Exam 2: A Users Guide to the Sky

What is an asterism?

Explain why it is difficult to see Mercury in the night sky.

Why do many people think stars are not in the sky during the daytime?

Within the Northern Hemisphere, the vernal equinox marks the start of ____.

Day and night cycles are caused by the ____ of Earth.

The scale of apparent visual magnitudes extends into negative numbers to represent the faintest objects in the sky.

In 1928, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) established _______________ official constellations with carefully defined boundaries that together include every part of the sky.

Astronomers use the _______________ alphabet to identify the bright stars in a constellation in approximate order of brightness.

Arc seconds are _______________th of an arc minute.

Astronomers describe the brightness of stars using the brilliance scale.

The Sky Around You - Page 18 (For the following questions) Review the accompanying figure and identify point C.

Figure 2-6  The star Vega has a magnitude of 0.03. Using the accompanying figure, which object is brighter than Vega?

What is the flux ratio of two stars whose difference in magnitude is 2.6?

The constellations are an ancient heritage handed down for thousands of years as ways to tell stories of mythical heroes and monsters.

Which planet is often called our most brilliant "morning star"?

From which language did the majority of star names originate?

The Milankovitch hypothesis suggests that the shape of Earth's orbit, its precession, and tilted axis can influence climatic changes and thus cause _____.

Scientists constructed a history of ocean temperatures using deep ocean cores that convincingly matched the predictions of the _______________, describing the cause of multiple ice ages on Earth.

On the day of the _______________ in late June, Earth's Northern Hemisphere is inclined toward  the Sun.

Because Earth's axis of rotation is inclined 23.4 degrees from vertical, the Sun moves into the northern sky in the spring and into the southern sky in the fall.