Steve Meacham
December 9, 2010
MARK these dates in your calendar right now.
June 6, 2012: Transit of Venus, ideally seen from Sydney between 8.16am and 2.44pm.
July 31, 2018: Favourable opposition of Mars - when the red planet will be just 57.6 million kilometres away from the Sydney Tower, the nearest it has been since 2003.
And of course the big one. July 22, 2028: Total eclipse of the Sun. Nick Lomb says for Sydneysiders, ''this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to witness a fully eclipsed Sun from their own backyards'' (cloud permitting).
The curator of astronomy at the Sydney Observatory, Lomb has just launched his 2011 Australian Sky Guide - the 21st edition since he wrote the first version in 1990.
However this year is different. The latest edition, ''featuring new, improved sky maps [and] a new dreamtime astronomy story'', is in colour for the first time and in a wider format, Lomb says, ''making it more readable and attractive than it has been''.
Lomb himself has changed orbit this year. He's landed not on Mars but in Melbourne.
Having retired last December from the Sydney Observatory, Lomb now edits the guide from Victoria where his wife has family. Is the heavenly perspective from Melbourne any different? ''No,'' he says. ''It's possibly more cloudy, though Melbourne people would kill me for saying that. And everything takes place 25 minutes later because it is west of Sydney.''
How does his guide change each year? ''The stars remain the same, always appearing on the same day. But the planets are very different,'' Lomb says.
''There's always new information from the satellites going round Jupiter and Saturn. And a new spacecraft has gone past Mercury. In 2011 there will be two eclipses of the moon. Then in 2012 there's going to be a huge event - the Transit of Venus.'' So what is the celestial highlight of the past 21 years, as seen from Sydney Observatory? Three stand out, he says.
''In 1994, the comet called Shoemaker-Levy 9 - the ninth comet discovered by the American astronomers Carolyn and Eugene Shoemaker and their colleague David Levy - crashed into the planet Jupiter.''
The crash had been predicted and scientists knew the impact would reveal vital information about the giant planet's make-up, particularly as viewed via the Hubble Space Telescope and the Galileo spacecraft.
''We had observation sessions at Sydney Observatory,'' Lomb says. ''But we didn't know if the effect of the collision was going to be visible. The excitement after the first impact, when we saw this dark blob appear on the planet's surface through the small telescope at the observatory, was amazing.'' Another awe-inspiring memory spread over several days in 2003 ''when the planet Mars was the closest it has been to us for 50,000 years''.
''Again, that created huge excitement and it was a pleasure to watch it with the many thousands of people who came to the observatory at night,'' Lomb says. Finally, he says, no one could forget ''the 2004 transit of Venus, the first time it had been visible since 1882 - so something no living person had ever seen before''. ''We were very fortunate with the weather. It was a beautiful, clear afternoon in Sydney, and we had a great view.''
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