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We have no scheduled bright comets to view this year as we did in the past two years. Comet Tempel-Tuttle, the faint comet with a 33-year period that is responsible for the Leonid meteor shower in November, visits the inner solar system this year. This may result in a meteor "storm" such as the one seen after the comet visited the inner solar system in 1966. Then, observers in the western U.S. reported up to 200 meteors per second. The peak of the shower is predicted on Nov. 17 in a moonless sky, so if skies are clear, plan to watch for this shower. The other meteor shower we note annually is the Perseid shower. A waning gibbous moon will interfere with viewing this year's Perseids in the early morning hours of Aug. 12, their predicted peak.
Two solar eclipses and three penumbral lunar eclipses take place this year. The first of these five is a total solar eclipse on Feb. 26. Its path of totality crosses northern Columbia, the Netherland Antilles islands of Aruba, Bonaire, and Curacao, the Caribbean Sea, and some of the Leeward Isands. In Morgantown we shall have the opportunity to see about 8% of Sun's disc obscured by Moon at 1:09 p.m. if skies are clear. The first penumbral eclipse takes place on March 12. Moon stays in the outer portion of Earth's shadow, the penumbra, where sunlight is not completely blocked by Earth. It doesn't enter the dark, inner shadow called the umbra. At maximum eclipse Moon's southern limb will be about 11 arc seconds from the umbra, so it may be possible to see subtle shading from the southern to northern edge of Moon about 11:20 p.m.
The third eclipse is another penumbral lunar eclipse on Aug. 7, but Moon doesn't pass very far into the penumbra then, and even at maximum there will be very little to detect without sensitive light-measuring instruments. An annular solar eclipse, with Moon not appearing quite as large as Sun, will result in a thin ring, or annulus, that sweeps across part of the Indian Ocean, Sumatra, Malaysia, northern Borneo, and the South Pacific on Aug. 22. Eclipses for 1998 end with another penumbral lunar eclipse that reaches its maximum after our moonset and our sunrise on Sept. 6.
Moon is still passing in front of the Hyades cluster this year, so some of its members will be occulted. Aldebaran will disappear behind the dark limb of Moon at 7:24 p.m. EST on March 4 and miss the northern limb of Moon by only 10 arc seconds at 3:27 a.m. EDT on September 12. On the morning of March 26, Jupiter rises behind a narrow, waning crescent Moon and reappears at Moon's dark limb at 5:43 a.m. EST, only a little more than 3 degrees above the horizon.
Venus moves into the morning sky this month and is visible there until the end of September. It returns to the evening sky in late December. Mars will disappear into evening twilight in March and reappear in the morning sky in July where it will remain for the rest of 1998. Jupiter will disappear from the evening sky next month, reappear in the morning sky by mid-March, and be at opposition on Sept. 16. Saturn leaves the evening sky in early April, becomes visible in the morning sky in mid-May, and reaches opposition on Oct. 23. The best time to see Mercury in the evening sky this year is in the middle of March and it is most visible in the morning sky during the first half of December.
The third of the Great Observatories, the Advanced X-ray Astrophysics Facility (AXAF), is scheduled to be launched by the Space Shuttle in September. It will join the Hubble Space Telescope and the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory already in orbit. Mars Surveyor 1998 Lander is scheduled for a launch in December as NASA continues its exploration of Mars. NASA is scheduled to begin the International Space Station with a shuttle flight in June. It should be an exciting year for our space program.