The Milky Way is best seen during the summer months (from June to August) in the Dolomites. During this time, the galactic core is positioned high in the night sky, offering the best view of the Milky Way's band of stars, dust, and gas.
It’s dark where I am, and the stars are placed very favorably* to check out Corona Borealis (the Northern Crown) to see if the nova at T Coronae Borealis has erupted yet. This is a once in a lifetime opportunity to see a naked-eye recurrent nova.
(*Haha, just kidding, it's cloudy of course)
I made a little movie to show where the nova should appear, at roughly the anticipated brightness.
H/T to @OkieSpaceQueen, who pointed out that the nearly full Moon will be close to the star Spica tonight. Spica is the brightest star in the constellation Virgo.
If you take a look at the pair every hour or so, you can notice the relative motion of the Moon against the background stars as it orbits the Earth (a small, but negligible, portion of this is due to the Earth’s motion around the Sun as well).
Very roughly (to make the math easier 😄), the Moon orbits the Earth once in 30 days: 360° ÷ 30 days = 12° per day, or 0.5° per hour. 0.5° is the apparent width of the Moon, so it moves almost it's diameter in one hour.
All views from Ottawa, Canada (N 45º 24' W 75° 41’).
"A 2.5 million-acre swath of southern Oregon has been named the largest Dark Sky Sanctuary in the world.
The region, which on Monday was officially named the Oregon Outback International Dark Sky Sanctuary, comprises the southeastern half of Lake County, including Hart Mountain, Lake Abert and Summer Lake."
The calendar can say what it likes; I know Spring when I see it, and it's in the Cheshire Cat grin of the waxing moon, first of the new lunar year, as it menaces the western horizon tonight.
After an exchange between @OkieSpaceQueen and myself (they made a comment, I liked it 😄), it occurred to me to do this comparison of views of the morning sky. Apologies to people at different latitudes, but I just wanted to show a pattern.
All views are from the Stellarium desktop app (stellarium.org), and are set to times when the Sun is 10° below the local horizon.
You can see that as you go farther north, the angle the ecliptic makes with the horizon gets smaller and thus makes spotting planets like Mercury harder. Today, if you were at the North Pole, it would be very hard as the Sun, Mercury, and Venus never rise above the horizon! But the Aurora is pretty, I'm sure 😊
The Clear Skies Observing Guides for Astrotreff's Object of the Month for January 2024: the open cluster Melotte 20 - the "Alpha Persei Cluster" in Perseus.
Tonight’s target on the dog walk. Uranus looks like a relatively easy target these days. Find the Pleiades, down and to the right, then follow an arc of bright(ish) stars to the last one, which will be the planet. Should be easy with binoculars. Less easy if my dog gets impatient 😄 #Astronomy#Uranus#Pleiades#Stargazing
Check out this moment from Dispatches from The Well when host Kmele Foster sets up a Unistellar eVscope to observe the night sky above the Santa Fe Institute with artist Thomas Ashcraft: https://youtu.be/8gjZ_dfzaDE?si=7r_m7KaMgoOFcqBl&t=2320
What's the story behind "The Twelve Days of Christmas" — why 12 days, and why is there such a ludicrous number of birds in the song? Science journalist Rebecca Boyle took a look at its history and how it's connected to the night sky.