The June Sky, 2012

.....I am going to start a project on midsummer's night, but I'll talk more about that then.  Before I get to that to point, I hope to go through the types of things that can be seen in sky, as well as the different ways in which you can observe the skies (eyes, binoculars, telescope).  I hope you will be surprised by how much it is possible to see!

.....For now, here is an image of the night sky for June of this year.  This is an attempt to replicate the apparent bowl of the night sky on a flat screen (or piece of paper, if you print it out).  If you have never used one of these, if you are facing, say, south, then the stars above the "S" on the map will be aligned above the southern horizon.  If you are facing east, then turn the screen so that the "E"is at the bottom (maybe it would be easier to print this out), and those stars will be above the eastern horizon.

.....The brighter the star, the larger the dot on the map.  Star brightnesses are described by "magnitudes", in which lower numbers are brighter.  A star of the first magnitude is bright, while a star of the sixth magnitude is typically the faintest star that can be seen by the unaided eye.  My map has stars down to the fifth magnitude, because including all of the stars down to the sixth magnitude, both because this would leave the map crowded, and because most people are located where city lights drown out many of the fainter stars.  As a comparison, here it what these stars would look like if only the first magnitude stars were visible:

.....The view of the sky could be confusing, so the sky has been divided up into constellations.  The "official" set of constellations come from the Romans ... well, they have Roman names, but the figures were largely taken from Greek mythology ... except for the ones taken from Babylonian and Indian mythology.  The constellations with names printed in blue have already been discussed in blog articles here: Ursa Major, Ursa Minor, Bootes and Corona Borealis, Serpens and Ophiuchus, Libra, Scorpius, Hercules, Cygnus, Lyra, Draco and Aquila.  I hope to add more as quickly as I can.