Short nights of June, July

June and July have the shortest nights of the year. Good stargazing can’t really begin until after 10 p.m., and the show is pretty much over with by 4:30 a.m. when morning twilight begins.

Get your afternoon nap so you can enjoy nature’s late, late summer star show, and remember to have the mosquito juice at the ready!

The transition in the night sky is just about complete. The stars and constellations of winter are pretty much gone from our skies, all setting well before the sun.

The only bright winter stars left are Castor and Pollux in the constellation Gemini the Twins, and toward the end of evening twilight between 9:30 and 10 p.m. you can see them side by side in the low Butler northwestern sky.

Just after evening twilight, Saturn will be a little more than a third of the way from the southwest horizon to the zenith.

You’ll see an actual star just below Saturn, which is Spica, the brightest star in the large, but faint constellation Virgo the Virgin. Saturn is now more than 850 million miles away from Earth, about 50 million miles farther than it was in early April.

Saturn is a must see through any size telescope. You can easily see its ring system that spans more than 130,000 miles in diameter. If your scope is powerful enough and the air is clear enough, you might also see many of Saturn’s moons that resemble tiny little stars.

One of the moons though, Titan, is a lot brighter than the rest and you should have no trouble seeing it through any scope. In fact, Titan is larger than the planet Mercury, the closest planet to the sun.

Get your telescope time in with Saturn this month, because by early July it will start out the evening in the lower southwestern sky and you’ll be forced to look at it through a lot more of Earth’s blurring atmosphere. I guarantee that you’ll love what you see in the eyepiece with Saturn.

If you lie back on that reclining lawn chair and look straight overhead toward the zenith you’ll easily see the nearly upside-down Big Dipper, and not far from the end of 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 (give or take a billion miles).

The light that we see tonight from Arcturus, almost 70 times the diameter of our sun, left that star when Gerald Ford 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.

Over in the eastern skies the stars of summer are making their initial evening appearance.

Leading the way is Vega, the brightest star of Lyra the Harp. A little to the lower left of Vega is Deneb, the brightest shiner is Cygnus the Swan, otherwise known as the “Northern Cross” rising sideways in the east.

Deneb lies at the head of cross and is more than 1,500 light years from Earth. Remember, just one light-year equals almost six trillion miles!

Deneb is a moderately bright star in our sky but looks are deceiving. It’s almost 400,000 times more powerful than our sun and more than 250 million miles in diameter.

Our own sun is less than a million miles in girth. Deneb would be a whole lot brighter in our sky except that it’s so very far away. The starlight we see from Deneb this month left that star around 600 AD!

Celestial hugging

Sunday morning, look for the thin crescent moon hanging just above the planets Venus and Mars. Venus will be much brighter than Mars.

The planet Jupiter will be the next brightest starlike object you see to the upper right of the moon. You may see the rest of the Moon’s disk as well as the brightly lit crescent.

That pale gray light is called earthshine because it’s reflected sunshine that has bounced off the Earth toward the direction of the moon. It’s a gorgeous phenomenon!

Map instructions

To use this map, cut it out and attach it to a stiff backing. Hold it over your head and line up the compass points on the map’s horizon to the actual direction you’re facing. East and West on this map are not backward. This is not a misprint. I guarantee that when you hold this map over your head, east and west will be in their proper positions.

Also use a small flashlight and attach a red piece of cloth or red construction paper over the lens of the flashlight. You won’t lose your night vision when you look at this map in red light.

Mike Lynch is an amateur astronomer and professional broadcast meteorologist in Minneapolis and is author of the book, “Pennsylvania Starwatch,” available at bookstores and at his website www.lynchandthestars.com.