This Week's Sky at a Glance, July 3 – 12

FRIDAY, JULY 3

■ Once Venus is in easy view in the western twilight, keep your eyes out for Regulus to glimmer into view 6° to its left or upper left, as shown below. At magnitude +1.3, Regulus is only 1/150 as bright as Venus, magnitude –4.1.

And then watch 9° upper right of Regulus for yellower Gamma Leonis (Algieba) to appear. It's half as bright with a total magnitude of +2.0 (the total of its two lovely telescopic components, separation 4.7 arcseconds).

And then as night comes on, watch for the four other stars that form the Sickle of Leo:

■ If you happen to be up very early on the July 4th holiday, look low in the east for Mars between Aldebaran (its near twin) and the Pleiades, as shown below. The Pleiades will be a tough catch even in binoculars as dawn grows bright. Instead, try 60 or 70 minutes before sunrise.

■ Bonus! Mars and Uranus are in conjunction a mere 0.1° apart at the beginning of dawn Saturday morning the 4th. Mars is magnitude 1.3 and Uranus is mag 5.8, one sixtieth as bright but fairly plain in binoculars or a telescope if you look early enough before dawn gets too bright. Be outside looking low about 1 hour 40 minutes before sunrise. For North Americans, Uranus will be just above Mars. An 8.3-magnitude star is between them (good luck with that).

SATURDAY, JULY 4

■ Comparing Hercules globular clusters. M13 in the edge of the Keystone of Hercules is famous as one of the best and brightest globular star clusters in the sky. It's now nearly overhead after dark. But part of its fame is due to its easily findable location. Less known is its near-twin "great cluster in Hercules," M92 in sparser wilderness 9½° to the northeast, as shown below. M92 is only slightly smaller that M13 and has a look of its own.

"To really appreciate the personalities of these two Hercules clusters, try rapidly going back and forth between them," Matt Wedel once wrote in his Binocular Highlight Sky & Telescope column. "Most of the visible differences are down to physical size, with M13 being almost twice as massive as M92. Regardless, each is worthy of the title 'showpiece object.' "

SUNDAY, JULY 5

■ And while you're doing globulars, here's a rather different one. Explore the area around Antares using Matt's column and chart in the June 2026 Sky & Telescope, page 43. In Antares's binocular field is M4, bigger and closer to us but less condensed (compact) than M13 and M92. M4, being closer, is more easily resolvable into stars than most globulars are.

■ The Moon finally rises in the east around midnight tonight; it's nearing last quarter. An hour later Saturn rises to the Moon's lower left. By the beginning of dawn they're high in the south-southeast, possibly in good, steady atmospheric seeing for a telescope at high power. Last fall Saturn turned its rings edge-on to us. The rings now are still dramatically narrow, with a tilt of 9° to our line of sight.

MONDAY, JULY 6

■ On the eastern side of the sky, the Summer Triangle holds sway after dark. Its top star is Vega, the brightest. Two fists to Vega's lower left is lesser Deneb. Altair is the brightest star farther to their lower right.

After complete nightfall, with the Moon not yet risen, perhaps you can see the Milky Way (if you're not too light-polluted) running grandly just inside the Triangle's bottom edge. This stretch of the Milky Way includes the Cygnus Star Cloud, one of its most star-rich regions. That's because when we look toward Cygnus, we're looking downstream through the local arm of our galaxy.

That's also the direction we're flying at 220 kilometers per second in the Sun's orbital motion around the center of the Milky Way.

■ As evening grows late and even Altair rises high, look lower left of Altair, by hardly more than a fist, for the compact little constellation Delphinus, the Dolphin.

Did you get it? Then try for even fainter, smaller Sagitta, the Arrow. It's to Altair's upper left just a little closer. The Arrow points toward lower left, past the nose of Delphinus.

■ Earth is at aphelion today, our farthest distance from the Sun for the year. But the difference is small. At perihelion in January, we're just 3.4% closer to the Sun than we are now. Earth's orbit is almost circular; it's an ellipse with eccentricity 0.0167.

TUESDAY, JULY 7

■ Last-quarter Moon (exact at 3:29 p.m. EDT). The half-lit Moon rises in the east around midnight or 1 a.m. tonight (depending mostly on how far east or west you live in your time zone).

As the Moon gets higher spot Saturn about a fist to its right, and the two or three brightest stars of Aries a similar distance to the Moon's left. By the beginning of Wednesday's dawn, this array is much higher.

WEDNESDAY, JULY 8

■ Soon after nightfall, look due south for orange Antares on the meridian. Around and upper right of Antares are the other, whiter stars forming the distinctive pattern of upper Scorpius. The rest of the Scorpion runs down from Antares toward the horizon, then left.

Three doubles at the top of Scorpius. The head of Scorpius — a near-vertical row of three stars — stands upper right of Antares. The top star of the row is Beta (ß) Scorpii or Graffias: a fine double star for telescopes, separation 13 arcseconds, magnitudes 2.8 and 5.0. (They're unresolved in the photo below.)

Just 1° below Beta is the very wide naked-eye pair Omega¹ and Omega² Scorpii. They're 4th magnitude and ¼° apart. Binoculars show their slight color difference; they're spectral types B9 and G2.

Upper left of Beta by 1.6° is Nu Scorpii, separation 41 arcseconds, magnitudes 3.8 and 6.5. In fact it's a telescopic triple. High power in good seeing reveals Nu's brighter component itself to be a close binary, separation 2 arcseconds, magnitudes 4.0 and 5.3, aligned almost north-south.

THURSDAY, JULY 9

■ Catch Venus low in the west as twilight fades. It's now having its conjunction with Regulus, much fainter, 1° under it as shown below. Binoculars will help reveal Regulus through the twilight.

■ More Scorpius: To the right of Antares is that vertical row of Beta, Delta, and Pi Scorpii; the see photo above. The middle one, Delta Sco, is the brightest — obviously so. But it didn't used to be. It used to be like Beta.

Delta is a strange variable star, a fast-rotating blue subgiant throwing off luminous gas from its equator. Assumed for centuries to be stable, Delta doubled in brightness unexpectedly in summer 2000, then dipped down and up again several times from 2005 to 2010, and has remained essentially steady at peak brightness (magnitude 1.8) ever since. If anything, it has gained a little under a tenth of a magnitude in these last 15 years.

Delta has a smaller orbiting companion star that was suspected to trigger activity at 10.5-year intervals. Astronomers watched to see whether the system would have another flareup around 2022, when the companion star made its third pass by the primary star since 2000. But nothing happened. No one knows what might happen next, or when.

FRIDAY, JULY 10

■ In early dawn tomorrow the 11th, look east-northeast for the waning crescent Moon forming a diagonal line with Mars and Aldebaran under it, as shown below.

SATURDAY, JULY 11

■ The Big Dipper, high in the northwest as evening advances, is beginning to turn around to "scoop up water" through the hours and months to come.

■ And low in the north-northeast after dark, the upright W of Cassiopeia is slowly beginning to tilt and climb.

SUNDAY, JULY 12

■ Look low in the northwest or north at the end of these long summer twilights. Would you recognize noctilucent clouds if you saw them? They're the most astronomical of all cloud types, what with their extreme altitude and, sometimes, their formation on meteoric dust particles. They used to be rare, but they've become more common in recent years as the atmosphere changes. See Bob King's Nights of Noctilucent Clouds.

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This Week's Planet Roundup

Mercury is hidden in conjunction with the Sun.

Venus shines brightly (magnitude –4.1) as the "Evening Star" in the west in twilight. It's getting just a little lower every week. It now sets shortly after full dark.

This week Venus passes Regulus, only 1/160 as bright at magnitude +1.4. On Friday July 3rd, look for Regulus 7° to Venus's upper left. By Thursday July 9th, their conjunction date, Venus will be just 1° above Regulus. Binoculars will help in the twilight.

In a telescope, Venus is a brilliant little gibbous disk 65% sunlit and 17 arcseconds from pole to pole. Catch it as soon after sunset as you can, before it sinks low into poorer atmospheric seeing.

Venus will remain in twilight view until the end of the summer, enlarging while waning in phase.

Mars, magnitude +1.3 in Taurus, glows fairly low in the east in early dawn. Below it twinkles Aldebaran, similar to Mars in color and brightness. Above them are the Pleiades.

Jupiter is lost in the sunset.

Saturn (magnitude +0.8, at the Pisces-Cetus border) rises in the east around 1 a.m. Find it below the Great Square of Pegasus. It's nicely placed high in the southeast before dawn, the brightest thing in that area. (Don't confuse Saturn with Fomalhaut, its near-twin in brightness, twinkling four fists down to Saturn's lower right.)

Late last fall Saturn's rings turned nearly edged-on to Earth and almost disappeared. Now the rings' inclination is back up to 9°, still dramatically narrow but quite Saturn-like again.

Uranus (magnitude 5.8, in Taurus) hides in the distance near Mars.

Neptune (magnitude 7.9, at the Pisces/Cetus border) is up in the early morning hours 10° west of Saturn. You'll need detained finder charts for Uranus and Neptune.

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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 and graphics that also depend on longitude (mainly Moon positions) are for North America. Eastern Daylight Time (EDT) is Universal Time minus 4 hours. UT is also known as UTC, GMT, or Z time.

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Want to become a better astronomer? Learn your way around the constellations. They're the key to locating everything fainter and deeper to hunt with binoculars or a telescope.

This is an outdoor nature hobby. For a more detailed constellation guide covering the whole evening sky, use the big monthly map in the center of each issue of Sky & Telescope, the essential magazine of astronomy.

For the attitude every amateur astronomer needs, read Jennifer Willis's Modest Expectations Give Rise to Delight.

Once you get a telescope, to put it to good use you'll want a much more detailed, large-scale sky atlas (set of charts). The basic standard is the Pocket Sky Atlas, in either the original or Jumbo Edition. Both show all 30,000 stars to magnitude 7.6, and 1,500 deep-sky targets — star clusters, nebulae, and galaxies — to search out among them.

Next up is the larger and deeper Sky Atlas 2000.0, plotting stars to magnitude 8.5; nearly three times as many, as well as many more deep-sky objects. It's currently out of print, but maybe you can find one used.

The next up, once you know your way around well, are the even larger Interstellarum Deep-Sky Atlas (with 201,000+ stars to magnitude 9.5 and 14,000 deep-sky objects selected to be detectable by eye in very large amateur telescopes), and Uranometria 2000.0 (332,000 stars to mag 9.75, and 10,300 deep-sky objects).

For the necessary tricks, read How to Use a Star Chart with a Telescope. It applies just as much to electronic charts on your phone or tablet — which many observers find handier and more versatile, if sometimes less well designed and contextualized.

You'll also want a good deep-sky guidebook. A beloved old classic is the three-volume Burnham's Celestial Handbook. It was my bedside reading for years. An impressive more modern one is the big Night Sky Observer's Guide set (2+ volumes) by Kepple and Sanner. The pinnacle for total astro-geeks is the new Annals of the Deep Sky series, currently at 11 volumes as it works its way forward through the constellations alphabetically. So far it's up to H.

Can computerized telescopes replace charts? Well, I used to say this:

"Not for beginners, I don't think, unless you prefer spending your time getting finicky technology to work rather than learning how to explore through the sky yourself. As Terence Dickinson and Alan Dyer say in their Backyard Astronomer's Guide, '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 and a curious mind.' Without these, 'the sky never becomes a friendly place.' "

But things change. The technology has continued to improve and become more user-friendly — particularly with "plate solving" software that can now recognize any star field to determine exactly where the telescope is pointed — finally bypassing all aiming imperfections in the mount, tripod, gears, bearings and other mechanics, or in the user's skill in setting up.

The latest revolution is the rise of small, photography-only "smartscopes." These take advantage of not only today's pointing technology, but also the vastly better capabilities of imaging chips and image processing compared to the human retina and visual cortex. The most sophisticated image stacking and processing can come built right in. The result is decent deep-sky imaging from shockingly small units, relatively low priced. The image may be viewable on your phone or computer as it builds up in real time. Some can directly enable contributions to citizen-science projects.

Smartscopes are changing the hobby at the entry level. For more on this see Richard Wright's "The Rise of the Smart Telescopes" in the November 2025 Sky & Telescope. And read the magazine's review of this especially small one.

If you get a larger, more conventional computerized scope that you can look through, make sure that its drives can be disengaged so you can swing it around and point it readily by hand when you want to, rather than only slowly by the electric motors (which eat batteries).

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Audio sky tour. Out under the evening sky with your
earbuds in place, listen to Kelly Beatty's monthly
podcast tour of the naked-eye heavens above. It's free.

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"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, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

 

"Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence."
            — John Adams, 1770, in the summation of his unpopular, but successful, defense of British soldiers in the Boston Massacre trial

 

"Truly, whoever can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."
            — Voltaire, 1765, Questions sur les miracles

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