This weekend provides an excellent opportunity to witness one of the wonders of the night sky. I'm talking about the star Algol in the constellation of Perseus.
The cool thing about Algol is that it consists of two stars, a bright primary and a dim secondary. Even cooler, Algol is what astronomers call an eclipsing binary. The dimmer star, which orbits only five percent as far from its companion as Earth does the Sun, passes in front of the bright one every 2.867...days. This makes Algol's brightness dip nearly 70 percent from magnitude 2.1 to magnitude 3.4. From light-polluted, suburban skies Algol can go from a respectably bright star to seemingly not there at all.
Algol is the prototypical eclipsing binary system and provided a terrific laboratory for astronomers to study stellar masses, dimensions, and luminosity; which in turn allowed better distance estimates between stars in our galaxy. And we get to see this wonder take place every few days from our own backyards.
Algol's eclipse starts about 11:07 p.m. Saturday night (CST). Mid-eclipse occurs at 12:07 a.m. Sunday. And it should all be over about 1:07 a.m. Sunday. The constellation of Perseus will be high in the west-northwestern sky at that time. Algol lies nearly mid-way between The Pleiades star cluster and the constellation of Cassiopeia.
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The Kansas City School District planetarium will present a free public event at 10 a.m. Saturday. Location is the Southwest Early College Campus, 6512 Wornall Rd. It's part of a yearlong celebration marking the 400th anniversary of Galileo Galilei's first recorded observations of space through a telescope.
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