The May Sky

.....There are many books and websites to help people who are good at astronomy become really good at astronomy, and many books and websites to (apparently) help people who live in the country where the sky gets what could actually considered to be dark (or at least where you don't have a direct line-of-sight to eight outdoor lights), but a lot of this can be counterproductive if you are just trying to start out, or if you just live where the sky is bright enough to hide a lot of the stars from you. Hopefully, this blog can be useful in both of these cases, but I realized that I might lose some of the benefits of talking about constellations if you aren't able to easily find those things in the first place, so I made a series of maps.

.....All of these maps show the sky as it is seen from the latitudes of the northern US about eleven PM (tonight), or about when the sky finally gets dark. The first map just shows the brightest stars, so while the constellation figures are missing stars, hopefully this stripped-down maps will help you find those constellations to begin with. (As you might see in just a moment here, sometimes star maps that have all visible stars can seem a lttle "busy", and be hard to follow. Also, in all maps the constellations in blue are the ones that have already been discussed in some depth in a blog post, and the constellations in red are the ones that I have yet to get to. Looks like a busy summer.)

.....Heck, even just giving these constellations might not be that helpful. After all, what I have is a representation of the sky as the inside of a giant bowl, flattened out and seen from the inside. In the spring and early summer, the Big Dipper can be used to find the North Star at the tail of Ursa Minor (the Little Dipper), Regulus, the brightest star in Leo, and following the arc of the stars of the handle leads to Acrturus, in Boötes, and then on to Spica, in Virgo.

.....With that (hopefully) as a means to help you find the constellations of the brighter stars, here is a map of the whole sky, helping you if you do live somewhere where the whole sky can be seen, and perhaps frusting you a little bit if you don't.

.....Note that the planets Mars and Saturn are both visible in our evenings! Both planets are about as bright as the star Spica, the brightest star in Virgo (and the end of the great arc from the Big Dipper's handle) Mars does not show much (to me, at least) beyond a disk in a telescope, but Saturn looks so phenomenal as to almost seem fake in even the smallest telescope. If you have anything, even an old department store cardboard 'scope, give Saturn a try!

.....As always, individual maps can be downloaded from this site.