The Ellensburg, WA sky for the week of June 5, 2021

Saturday: According to an Australian Aboriginal legend, a young man was undergoing an initiation rite that required that he avoid contact with women. But the two wives of his brother liked him so they seduced him. When his brother found out, he set fire to the house they were in. The young man and the two women escape by casting a spear into the Milky Way and pulling themselves into the sky. What does this have to do with astronomy? In the legend, the man becomes a bright, pulsating red star and the women become two dimmer white stars above and below him.  What does this have to do with you? You can see the bright red pulsating star called Antares making its way into the evening sky. It is one fist above the south-southeastern horizon at 10:00 p.m. What stands out about this story is that aboriginal culture must have been paying attention to variations in star brightness long before the “official” discovery of variable stars in the late sixteenth century. For more about aboriginal star observations, go to http://tiny.cc/h4iytz. 

Sunday: Venus is a half a fist above the west-northwestern horizon at 9:30 p.m. Mars is two fists above the western horizon. It makes a line with the stars Pollux and Castor, both of which are a little brighter than Venus.

Monday: It looks so peaceful up there. But life is not peaceful for Jupiter. According to a recent study by astronomers, Jupiter gets hit by a 5-20 meter diameter asteroid 10 to 65 times a year. For comparison, the object that exploded over the Russian city of Chelyabinsk in 2013 was 20 meters in diameter. Earth gets hit by a 20-meter asteroid about once every 50 years. For more information, go to https://goo.gl/RxPc5G. Jupiter is two and a half fists above the southeastern horizon at 4:30 a.m. Saturn is two fists to the right of Jupiter.

Tuesday: The bright star Arcturis is six fists above due south at 10:15 p.m. Cor Caroli is the medium bright star about three fists to the upper right of Arcturus, halfway between Arcturus and the Big Dipper Cup. About halfway between Arcturus and Cor Caroli is M3, an eight billion year old globular cluster of 500,000 stars. You’ll need binoculars to find it. It looks like an out-of-focus star right next to an in-focus star just below it. For more information about M3, go to https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-news/hello-messier-3/.

Wednesday: Summer is nearly here. How do I know? Because the days are very long. Because the temperature is rising. Because the school year is ending. (Wait. How can we tell that with the kids at home more?) Also, because the Summer Triangle is fairly high in the eastern sky at 11:00 p.m. Vega, the third brightest star visible from Ellensburg, is about five fists above the east horizon. Deneb, at the tail of Cygnus the swan is about four fists above the east-northeast horizon. The third star in the triangle, Altair in Aquila the eagle, is two above the east horizon.

If you want to put somebody off, tell her to wait until Deneb sets. At Ellensburg’s latitude of 47 degrees, Deneb is a circumpolar star meaning it never goes below the horizon.

Thursday: There is an annular solar eclipse today. That doesn’t mean it is a yearly occurrence. Annular refers to the ring shape of the Sun. The Moon will be directly between the Earth and the Sun. But it will be relatively far from the Earth meaning it will not appear large enough to fully block the Sun. If you want to see this, you’ll need to go to Northern Canada, Greenland, or the Arctic Ocean. If you want to read about it, go to https://www.timeanddate.com/eclipse/solar/2021-june-10. This is one of my favorite astronomy websites.

Friday: I hope that you have never been in a collision. It can be scary and dangerous. The biggest collision in our celestial neighborhood will occur in a few billion years when our Milky Way Galaxy will collide with the Andromeda Galaxy. Here’s an article about what it will look like: http://tiny.cc/19iytz If you can’t stay up a few billion years to see the collision, stay up until late at night to see the Andromeda Galaxy. First find the Great Square of Pegasus. At 3:00 a.m., the left hand corner of the square is about three fists above the east-northeast horizon. Less than two fists to the left and down a little bit is another star the same brightness as the star at the corner of the square. From that star, hop about a half a fist up to a star that is about one fourth as bright. Less than another half fist in the same direction is a fuzzy oval patch of light known as the Andromeda Galaxy. The galaxy is impressive to see in binoculars. It consists of nearly a trillion stars and is 2.2 million light years away.

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.