Stargazing in June is worth staying up late
We’re into the shortest nights of the year now so good stargazing can’t really begin until after 10 p.m., and the show is pretty much over by 4:30 a.m. when morning twilight begins.
Make sure to get your afternoon nap so you can enjoy nature’s late, late summer star show over Butler. Watch the stars of summer on the rise, but prepare for possible hungry mosquitoes, especially around sunset. In most cases the blood suckers back off by midnight, sometimes even sooner.
The first bright stars that pop out in the evening twilight are actually the planets Venus and Jupiter.
Viewing Venus
Venus absolutely dominates the low western sky and through a small telescope it appears oval shaped and during the next few weeks it’ll “shrink” and appear as a half moon.
Because Venus’ orbit around the sun lies within Earth’s orbit, Venus goes through shape changes or phases like the moon as the angle between Earth, Venus, and the sun keeps changing.
It’s best to view Venus through a telescope in the evening twilight before darkness sets in, otherwise its bright glow will really muddy up what you see through the eyepiece.
Jupiter watch
Jupiter is much more fun to look at in the southeastern sky. With even a decent pair of binoculars or a small telescope you can easily see up to four of its orbiting moons that resemble tiny stars on either side of the planet. You might even see some of Jupiter’s cloud bands stretching across the 88,000 mile-wide planet.
The later in the evening you can wait to view Jupiter through a telescope, the better you’ll see as it rises farther above the thicker layer of Earth’s atmosphere close to the horizon.
Also try to take long continuous views of Jupiter through your telescope so you can get used to the light level in the eyepiece field and take advantage of the varying transparency of Earth’s atmosphere.
Later on this month Saturn and Mars will join Venus and Jupiter in the evening sky. In fact, in late July Mars and Earth will be at their closest approach to each other since 2003. Stay tuned to this column for more in the next few weeks.
Stars of summer
The transition to summer skies is just about complete. The stars and constellations of winter are pretty much gone from our evening skies, all setting well before the sun. The only bright winter stars left are Castor and Pollux in the constellation Gemini the Twins; toward the end of evening twilight you can see them side-by-side in the very low northwestern sky.
If you lie back on that reclining lawn chair and look straight overhead toward the zenith you’ll easily see the Big Dipper, and not far from the Dipper’s handle you’ll see a bright orange star.
That’s Arcturus, the second-brightest star in the sky, which is about 36 light years or 208 trillion miles away. The light that we see tonight from Arcturus, about 25 times the diameter of our sun, left that star when Nixon was our president. Arcturus is also the brightest star in the constellation Bootes the hunting farmer, which actually looks more like a giant nocturnal kite with Arcturus at the tail of the kite.
In the low southeast skies is another ruddy star. That’s Antares, a star so big that if you put it in our solar system instead of our sun, its outer edge would reach almost to Jupiter. We’d be somewhere near the inner core of Antares, the star at the heart of the constellation Scorpius the Scorpion.
Look to the upper right of Antares and you’ll see three stars lined up diagonally that mark the head and stinger of the great sky beast.
If you stay up late enough Saturn shows up in the low southeast sky just behind Scorpius.
Mike Lynch is an amateur astronomer and professional broadcast meteorologist for WCCO Radio in Minneapolis/St. Paul. He is also the author of “Stars: a Month by Month Tour of the Constellations,” published by Adventure Publications and available at bookstores and at adventurepublications.net. Contact Mike Lynch at mikewlynch@comcast.net.
