Friday, June 3
Saturday, June 4
Sunday, June 5
Monday, June 6
Tuesday, June 7
Wednesday, June 8
Thursday, June 9
Friday, June 10
Saturday, June 11
Want to become a better amateur astronomer? Learn your way around the constellations. They're the key to locating everything fainter and deeper to hunt with binoculars or a telescope.
For an easy-to-use 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. Or download our free Getting Started in Astronomy booklet (which only has bimonthly maps).
Once you get a telescope, to put it to good use you must have a detailed, large-scale sky atlas (set of charts). The standards are the Pocket Sky Atlas, which shows stars to magnitude 7.6; the larger Sky Atlas 2000.0 (stars to magnitude 8.5); and the even larger and deeper Uranometria 2000.0 (stars to magnitude 9.75). And read how to use sky charts effectively.
You'll also want a good deep-sky guidebook, such as Sky Atlas 2000.0 Companion by Strong and Sinnott, or the more detailed and descriptive Night Sky Observer's Guide by Kepple and Sanner, or the classic if dated Burnham's Celestial Handbook.
Can a computerized telescope take their place? I don't think so — not for beginners, anyway, and especially not on mounts that are less than top-quality mechanically. 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."
This Week's Planet Roundup
Mercury is lost in the glow of sunrise.
Venus (magnitude –3.8) shines very low as dawn grows bright. Look for it low above the east-northeast horizon 20 or 30 minutes before sunrise.
Mars (vastly fainter at magnitude +1.3) is moving increasingly away to Venus's upper right. Try for it with binoculars.
Jupiter (magnitude –2.1, at the Aries-Pisces border) rises around the first light of dawn is and well up in good view in the east before dawn becomes too bright. Venus is far to its lower left.
Saturn (magnitude +0.7, in Virgo) is in excellent evening view high in the south. And just ¼° to its upper right is fainter Porrima (Gamma Virginis), turning Saturn into a naked-eye "double star"! This week Saturn is the closest it will get to Porrima. Shining 15° to their left or lower left is Spica.
In a telescope Saturn's rings are 7.3° from edge on, their minimum tilt for more than a decade to come. The rings are casting a relatively wide, prominent black shadow southward onto the globe, and the globe's shadow on the rings is visible just off the globe's celestial east (following) side. The six-months-old white outbreak in the southern hemisphere is still active, as shown here; read more about this huge storm as studied from the Cassini Saturn orbiter and the Very Large Telescope in Chile.
See how many of Saturn's satellites you can identify in your scope using our Saturn's Moons tracker.
And don't skip over Porrima — it's a fine, close telescopic binary with equal components and a current separation of 1.7 arcseconds. Use high power and hope for good seeing. See the article in the April Sky & Telescope, page 56.
Uranus (magnitude 5.9, in western Pisces) is low in the east before the first light of dawn.
Neptune (magnitude 7.9, in Aquarius) is in the southeast before dawn.
Pluto (magnitude 14 in Sagittarius) is highest in the south before dawn. A big finder chart for it is in the July Sky & Telescope, page 64.
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) equals Universal Time (also known as UT, UTC, or GMT) minus 4 hours.
To be sure to get the current Sky at a Glance, bookmark this URL:
http://SkyandTelescope.com/observing/ataglance?1=1
If pictures fail to load, refresh the page. If they still fail to load, change the 1 at the end of the URL to any other character and try again.
Comments
You must be logged in to post a comment.