Saturday: The Moon, Saturn, and Jupiter make a long, skinny triangle in the southern sky at 10:00 p.m.. Jupiter is exactly one and a fists to the right of the Moon and Saturn is midway between, and just above, them. Astronomers discovered volcanoes spewing water vapor on Saturn’s moon Enceledus back in 2005. Just last year, scientists published findings of similar activity on Jupiter’s moon Europa. (What is it with moon name’s that start with the letter “E”?) It’s not possible to see Enceladus with a small telescope. But you can see Europa. If you look at 10:00 p.m., you’ll see three moons, Europa is closest to Jupiter, then Ganymede, and then Callisto. The inner moon Io is behind Jupiter at this time. For more information about Europa’s geysers, go to https://earthsky.org/space/europa-water-vapor-geysers-goddard.
Sunday: Mars is a little more than one fist above the eastern horizon at 11:00 p.m.
Monday: Had the script been written a little differently for a well-known Robin Williams movie, we might have heard Mr. Williams shout, “Goooood Morning Orion the hunter”. Orion is typically thought of as a winter constellation. But, it makes its first appearance in the early morning summer sky. The lowest corner of Orion’s body, represented by the star Saiph (pronounced “safe”), rises at 2:00 a.m., well before the Sun. By 5:30 a.m., Orion’s belt is three fists above the south-southeastern horizon.
Tuesday: Need a caffeine pick-me-up? Make it a double. Need an astronomy pick-me-up? Make it a double double. Find Vega, in the constellation Lyra the lyre, nearly straight overhead at 9:00 tonight. Less than half a fist to the east (or left if you are facing south) of the bright bluish star Vega is the “star” Epsilon Lyra. If you look at Epsilon Lyra through binoculars, it looks like two stars. If you look at Epsilon Lyra through a large enough telescope, you will notice that each star in the pair is itself a pair of stars. Each star in the double is double. Hence, Epsilon Lyra is known as the double double. The stars in each pair orbit a point approximately in the center of each respective pair. The pairs themselves orbit a point between the two pairs.
Wednesday: Venus is three fists above due east at 5:30 a.m.
Thursday: While you were looking through your underwear drawer for clean socks, some citizen scientists were looking through sky maps obtained by robotic telescopes to find brown dwarfs. The project, called Backyard Worlds: Planet 9, allows anyone with a computer and internet connection to search through thousands of images to find these strange objects that are midway between being classified as large planets and small stars. Some brown dwarfs can have surface temperature of thousands of degrees Celsius, the recently discovered ones are cooler than the boiling point of water and may even have clouds of water vapor! Read more about the discovery and how you can participate this project at https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2020-159.
Friday: “I’m a little teapot, short and stout. The galactic center, I pour it out.” (I’m a Little Teapot, astronomy version, 2019.) Despite its great size and importance, the center of our Milky Way galaxy and its giant black hole remains hidden to the naked eye behind thick clouds of gas and dust. By plotting the orbits of stars near the middle of the galaxy, astronomers have determined that the black hole’s mass is equal to about 4.5 million Suns. While you can’t see the actual galactic center, you can gaze in the direction of the center by looking just to the right of the teapot asterism in the constellation Sagittarius. This point is about one fist above the south-southwestern horizon at 9:00 p.m.
The positional information in this column about stars and planets is typically accurate for the entire week. For up to date information about the night sky, go to https://nightsky.jpl.nasa.gov/planner.cfm.
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