If you're new at this, start with brighter, easier constellations and save the shy Giraffe until you get good at it. Unless you have a really dark sky, you'll need binoculars to work out its loose, faint, nondescript pattern using the constellation chart in the center of Sky & Telescope - a challenge project that will build your skills for correctly relating what you see in binoculars to what you see, much smaller, on a sky map. ■ High in the northern sky these evenings, in the seemingly empty wastes between Capella overhead and Polaris due north, sprawls big, dim Camelopardalis, the Giraffe - perhaps the biggest often-visible constellation you don't know. It and the rest are about 560 light-years away. ![]() Some of them form a distinctive curving arc focused on Alpha Persei.Īlpha Per, a white supergiant, is a true member of the group and by far its brightest light. At least a dozen are 6th magnitude or brighter. It lies on the lower-right edge of the Alpha Persei Cluster: a large, elongated, very loose scatter of fainter stars about the size of your thumbtip at arm's length. The brightest star between Cassiopeia and the zenith right after dark, as seen from the world's mid-northern latitudes, is Alpha Persei (Mirfak), magnitude 1.8. ■ Right after nightfall this week, the W of Cassiopeia shines high in the northwest standing almost on end. The eerie waning gibbous Moon, with 1st-magnitude Spica, clears the east-southeast horizon around 11 p.m. ■ The waning gibbous Moon rises late Friday night, with 1st-magnitude Spica about 3° to its right or lower right as shown below. The whole array will seem to rotate clockwise as it moves lower toward the west. The orientation of this scene changes as the night grows late. This is the naked-eye setting for faint Comet ZTF as it passes Mars on Friday the 10th and Saturday the 11th see the text. Tomorrow evening, Saturday, the comet will be 1.8° below Mars. The comet is 1.6° upper left of Mars, at the top of the "s" in "Mars" in the diagram below (for evening in North America). Right after the end of twilight, face south and look very high, almost overhead. ![]() The Moon doesn't rise until about 10 or 11 p.m. Although the comet has dimmed to about magnitude 6.3, binoculars should still show it if you have a good dark sky. ■ Comet ZTF passes Mars this evening and tomorrow evening. Sirius is the cleaver's top back corner, its blade faces right, and its short handle is down below pointing lower left. Sirius is on his chest, to the right or lower right of his faint triangular head.īut through the light pollution under which most of us live, only his five brightest stars are easily visible. He's currently standing on his hind legs. In a dark sky with lots of stars visible, the constellation's points can be connected to form a convincing Big Dog profile. ■ Sirius the Dog Star blazes in the southeast after dinnertime, below Orion. It should be down to 7.5 by February 17th. And of course the comet's light is much more spread out ("diffuse"). By then it will probably be about mag 6.4, which is some 300 times fainter than Mars. On the evenings of February 10th and 11th the comet will be less than 2° from bright Mars. ![]() When the comet becomes too faint for that chart to suffice, use the more detailed one in the February Sky & Telescope, page 48 (where the dates are for 0:00 UT subtract one day from those to get the North American civil date). (On that chart, the comet symbols are labeled with the dates for evenings in North America, not the UT dates.) Bob King's new article Understanding the Tails of Comet ZTF has a finder chart to use in February. The comet is heading south after its swing past the Little Dipper in late January. Don't confuse long-exposure, stacked and processed images of a dim, diffuse object like this with its appearance to the eye, even in the same telescope! Note the narrow, straight ion tail and the broad, curved dust tail. Comet ZTF E3, imaged on January 21st by Pepe Chambó of Valencia, Spain, using an 8-inch short-focus reflector. That evening, using 10 x 50 binoculars under a mediocre suburban sky, I could just detect it near Iota Aurigae as a vague, diffuse enhancement of the sky background. As of February 9th it was down to about 6.1. It peaked in brightness on February 1st at about magnitude 5.0. The comet is crossing Auriga and Taurus on its way toward Orion's shield. On the other hand, it's now conveniently placed high overhead in early evening in a moonless sky the waning Moon doesn't rise until late. Comet ZTF is fading and receding into the distance.
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![]() Therefore, if the status date is set to today and you enter actuals, the work is assumed to have been completed when it was scheduled, but it is assumed that the remaining work will begin immediately instead of in the past (before the status date):Īnd move end of completed parts forward to status date If the Move start of remaining parts before status data forward to status date check box is selected, then if a task is scheduled before the status date and you enter actuals against it, Project leaves the actual portion of the task as scheduled, but moves any remaining work to the status date. Move start of remaining parts before status data forward to status dateĬonsider tasks that are scheduled before the status date and that have actuals entered against them. With both check boxes selected, Project moves the entire task around the status date to show that work was done on the task and completed as of the status date and remaining work is continuing as of the status date: If the Move start of remaining parts before status data forward to status date check box is selected, you can also select the And move start of remaining parts back to status date check box. But the remaining work is not expected to start until the future:Īnd move start of remaining parts back to status date ![]() Therefore, if the status date is set to today, and you enter actuals, the work is assumed to finish today, not in the future. If the Move end of completed parts after status date back to status date check box is selected, then if a task is scheduled after the status date and you enter actuals against it, Project moves the actual, completed portion of the task so that the completed work ends on the status date and any remaining work remains scheduled to begin in the future. Move end of completed parts after status date back to status dateĬonsider tasks that are scheduled after the status date, and have actuals entered against them. To modify the default settings, choose File > Options > Advanced, and scroll to the Calculation options for this project section. You can modify the default settings for how the status date is used for placing actual work and remaining work where you want, particularly when assignments are completed earlier or later than scheduled. When you enter progress as percent complete or actual work to date, Project uses the status date to determine where to place actual work and where to schedule remaining work. How does the status date affect progress updates? ![]() Under Line to change, pick Status Date, and then select a line style and color. On the Gantt Chart, choose Format > Gridlines. To set the status date back to the current date, either enter the current date, or enter NA in the date field. The status date is almost never the current date, so you need to set it: ![]() Or, if progress reports are due Friday, but were sent in late, you might set the status date back to Friday before reporting on progress information. For example, if you want sales report figures for last month, you set the status date to the last day of that month. Usually, you report your project’s progress on a day you set- the status date, to use project management-speak. ![]() They are not hard to please, and adapt themselves, They collect them, as hamsters do, in two big pockets in the cheeks, and then come to surface, swallowing the booty, with a splash. In nature, duckbills feed mainly of crustaceans, worms and larvae of insects they find on the river-beds, eyes closed, with their very sensible beak, rich of nervous terminals. “It’s the meal for this night,” Neil Morley explains, “based on fresh water crayfishes, flour larvae, and boiled eggs, kneaded with some milk, yoghurt and vitamins. It looks like rubbish, and I ask, curious, what it is. While I am observing them, guided by the director, an attendant comes, raises the grating, and throws inside the contents of a bucket. Two tunnels, just over the surface of the water, lead to the artificial dens placed in the rear of the building, in a calm area, closed to public, and another succession of tunnels connects them with some pools under the open sky, covered by a grating. ![]() ![]() Large wall panels narrate their life and anatomy, while a loudspeaker explains, in simple wordings, the biology and behaviour of these incredible animals to visitors. A complex with a large exposition basin, where swims, at fixed timings, a couple of duckbills. This huge zoological park, dedicated to Australian fauna, has the best equipped “Platypus house”, in the world. “And, furthermore,”, explains to me Neil Morley, director of the famous Sir Collin MacKenzie Sanctuary of Healesville, Australia, the only site in the world where these animals have reproduced in captivity, “males have, like serpents, on the back paws, a venomous gland connected to a spur.” It’s the famous wire, with which, in 1884, the scholar Caldwell, informed the Zoological British Society, gathered in Montreal, that the Duck billed Platypus, ( Ornithorhynchus anatinus), lays, as birds do, eggs with yolk.Īnd when the first specimen, embalmed, arrived in Europe, many, at the British Museum of London, thought it was a joke: a beaver with a bill similar to the one of a duck, two small eyes and web footed, by sure, did not look true. They are all oviparous, classified in the “monotremes” (literally, “unique hole”), because, as for the birds, the amphibians and the reptiles, the tract of their urogenital apparatus and the alimentary duct converge in only one hind orifice, called cloaca. It’s like if, within hundred millions years, somebody would like to look for the marks of our civilization among the fossils of a car: by sure he could find the bonnet of the Volkswagen, some parts of a mini and some super mini cars, produced for years in large quantity, but couldn’t find any trace of the prototypes, the cars by Cugnot, Stafford or Panhard.Īnd yet, still now left alone in the Australian region, do live some “mammals in transit”, incredibly survived, flesh and blood, to the competition of developed species. ![]() Hot blood reptiles, furred birds, mammals which lay eggs: reality had surely to overcome our imagination, even if not too much has remained of all these forms passing by. We know that birds and reptiles are near relatives but these had to be quite different from the present ones, and when, 200 millions of years ago, the first mammals tried new ways, the separations between the groups were not too much definite. There are animals, like the scorpion, suitable for every geological “season”, and practically unchanged since 400 millions of years, but the most part of the living beings, has a suffered history, where well-suited intuitions, and successive reconversions interlace with hard struggles and failures.īlind alleys of the life, extinct species, quickly deleted by an evolution which never proceeds in a direct line, which never closes all the doors, and goes forward reeling, by attempts.Īlmost always, the origins hide under the beginnings, and the “prototypes”, generally don’t leave any trace in the fossils. It has the muzzle of a duck but the fur of a beaver, it lays eggs but suckles its babies, it is gentle but can deploy a poisonous spur, it falls ill from minimal stress but has lived from time immemorial. |
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