mercury. I do think it was an interesting chance to show off, with a really good example, how moving around the planet changes your view of the sky, even if it is only a little, even if it is subtle, even though you can ignore it for a lot of more general statements about what’s in the sky, for some specific events you really need to be as exact as possible.

I hope that you enjoyed this piece, if you did then please do like it. If you enjoy this kind of content, then please do subscribe to this website and my YouTube channel if you’d like to see more of me. Thank you very much for watching and hopefully I’ll see you back here next time.