There won’t be any major celestial events in the coming year, but there will be a few “Highlights” But at least that’s what the head of the Vienna Working Group for Astronomy (WAA), Alexander Pikhard, knows. Things could get exciting in the fall if the comet moves “Tsuchinshan ATLAS” developed into a tail star visible to the naked eye. However, it is not yet possible to say exactly how bright it will actually be. As things stand today, it will pass Earth at a distance of 70 million kilometers on October 13, 2024. It will make its closest approach to the sun (perihelion) on September 28, 2024, around this date it will become clear how well the tail star will be visible.
2024 is a leap year
In 2024 – by the way, a leap year with 366 days, so February has 29 and not just 28 days – there will be four eclipses, of which only one is of interest to Austria: On September 18th, a partial lunar eclipse can be observed early in the morning. At the peak at 4:44 a.m., however, only nine percent of the moon’s disk is in the Earth’s umbra. The partial penumbral lunar eclipse on March 25th is almost impossible to see in this country. The total solar eclipse of April 8th and the annular solar eclipse of October 2nd cannot be seen from Central Europe. You can always see shooting stars when the night sky is clear, but it is particularly worth looking at the sky when the Earth crosses a comet’s orbit on its orbit around the sun. Swarms of shooting stars appear regularly. Their intensity varies from year to year. Whether many shooting stars can be seen also depends on the prevailing moon phase – which will not be particularly favorable in 2024. The most pleasant meteor shower of the season to observe is that of the Perseids, which reaches its maximum on August 13, 2024, but also promises many shooting stars in the days before and after.
By the way, Alexander Pikhard promises for the year after next “Hammer time in the sky”. In 2025 we would have a partial solar eclipse and two total lunar eclipses.
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