Rings Around the May Sky

.....I love looking at the stars, and I, like a lot of other people, want to help other people recognize what is there to be seen, but if you look at a star map in a magazine like Astronomy or Sky & Telescope, or at a useful web site such as Heavens Above, you will get a skyful of constellations, but you might not have the experience or confidence to use all this. As we go through the sky constellation by constellation, I will add these into the mix.

.....So far, we have only covered the Big Dipper and the bright stars that we can find with the Big Dipper ... plus one. We start with the Big Dipper and stars as it is seen at 10 PM on May first (which is, admittedly, well past). At the beginning of each month, I will post a view of the night sky at 10 PM. Will this be uniformly useful? Often not. In the summer, it might not even be dark at ten, and in the winter it will have been dark for several hours, but this will still be helpful if you observe within a few hours of 10 PM. The map is also set up to show the sky from 44 degrees north, pretty close for most of the northern United States and well set up for Europe, but a viewer in the southern US or Japan would only notice a slight shift in the positions of the stars. SO let's take a look ...

.....Added to this set of stars is the one bright planet visible in the evening sky, Saturn. (Sorry, SATURN!!) If you ave a telescope of even the smallest size gathering dust in a closet, you should definitely get that out, because Saturn is one of the few things in the sky that actually looks like it's supposed to. As I go through the sky, there will be a lot of deep sky objects that can be found in a telescope that (I know from bitter experience) get a response of, "So, is that it? The little fuzzy bit?" Saturn, in a telescope looks like *&^%&^* Saturn. Saturn's rings are clearly visible in even the smallest telescope, and you will definitely know that you have found them. On a good night, the Cassini division, the dark line between the two rings is visible, and Titan - the largest moon of Titan, and the only moon with an atmosphere (but it's still no Yavin IV).