You say the economy's in the tank, your credit card's maxed out, and you can't afford a movie ticket, much less a Wii?
Well, lift your head up high! Go ahead, look up! The new year holds in store all kinds of celestial entertainment for Maryland stargazers. And they're all free.
There are spectacular moonrises and moonsets, a string of promising meteor showers and planetary conjunctions rivaling the Dec. 1 triple conjunction of the moon, Venus and Jupiter.
We do seem to be in a sort of "eclipse recession," however. There are two solar eclipses on tap. But neither will be visible from North America. There are also four lunar eclipses, but three are "penumbral" - barely visible to anyone. The last, on New Year's Eve 2009, is only partial, and none of it will be visible from Maryland.
Even so, when the moon, sun and planets don't perform, we can look forward to more flyovers by the International Space Station and the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope repair mission. Maybe. If it does finally launch in May, we can watch the drama unfold on TV as four spacewalkers attempt one last multimillion-dollar repair and upgrade for the world's greatest space telescope.
Back out under the stars, there is a string of fine meteor showers on tap - most without serious interference from the moon. For mid-November's Leonid shower, astronomers predict "near-storm" activity - up to 500 meteors per hour - as the Earth sails through a field of dust laid down by a comet in 1466.
If cold keeps you indoors, grab a book and read about history's greatest backyard astronomer. In November, we'll celebrate the 400th anniversary of the night in 1609 when Galileo first turned his little telescope on the moon and changed our perception of our solar system, and ourselves, forever.
Here are the stargazers' highlights for 2009:
January
1 - Mercury stands just to the upper left of bright Jupiter, low in the southwest after sunset. The smallest and the largest planets seem to converge.
3 - Brave the cold after midnight for a look at the Quadrantid meteor shower, which peaks this morning. Far from urban lights, you may see more than 60 meteors per hour.
4 - Earth is at perihelion at 10 a.m. EST, only 91.4 million miles from the sun, its closest approach this year. This day also marks the latest sunrise of the year, at 7:27 a.m. EST, in Baltimore.
10 - The moon is nearly full, and at its second-closest approach to Earth this year. Look for unusually high tides.
