The Celestial Sphere

by Matthew Johnson

Sixty years ago, in 1961, the Russian Yuri Gagarin and the American Alan Shepard rocketed into space, beginning a competition between their two nations and an adventure in space that continues today.

Gagarin was born in 1934 in the Russian village of Klushino, a peasant village that suffered severely in World War II. As a child, he enjoyed making toy gliders with his father. He later worked in a foundry before joining the Soviet air force, where he flew MiG-15 fighters out of Murmansk. His love of aviation ultimately lead to his being chosen for cosmonaut training. His modest background was important to Russia, but his amazing memory, superior reflexes and mathematical ability helped him win selection as the world’s first space traveler.

On April 12, 1961, Gagarin was driven to Baikonur launch pad on the Central Asian steppe, now part of Kazakhstan. He sat in a spherical cabin within the capsule inside a Vostok 1 rocket. At 9:07 a.m., the rocket blasted off, with Gagarin crying “Poyekhali” (Let’s go!). He reached an altitude of 203 miles above the Earth, breaking all previous altitude records.

About two and a half hours later, the Vostok 1 reentered the Earth’s atmosphere, and Gagarin parachuted to the ground in Engels, Russia, just short of completing a complete orbit of the Earth. 

Following the 1957 Russian Sputnik program of launched satellites, the United States had responded by starting its own Project Mercury, which aimed to launch a man into orbit. Alan Shepard was chosen as one of the original Mercury Seven astronauts in 1959. And in 1961, the year of Gagarin’s successful orbit, Shepard learned that he would be the first American in space.

In fact, America might have beaten the Soviets to space had it not been for a series of setbacks that delayed Shepard’s flight, originally scheduled for a liftoff in March, one month before Gagarin’s.

On May 5, 1961, Shepard sat in his cabin capsule Freedom-7 atop a 83-foot-tall Redstone rocket at Cape Canaveral, Fla. This rocket was a descendant of Wernher von Braun’s V-2 rocket, the Nazi missile that devastated vast areas of London during World II. There were more than three hours of delays before the flight was launched, and Shepard is quoted as saying, “Why don’t you fix your little problem and light this candle?”

Shepard’s flight did not achieve orbit, like Gagarin’s had, but carried him 116 miles into space before it landed in the Atlantic Ocean a few miles north of the Bahamas. The early years of American space flight is wonderfully documented in the book “The Right Stuff,” by Tom Wolfe.

Americans would eventually gain the advantage and land on the moon ahead of the Russians. Shepard continued in the space program and would walk on the moon in February 1971, while Gagarin’s career ended in tragedy when he died in the crash of a MiG-15 training jet in March 1968. 

Planets:

Mercury and Mars are too close to the sun to view this month. Venus can be seen a half-hour after sunset and is visible for hours in the southern sky. Jupiter and Saturn can be viewed all month just after sunset and are visible in the constellation Capricorn rising early in the east, trekking across the southern celestial sphere and setting in the west late at night. Jupiter is brighter and to the left of Saturn.

Uranus is visible in small telescopes and larger binoculars in the constellation Aries. It is best viewed on the night of Nov. 4, southwest of the Pleiades cluster. It is blue-green in color and a joy to locate. Uranus is 1.75 billion miles away from Earth.

Meteor showers:

The annual Leonid meteor shower, which peaks on the night of Nov. 17, is unfortunately affected by the light of the large waxing gibbous moon. Only the brightest meteors will be visible. The shower is active from Nov. 6 to 30. Look toward the constellation of Leo for the radiant of the shower. The shower is caused by the Earth colliding with the orbital path of the debris left from Comet-55P/Tempel-Tuttle.

Moon phases:

Nov. 4: New moon (no visible moon). The best time of the month to observe faint objects such as distant galaxies. 

Nov. 11: First quarter (right half of moon illuminated). Moon is waxing.

Nov. 19: Full moon, lunar eclipse.

Nov. 27: Last quarter (left half of the moon illuminated). Moon is waning.

November’s full moon is often referred to as the Beaver Moon or the Frost Moon. There is debate about the origins of the name Beaver Moon. Some say that it came from Native Americans setting traps, or from the heavy activity of beavers building their winter dams. 

There is a lunar eclipse the night of the full moon, Nov. 19. The sun, Earth and moon will line up, and the Earth will cast its shadow over the full moon. The moon will completely enter the Earth’s penumbra and slightly darken from 1:02 to 2:18 a.m. The moon enters into Earth’s umbra, its darkest shadow upon the moon, from 2:18 to 5:46 a.m., with the greatest eclipse manifesting at 4:02 a.m., when 97 percent of the moon will be completely in the Earth’s umbra. The moon takes on a beautiful reddish aspect within the umbra, caused by refraction from the Earth’s atmosphere. At maximum eclipse, the reddish moon will be just south of the glorious Pleiades star cluster in the constellation Taurus. This would make a wonderful photograph.