FRIDAY, JUNE 26
■ This evening the Moon shines under the three-star head of summery Scorpius, as shown below. Orange Antares, the Scorpion’s 1st-magnitude heart, glimmers 5° or 6° to the Moon’s left. That’s about three finger-widths at arm’s length.
SATURDAY, JUNE 27
■ Now the waxing gibbous Moon shines lower left or left of Antares, again by about 6°, as shown above.
■ This is the time of year when the two brightest stars of summer, Arcturus and Vega, shine about equally high overhead shortly after dark: Arcturus toward the southwest, Vega toward the east.
Arcturus and Vega are 37 and 25 light-years away, respectively. They represent the two commonest types of naked-eye star: a yellow-orange K giant and a white A main-sequence star. They’re 150 and 50 times brighter than the Sun, respectively — which, combined with their nearness, is why they dominate the evening sky.
SUNDAY, JUNE 28
■ These evenings the main stars of the little constellation Lyra, forming a small triangle and parallelogram, dangle down from bright Vega high in the east. The two brightest stars of the pattern after Vega are the two forming the bottom of the parallelogram: Beta and Gamma Lyrae, Sheliak and Sulafat. They’re currently lined up almost vertically when you face them. Beta is the one on top.
Beta Lyrae is an eclipsing variable star. Compare it to Gamma whenever you look up at Lyra. For much of the time Beta is only a trace dimmer than Gamma. Eventually, however, you’ll catch Beta when it is quite obviously dimmer than usual.
The orbital period of this interacting binary is 1.4 hours short of exactly 13 days. So, throughout any given year’s observing season, expect its behavior to nearly repeat every two weeks minus a day.
Beta Lyrae’s exact brightness varies continuously, as shown in the light curve below. Data courtesy AAVSO.
Twist Lyra’s pattern by 30° counterclockwise around Vega to match its orientation soon after dark at this time of year.
MONDAY, JUNE 29
■ Full Moon (exact at 7:57 p.m. EDT). For the Americas the Moon rises soon after sunset, on the horizon directly opposite where the Sun went down.
Nighttime reveals that the Moon is at the handle of the Sagittarius Teapot — if the sky isn’t too hazy. To help bring out the Teapot’s 2nd- and 3rd-magnitude stars, cover the Moon with your fingertip to hide its bright glare. Or better, use two fingertips, one for each eye. Close one eye and position a fingertip onto the Moon. Then, holding very still, do the same for the other eye with another finger. Now open both eyes.
TUESDAY, JUNE 30
■ Star colors are mostly subtle, and different people have an easier or harder time seeing them. To me, the tints of bright stars show a little better in a late-twilight sky than in a fully dark sky.
For instance, the two brightest stars of summer are Vega, high in the east in late twilight, and Arcturus, even higher in the southwest. Vega is white with just a touch of icy blue. Arcturus is a pale yellow-orange giant. Do their colors stand out a little better for you against the deep blue late twilight? How about against the neutral dim gray of the moonlit sky tonight after twilight is over?
Binoculars, of course, always make star colors much easier.
WEDNESDAY, JULY 1
■ The waning gibbous Moon rises in the east-southeast around the end of twilight. The Big Summer Triangle hangs high above it. The triangle’s highest and brightest star is Vega; look for it very high due east around moonrise.
Halfway up from the Moon to Vega shines Altair, the Summer Triangle’s second-brightest star. Above Altair by a finger-width at arm’s length is little orange Tarazed (Gamma Aquilae), Altair’s eternal sidekick marker. Tarazed is a modest magnitude 2.7; Altair is showy 0.7. But looks are deceiving. Altair looks so bright because it’s one of our near neighbors, just 17 light-years away. Tarazed is an orange giant about 380 light-years farther in the background — and it’s 170 times as luminous as Altair!
THURSDAY, JULY 2
■ The Big Dipper, high in the northwest as evening advances, is beginning to turn around to “scoop up water” through the hours and months to come.
■ And low in the north-northeast after dark, the upright W of Cassiopeia is slowly beginning to tilt and climb.
FRIDAY, JULY 3
■ After Venus is in easy view in the western twilight, keep your eyes out for Regulus to glimmer into view 6½° to its left or lower left, as shown below. At magnitude +1.3, Regulus is only 1/150 as bright as Venus, magnitude –4.1.
And then watch 9° upper right of Regulus for yellower Gamma Leonis (Algieba). It’s half as bright with a total magnitude of +2.0 (the total of its two lovely telescopic components, separation 4.7 arcseconds).
And then as night comes on, watch for the four other stars of the Sickle of Leo:
■ If you happen to be up very early on the July 4th holiday, look low in the east for Mars between Aldebaran (its near twin) and the Pleiades, as shown below. The Pleiades will be a tough catch even in binoculars as dawn grows bright; instead, try 60 or 70 minutes before sunrise.
■ Bonus! Mars and Uranus are in conjunction a mere 0.1° apart at the beginning of dawn this morning. Mars is magnitude 1.3 and Uranus is mag 5.8, one sixtieth as bright but fairly plain in binoculars or a telescope if you look early enough before dawn gets too bright. Be out looking low about 1 hour 45 minutes before sunrise. For North Americans, Uranus will be just above Mars. An 8.3-magnitude star is between them (good luck with that).
SATURDAY, JULY 4
■ Comparing Hercules globular clusters. M13 in the edge of the Keystone of Hercules is famous as one of the best and brightest globular star clusters in the sky, now nearly overhead after dark. But part of its fame is due to its easily findable location. Less known is its near-twin “great cluster in Hercules,” M92 in sparser wilderness 9½° to the northeast, as shown below. M92 is only slightly smaller that M13 and has a look of its own.
Celestial east is roughly down and celestial north is roughly to the left; this is the scene as you see it when facing east and looking overhead these early-summer evenings.
Starry Night Pro
“To really appreciate the personalities of these two Hercules clusters, try rapidly going back and forth between them,” Matt Wedel once wrote in his Binocular Highlight Sky & Telescope column. “Most of the visible differences are down to physical size, with M13 being almost twice as massive as M92. Regardless, each is worthy of the title ‘showpiece object.’ “
SUNDAY, JULY 5
■ And while you’re doing globulars, here’s a rather different one. Explore the area around Antares using Matt’s column and chart in the June 2026 Sky & Telescope, page 43. In Antares’s binocular field is M4, bigger and closer to us but less condensed (compact) than M13 and M92. In a telescope M4, being closer, is more easily resolvable into stars than most globulars are.
■ The Moon finally rises in the east around midnight tonight; it’s nearing last quarter. An hour later Saturn rises to the Moon’s lower left. By the beginning of dawn they’re high in the south-southeast, possibly in good, steady atmospheric seeing for a telescope at high power. Last fall Saturn turned its rings edge-on to us. The rings now are still dramatically narrow with a tilt of 9° to our line of sight.
This Week’s Planet Roundup
Mercury is lost in the sunset.
Venus shines brightly (magnitude –4.1) as the “Evening Star” in the west during and just after twilight. It’s getting a little lower every week now. It sets shortly after full dark.
In a telescope, Venus a brilliant little gibbous disk two-thirds sunlit and 15 arcseconds from pole to pole. Catch it as early in twilight as you can locate it before it gets low in poorer atmospheric seeing. Venus will remain in twilight view for most of the summer, enlarging while waning in phase.
Mars, magnitude +1.3 in Taurus, glimmers low in the east-southeast in early dawn, moving eastward against the stars. Look for it far lower left of Saturn, about four or five fists at arm’s length.
Below Mars is twinklier Aldebaran, its near-twin for color and brightness. Above Mars are the Pleiades. The cluster, planet, and star form a perfectly straight line on the morning of July 5th.
Jupiter, magnitude –1.8, is disappearing into the glow of sunset. You might still try for it about two fists lower right of Venus. Bring binoculars. And thus does Jupiter end its 2025-26 apparition.
Saturn, magnitude +0.8 at the Pisces-Cetus border, rises in the east around 1 a.m. below the Great Square of Pegasus. Catch it glowing high in the southeast before dawn. It’s the brightest thing in that area. (Don’t confuse Saturn with Fomalhaut, its near-twin in brightness, twinkling four fists down to Saturn’s lower right in the south.)
Uranus, magnitude 5.8, hides in the distance near Mars in Taurus.
Neptune, magnitude 7.9, is 10° west of Saturn in the early morning hours.
All descriptions that relate to your horizon — including the words up, down, right, and left — are written for the world’s mid-northern latitudes. Descriptions and graphics that also depend on longitude (mainly Moon positions) are for North America. Eastern Daylight Time (EDT) is Universal Time minus 4 hours. UT is also known as UTC, GMT, or Z time.
Want to become a better astronomer? Learn your way around the constellations. They’re the key to locating everything fainter and deeper to hunt with binoculars or a telescope.
This is an outdoor nature hobby. For a more detailed constellation guide covering the whole evening sky, use the big monthly map in the center of each issue of Sky & Telescope, the essential magazine of astronomy.
For the attitude every amateur astronomer needs, read Jennifer Willis’s Modest Expectations Give Rise to Delight.
Once you get a telescope, to put it to good use you’ll want a much more detailed, large-scale sky atlas (set of charts). The basic standard is the Pocket Sky Atlas, in either the original or Jumbo Edition. Both show all 30,000 stars to magnitude 7.6, and 1,500 deep-sky targets — star clusters, nebulae, and galaxies — to search out among them.
Next up is the larger and deeper Sky Atlas 2000.0, plotting stars to magnitude 8.5; nearly three times as many, as well as many more deep-sky objects. It’s currently out of print, but maybe you can find one used.
The next up, once you know your way around well, are the even larger Interstellarum Deep-Sky Atlas (with 201,000+ stars to magnitude 9.5 and 14,000 deep-sky objects selected to be detectable by eye in very large amateur telescopes), and Uranometria 2000.0 (332,000 stars to mag 9.75, and 10,300 deep-sky objects).
For the necessary tricks, read How to Use a Star Chart with a Telescope. It applies just as much to electronic charts on your phone or tablet — which many observers find handier and more versatile, if sometimes less well designed and contextualized.
You’ll also want a good deep-sky guidebook. A beloved old classic is the three-volume Burnham’s Celestial Handbook. It was my bedside reading for years. An impressive more modern one is the big Night Sky Observer’s Guide set (2+ volumes) by Kepple and Sanner. The pinnacle for total astro-geeks is the new Annals of the Deep Sky series, currently at 11 volumes as it works its way forward through the constellations alphabetically. So far it’s up to H.
Can computerized telescopes replace charts? Well, I used to say this:
“Not for beginners, I don’t think, unless you prefer spending your time getting finicky technology to work rather than learning how to explore through the sky yourself. As Terence Dickinson and Alan Dyer say in their Backyard Astronomer’s Guide, ‘A full appreciation of the universe cannot come without developing the skills to find things in the sky and understanding how the sky works. This knowledge comes only by spending time under the stars with star maps in hand and a curious mind.’ Without these, ‘the sky never becomes a friendly place.’ “
But things change. The technology has continued to improve and become more user-friendly — particularly with “plate solving” software that can now recognize any star field to determine exactly where the telescope is pointed — finally bypassing all aiming imperfections in the mount, tripod, gears, bearings and other mechanics, or in the user’s skill in setting up.
The latest revolution is the rise of small, photography-only “smartscopes.” These take advantage of not only today’s pointing technology, but also the vastly better capabilities of imaging chips and image processing compared to the human retina and visual cortex. The most sophisticated image stacking and processing can come built right in. The result is decent deep-sky imaging from shockingly small units, relatively low priced. The image may be viewable on your phone or computer as it builds up in real time. Some can directly enable contributions to citizen-science projects.
Smartscopes are changing the hobby at the entry level. For more on this see Richard Wright’s “The Rise of the Smart Telescopes” in the November 2025 Sky & Telescope. And read the magazine’s review of this especially small one.
If you get a larger, more conventional computerized scope that you can look through, make sure that its drives can be disengaged so you can swing it around and point it readily by hand when you want to, rather than only slowly by the electric motors (which eat batteries).
Audio sky tour. Out under the evening sky with your
earbuds in place, listen to Kelly Beatty’s monthly
podcast tour of the naked-eye heavens above. It’s free.
“The dangers of not thinking clearly are much greater now than ever before. It’s not that there’s something new in our way of thinking, it’s that credulous and confused thinking can be much more lethal in ways it was never before.”
— Carl Sagan, 1996, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
“Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”
— John Adams, 1770, in the summation of his unpopular, but successful, defense of British soldiers in the Boston Massacre trial
“Truly, whoever can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”
— Voltaire, 1765, Questions sur les miracles