salutations celestial sight seers I'm David fuller welcome to eyes on the sky
what's up this week the summer solstice occurred on June 21st which means that
in the northern hemisphere we get warm weather for about three months or so
even though where I am we're getting still lots of rain along with a lot of
other areas however if you do actually manage to get some clear skies I want to
kind of back up a little bit slow things down and take a look at just getting
oriented with the summer sky and what's out there in terms of what you can see
naked eye the stars the constellations the planets major planets that you'll be
able to see throughout the course of the summer so let's take a look at that I
have kind of a most of the full sky up right here on the top of the screen I've
got Polaris so that's really kind of the northern edge we don't need to look
below Polaris because most anything that's gonna be around that it's gonna
wheel up overhead at some point during the year as the Earth spins and as we
revolve around the Sun off to the west we have some of our stars that we would
normally see in the springtime so Regulus is way over towards the west
getting ready to set along with Leo the Lion and if we bring up our
constellation lines here we can see that along with our constellation labels
towards the northwest is the Big Dipper along with Ursa Major so we've got the
tail handle stars here going this direction and then the pointer stars
right here and I'm just gonna wheel this around for you so it looks a little bit
more like what you'd see in the evening sky facing towards the north and
northwest so there's the Big Dipper do use the pointer stars that point towards
Polaris that's the North Star Draco the dragon is nicely overhead at the moment
it's a bit of a dimmer constellation has lots of third and fourth magnitude stars
and it kind of winds in between the Big Dipper here and the bowl stars of the
Little Dipper here these are usually pretty visible because Kocab is a
second magnitude star Pherkad is a third magnitude star so these stars of Draco
third fourth magnitude stars this is one of the brighter ones 2.7 magnitude
coming around here but then once we get out towards like where the eyes are the
dragon we've got 2.7 magnitude stars and those
are fairly bright you can see those between the bowl stars of Ursa Minor and
the Little Dipper and Vega Vega is really bright Vega is part of the summer
triangle which if we look off towards the east this is hard to miss so even if
I take these away all those things way I'm you can see how that's an easy
triangle shape to spot Vega is one of the brightest stars in the entire night
sky it's a zero magnitude star so it's actually brighter than first magnitude
not difficult to find it is part it's the brightest star in Lyra the harp and
if we go down towards the Northeast from there we can find Deneb that's the
dimmest star of the summer triangle these stars just so you can measure that
Vega and Deneb are around 23 degrees away from each other so if you hold your
hand out like this at arm's length with your thumb and pinky at arm's length
that's about the distance that those stars will be apart this works for just
about everybody so you can kind of measure that distance they say oh I
found Vega and now I figured out where Deneb is once you figure out where Deneb
is at you can then also find where Cygnus goes because Cygnus kind of
comes in between the summer triangle there's four stars that go this way
this stars a lovely double star put a little magnification on that you can see
Albireo the blue and white components of that and then the wings of Cygnus come
out this way and then Altair is kind of the you can call it the apex of the
triangle if you want to go with that being the narrower point of it then
Altair is the brightest star of Aquila the eagle and the eagle has a bunch of
third magnitude stars mostly that formed that Eagle shape kind of coming up this
way Altair is really kind of the focus of
that particular constellation but you'll notice that between just under Deneb
here but then in between where Vega and Altair are
there's like this cloudy section that would be the Milky Way
and there's this Great Rift area that we call because in dark skies you can see
there's just kind of a blacked-out section where there's a lot of dust
blocking our view of the galaxy so that is a lovely area of the sky to just
peruse with binoculars you don't need to necessarily even be looking for anything
just sweep binoculars in that part of the sky you will see tons and tons and
tons of tons of stars you might run across some objects and you're not sure
what they are but that's okay just sweep the area anyway you might even be able
to figure out what you're looking at if we wheel a little bit over towards the
south we can see how the Milky Way comes down just about towards the south now
I'm looking at this right at about 10:30 in the evening so that's about as early
as it really hits astronomical Twilight for me I know for some areas that are
north of me astronomical Twilight doesn't happen until you know 11:00 or
midnight or not at all depending on how far north you are if we go forward in
time we can see how everything shifts over towards the west so it's going to
just move that direction the later you stay up and also that's gonna happen
when you move into subsequent months so see there's July 30th and then August
30th it moves in a similar way just depending on the time of night and the
time of year that you're looking you'll also notice we've got Jupiter right here
super bright that's gonna be the brightest thing that you see in that
part of the sky it is close to Antares which is a lovely bright red star in
Scorpius and then between Jupiter and where Saturn is we have this teapot
shape which is the kind of the major part of Sagittarius that most of us tend
to look for because if we look in this part of the sky where the teapot spout
comes out that's about the center of our Milky Way galaxy again binoculars
wonderful to look from here up towards Altair especially through Scutum
Scutum has some nice bright areas of the Milky Way and there's just a ton
open clusters and nebulae and things in here when we turn on our sky and viewing
windows and the deep sky objects portion with all the labels you can see that
area is just filled with all kinds of objects that are great to see that's a
lovely dense area for deep sky objects for sure definitely worth checking out I
will turn these back off so we don't get too confused when we're looking through
here just above where Jupiter is is a large constellation Ophiuchus towards
the south that has some nice globular clusters in it and it is framed on
either side by two constellations actually so if we bring up our
constellation labels it just says serpens but actually there's Serpens
Cauda and Serpens Caput so it's actually constellation split in two, some
other bright constellations are going to be Bootes Arcturus fourth brightest
star in the sky hard to miss that's gonna be an easy one now what I do when
I'm looking for Hercules if the sky is a little bit bright I will look between
Vega which we looked at earlier nice bright star and Arcturus and go about
one-third of the way over towards Arcturus and there's Hercules because
hercules does not have terribly bright stars looking ahead into the future you
can see how the planets are not very high up Jupiter is only gonna get maybe
25 degrees high and as we go forward into the summer that ecliptic does not
get much higher for Saturn it's also only gonna be about 25 degrees up on the
meridian in August so unfortunately we won't get a lot of relief that way but
those planets are at least visible in warm weather so every time it's clear
bring that telescope out take a look at them they're definitely very cool to
look at I mean quickly zoom in on Saturn for you as we end this just so you can
see what the tilt is going to be like of the Rings and
that's just gonna be a beautiful sight you've got a nice opportunity to look at
the Cassini division between the a and B rings there's really nothing better than
that to see Saturn hanging there in the night
sky so that's a wonderful way to be able to at least start looking at things in
your night sky for the summer so that's all for this week keep your eyes on the
sky and your outdoor lights aimed down so we can all see what's up
I'm David fuller wishing you clear and dark skies
you