Although high summer, if you don’t mind burning the midnight oil, it’s worth waiting for the sun to sink below the horizon. Around mid-month look low down towards the western horizon to see the bright star Regulus in the constellation Leo, while opposite, just above the eastern horizon, Altair – the brightest star in Aquila – begins to show.
Let us begin by finding the familiar asterism of the Plough. Its two brightest stars ‘the pointers’ show the way to our pole star, while at the opposite end, the last star in the Plough’s handle will point down towards a bright naked-eye star Arcturus in Bootes. This star is easily picked out because of its obvious orange colour. Let’s just stop here and, using Arcturus, look for a small naked-eye circlet of stars.
This little constellation of Corona Borealis is to the left and a little above Arcturus. From here gaze left of the crown to find Hercules, a sprawling constellation with its most obvious bit being the four naked-eye stars that seem to form a lop-sided square.
Now back to Corona Borealis. Using a pair of binoculars, slowly move them down towards the southern horizon. Halfway between Corona and the horizon you should detect a wavy line of stars pointing downwards. This is the constellation Serpens Caput. Your binoculars will show the brightest star of this line as being orange, something like the more obvious Arcturus. Once you have identified this star, focus the binoculars and slowly move to the right and thinking about a clock face move towards what would be the four o’clock position. Can you see a dull fuzzy object? this is M5 a splendid globular cluster. It may not look much in binoculars, but it contains many stars, perhaps as many as 100,000, and it lies roughly 26,000 light-years from Earth.
If you can’t wait until late, then early evening sees two bright naked-eye planets Venus and Jupiter. They are shining above the west-northwestern horizon. Watch as they appear to come closer to each other before passing each other. They are heading for what we call a conjunction. This means we see an optical illusion. They will appear to be close to each other but in fact they are far apart from one another. Venus will be the brightest of the two and on the evening of the 9th the apparent distance between them will be just one and a half degrees. This is roughly what seeing three full moons side by side looks like. On the 17th about 10pm you should see Venus above a very thin crescent moon.
If you have a good clear western horizon then once the sun has set about 11pm look for Noctilucent clouds, or night shining clouds. Due to ice crystals and forming around 80 kilometres altitude watch for blue/grey wispy features, sometimes showing herringbone or zigzag pattern. A relative modern phenomenon first seen 1885/6, they only appear in our latitudes May/August and were once very rare but recent years more sightings have been noted.
Our moon is new on 15th, its full on 29th. On 25th it will be low on the southern horizon in Libra and by 27th it will be in Scorpius.
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