The Big Dipper starting to scoop. Sunday, July 1. The Big Dipper, high in the northwest after dark, is beginning to turn around to 'scoop up water' through the evenings of summer and early fall. Monday, July 2. Ganymede, Jupiter's biggest moon, crosses Jupiter's face tonight from 8:35 to 10:21 p.m.
Browse Mod DB files to download full releases, installer, sdk, patches, mods, demos, and media. Beta files for K1 to K2 beta & modders resource, you will need to. Find helpful customer reviews and review ratings for Deep-Sky Name Index 2000.0 at Amazon.com. Read honest and unbiased. Objects are listed by type.
EDT, distantly followed by its tiny black shadow much later: from 12:58 to 2:42 a.m. EDT (when Jupiter is getting low or setting for Easterners). Meanwhile, Jupiter's Great Red Spot should transit the planet's central meridian around 9:48 p.m. Tuesday, July 3. If you have a dark enough sky, the Milky Way now forms a magnificent arch high across the whole eastern sky after nightfall is complete. It runs all the way from below Cassiopeia in the north-northeast, up and across Cygnus and the Summer Triangle in the east, and down behind Saturn and the spout of the Sagittarius Teapot in the south.
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Wednesday, July 4. Tonight, users of large telescopes in the Americas can watch for Saturn and especially its rings occulting a 10th-magnitude star from about midnight to 3 a.m. EDT (dusk to midnight PDT). The star is likely to show rapid fadings and dimmings as it passes behind the rings due to their filamentary fine-scale structure — if it's not totally swamped by their light! Extremely sharp atmospheric seeing will be crucial to the star's visibility.
See the June Sky & Telescope, page 50. Thursday, July 5. Last-quarter Moon tonight (exact at 3:51 a.m. July 6th EDT). The Moon rises around 1 a.m.
Between Pisces and Aquarius, in the dim 'Great Water' region of constellations. The Moon hangs high in the southeast by sunrise on the 6th. The moonless late nights for the next week are a fine time to go hunting for the little-known deep-sky objects in the Cygnus Milky Way, near Albireo, that Ken Hewett-White describes in his 'Going Deep' column in the, page 58. Cygnus is climbing high. The Pocket Sky Atlas plots 30,796 stars to magnitude 7.6, and hundreds of telescopic galaxies, star clusters, and nebulae among them.
Shown above is the for easier reading in the night. Once you get a telescope, to put it to good use you'll need a detailed, large-scale sky atlas (set of charts). The basic standard is the Pocket Sky Atlas (in either the or ), which shows stars to magnitude 7.6. Next up is the larger and deeper, plotting stars to magnitude 8.5; nearly three times as many. The next up, once you know your way around, is the even larger (stars to magnitude 9.75). You'll also want a good deep-sky guidebook, such as Sue French's collection (which includes its own charts), by Strong and Sinnott, or the bigger by Kepple and Sanner. Can a computerized telescope replace charts?
Not for beginners, I don't think, and not on mounts and tripods that are less than top-quality mechanically (meaning heavy and expensive). And as Terence Dickinson and Alan Dyer say in their, 'A full appreciation of the universe cannot come without developing the skills to find things in the sky and understanding how the sky works. This knowledge comes only by spending time under the stars with star maps in hand.'
This Week's Planet Roundup. Saturn at opposition on June 27th, imaged by with the 1-meter Chilescope in average seeing. Notice the extra brightness of the rings at opposition compared to the globe. This is called the Seeliger effect.
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In 1887 the German astronomer Hugo von Seeliger analyzed what it might be telling about the composition of the rings. Mercury (magnitude 0.0) is visible in bright twilight very low in the west-northwest, about 16° lower right of Venus.
Catch Mercury in the narrow time window between when the sky is still too bright and when Mercury sinks too low and sets. Venus (magnitude –4.1, in Leo) shines brightly in the west during twilight.
Find Regulus ever closer to Venus's left or upper left. They close from 11° apart on June 29th to 3½° apart on July 6th. In a telescope Venus is a gibbous disk 16 arcseconds tall and 70% sunlit. Mars is the 'star' planet of the summer! It's now a dramatic, Jupiter-bright magnitude –2.2, rising in Capricornus around the end of twilight. Mars is highest in the south, in best telescopic view, in the hour or so before the first light of dawn. It's 21 arcseconds in diameter, on its way to 24.3 arcseconds around its closest approach on the night of July 30-31.
But Mars is in the throes of a great dust storm! Dust has enveloped much of the planet, obscuring many major dark surface features and reducing contrast for the rest. 'The planet is unrecognisable,' wrote imager on June 26th. Dust like this remains in Mars's atmosphere for a long time. See our article, updated several times. Can you identify any of the usual markings as seen in your scope? You'll want a Mars map that shows which features are facing Earth at your time and date, such as our online.
Vesta, the brightest asteroid, was at opposition June 19th and is still unusually bright, fading from magnitude 5.6 to 5.8 this week. That's about as bright as Uranus. Vesta is west of Saturn, moving from Sagittarius into Ophiuchus. Article with finder charts:. Jupiter (magnitude –2.4, in Libra) shines in the south-southwest in twilight and declines in the southwest later in the evening.
It's 41 arcseconds wide and shrinking. See our telescopic guide to observing Jupiter in the, page 48. Saturn (magnitude 0.0, just above the Sagittarius Teapot) glows in the southeast in twilight and higher in the south by midnight. It's 34° to the upper right of much brighter Mars. Uranus (magnitude 5.8, at the Aries-Pisces border) and Neptune (magnitude 7.9, in Aquarius) are up in the east and southeast, respectively, before the beginning of dawn.
All descriptions that relate to your horizon — including the words up, down, right, and left — are written for the world's mid-northern latitudes. Descriptions that also depend on longitude (mainly Moon positions) are for North America. Eastern Daylight Time (EDT) is Universal Time (also called UT, UTC, GMT, or Z time) minus 4 hours. 'Remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see and wonder about what makes the universe exist. — Stephen Hawking, 1942–2018 'The dangers of not thinking clearly are much greater now than ever before. It's not that there's something new in our way of thinking, it's that credulous and confused thinking can be much more lethal in ways it was never before.'
— Carl Sagan, 1996 'Objective reality exists. Facts are often determinable.
Vaccines save lives. Carbon dioxide warms the globe. Bacteria evolve to thwart antibiotics, because evolution. Science and reason are not a political conspiracy.
They are how we determine facts. Civilization's survival depends on our ability, and willingness, to do this.' — Alan MacRobert, your Sky at a Glance editor 'Facts are stubborn things.'
— John Adams, 1770. 2 thoughts on “ This Week’s Sky at a Glance, June 29 – July 7”.
misha17 Depending on your latitude, the earliest sunset for Northern Hemisphere viewers will occur early this viewing week for cities farther south (like Los Angeles and Miami). For cities farther north like Seattle or Denver, the latest sunset occurred this past viewing week, but the sun is only setting a minute or so earlier this week. The earliest sunrise occurred in early June; in northern cities like Seattle the sun will already be rising 10 minutes later this week than it did in early June.
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