Astronomy news for the week starting Friday, December 24, 1999.

The end of the year is now in sight, just one week to go to the year 2000. A Happy Holiday Season to all. As if in response to its earlier exciting events, 1999 celebrates its ending quietly, with little happening except for the steady, dependable flow of the perpetual stars and planets. After our bright high full Moon of last week, the Moon descends through its waning gibbous phase, reaching third quarter on Wednesday, December 29. With the Sun just past the solstice, the third quarter will have moved just beyond the autumnal equinox in Virgo, up and to the right if the first magnitude star Spica and just above the distorted box that makes the starry figure of Corvus the Crow.

Over the past few months, Jupiter has been pulling to the west of Saturn, but with the giant planet now moving easterly again, it will quickly begin to close the gap between the two, as they prepare for their "grand conjunction" next May 31, an event that takes place only once every 20 years. In the early evening Mars can still be seen low in the southwest, while its opposite, Venus, still dominates the morning sky.

Now, however, in the long dark nights of midwinter, is the time to contemplate the grandest of all constellations, great Orion, which rides the sky high to the south before midnight, the mythical hunter outlined by seven bright stars and looking for all the world like what he is supposed to be. Located just off, and to the right of, the faint winter Milky Way, Orion is filled with celestial sights that include the Orion Nebula, which surrounds the central star of his "sword." The Orion Nebula, easily visible in the smallest of binoculars, is a marker for a huge background dark interstellar cloud of gas and dust that literally fills the constellation and in which star formation is furiously taking place, the nebula lit by a set of four recently-made hot young stars. Orion also contains two of the sky's three first magnitude supergiants: reddish Betelgeuse, which marks the hunter's right shoulder, and bluish Rigel, which indicates a right foot that is commonly depicted as planted on the star Cursa, which begins the westerly, then southerly, flow of Eridanus, the River. By far the most notable part of Orion, however, must be his three-star belt, which falls nearly atop the celestial equator, the Hunter half in the sky's northern hemisphere, half in the southern.
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