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Binoculars can reveal deep space objects
For July, the Moon will be just past full on July 1st. This is the Hay or Thunder moon, depending on the culture. The first two weeks of July will thus find the Moon waning and rising later each evening. Last quarter moon is on July 7th, and the waning crescent moon passes above Mars in morning sky on July 9th. The new moon occurs on July 14th, so the last two weeks find the moon waxing in the evening sky. On July 16, the waxing crescent moon will approach Saturn in evening twilight. Next evening, the waxing crescent moon Passes Regulus then Venus. First quarter moon sits high in the sky and half-lit at sunset on July 22nd. Approaching full, the moon passes just below Jupiter again on July 25th.
While the naked eye, dark adapted by several minutes away from any bright lights, is a wonderful instrument to stare up into deep space, far beyond our own Milky Way, binoculars are better for spotting specific deep sky objects. For a detailed map of northern hemisphere skies, about June 30th visit the www.skymaps.com website and download the map for July 2007; it will have a more extensive calendar, and list of best objects for the naked eyes, binoculars, and scopes on the back of the map. Also available as the next month begins is wonderful video exploring the July 2007 sky, featuring many different objects, available from the Hubble Space Telescope website at: http://hubblesite.org/explorea stronomy/tonightssky/.
 | | ABOVE: Ring Nebula, M-57 in Lyra is seen above through EAAA member Bill Cristea's scope. This famed Ring Nebula reveals itself as a cosmic smoke ring, and shows the tiny white dwarf star in its center, weighing as much as the Sun, but collapsed to the size of the Earth, its matter packed a million times more densely than normal for us on earth. |
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Venus dominates the west still, passing very close to Saturn on July 1st. She appears as a large crescent, 36 % lit on July 1stth, but is only 25% lit at her greatest brilliancy on July 14th; almost 40" across, her crescent will be easily resolved with 7- 10X binoculars by now. She will retrograde between us and the Sun in July 2007, dropping lower in the west each evening. She appears only 10% sunlit at month's end, but now 50" across. She passes between us and the Sun at inferior conjunction on August 18th. She reappears in September to the right of the Sun, in the morning sky. Covered with sulfuric acid clouds, her bright disk reveals no visible details in the scopes.
Saturn is named for the god of time (Chronos in Greek) because he moves so slowly. Much faster Venus overtakes him in the west on July 1st, with Venus passes about a moon diameter (.7 degrees) below Saturn then. Saturn's rings are closing now, and will vanish edge-on at its 2010 equinox. It disappears into the Sun's glare by the month's end.
Overhead, the Big Dipper rides high at sunset, but falls lower in NW each evening. Good scouts know to take its leading pointers north to Polaris, the famed Pole Star. For us, it sits 30 degrees (our latitude) high in the north, while the rotating earth beneath makes all the other celestial bodies spin around it from east to west.
If you drop south from the bowl of the Big Dipper, Leo the Lion is in the SW. Saturn lies just west of the bright star Regulus, the heart of the King of Beasts. Note the Egyptian Sphinx is based on the shape of this Lion in the sky. Venus passes Regulus on July 13; it is almost exactly 100X brighter than this first magnitude star then.
Taking the arc in the Dipper's handle, we "arc" SE to bright orange Arcturus, the brightest star of Spring. Cooler than our yellow Sun, and much poorer in heavy elements, some believe its strange motion reveals it to be an invading star from another smaller galaxy, now colliding with the Milky Way in Sagittarius in the summer sky. Moving almost perpendicular to the plane of our Milky Way, Arcturus was the first star in the sky where its proper motion across the historic sky was noted, by Edmund Halley.
Spike south to Spica, the hot blue star in Virgo, then curve to Corvus the Crow, a four sided grouping. It is above Corvus, in the arms of Virgo, where our large scopes will show members of the Virgo Supercluster, a swarm of over a thousand galaxies about 50 million light years away from us.
To the east, Hercules is rising, with the nice globular cluster M- 13 marked on your sky map and visible in binocs. Several other good globular clusters are also shown and listed on the best binoc objects on the map back page.
The brightest star of the northern hemisphere, Vega (from Carl Sagan's novel and movie, "Contact"), rises in the NE as twilight deepens. Twice as hot as our Sun, it appears blue-white, like most bright stars. At the bottom of the parallogram of Lyra is the famed Ring Nebula. Photograph of this cosmic smoke ring shows the tiny white dwarf star in its center, weighing as much as the Sun, but collapsed to the size of the Earth, with matter packed a million times denser than normal for us.
To the south, Antares rises about the same time in Scorpius. It appears reddish (its Greek name means rival of Ares or Mars to the Latins) because it is half as hot as our yellow Sun; it is bright because it is a bloated red supergiant, big enough to swallow up our solar system all the way out to Saturn's orbit!
Just a little NE of Antares, and much brighter, giant Jupiter dominates the SE sky. Any small scope will reveal what Galileo marveled at in 1609; four large moons, all bigger or similar to ours in size, orbit it in a line along Jupiter's equator. So get out the old scope, and focus on Jupiter for a constantly changing dance of the moons around the giant world.
We plan to come back out the Ft. Pickens again this summer, with gazes now set for July 13th and August 10th. (Perseid Meteor Shower Watch!). We hope you can make all of them! Bring along your digital cameras to capture the rings of Saturn, Jupiter and moons, galaxies, clusters, and other cool stuff off our live video feed from the large telescopes we use there.
For more information on the
Escambia Amateur Astronomers,
visit our website, or call our sponsor, Dr.Wayne Wooten at PJC at (850) 484-1152, or e-mail him at
wwooten@pjc.edu. We have just
issued a CD photo gallery of the
best images by EAAA members,
called "Star Shooting". It is available for a $10 donation to the
EAAA; contact Dr.Wooten if
interested.
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