FRIDAY, MAY 29
■ Bright Venus and Jupiter are putting on a sky drama. Watch them in the west each nightfall as they pull closer together. The king of the gods and the goddess of love, are they eyeing each other? Tonight they’re 11° apart. They will close to 1.8° apart on June 8th and 1.6° at their conjunction on the 9th (for the Americas), then pass each other by.
Meanwhile quick Mercury, way down to their lower right, is heading their way as if to join them. But it will change its mind and drop back in weeks to come.
Above all three twinkle Pollux and Castor as background spectators, tiny by comparison.
■ Vega, the Summer Star, shines as the brightest point in the east-northeast after dark. It’s currently the top star of the big Summer Triangle. Look lower left of it by two fists at arm’s length for Deneb. Lower right of Vega by three fists is Altair, finally coming up almost due east.
Bob King
■ Back to Vega. Just below it, look for its faint little constellation Lyra hanging down from it, with its bottom canted to the right. It can be faintly seen in the image above: a small equilateral triangle with Vega as one upper corner, and a larger parallelogram attached to the little triangle’s bottom corner. The triangle is the size of your thumbprint at arm’s length. The whole thing is about the length of your thumb. It points toward Altair.
Binoculars will help through the moonlight. The Lyra pattern is 7½° from end to end, so it will somewhat overspill the field of view in most binoculars
SATURDAY, MAY 30
■ Full Moon tonight; exactly full at 4:45 a.m. Sunday morning EDT. This a minimoon (sometimes called a “micromoon” but that’s much too exaggerated)— the opposite of a supermoon. The Moon is just hours from apogee, making this the smallest full Moon of the year. Can you detect the slight difference from average?
After dusk look for orange Antares 2° or 3° left of it, as shown below. Antares is closer above the Moon by the beginning of dawn. You can reduce the Moon’s glare by covering it with a finger. Binoculars help even more to reveal the star and its color.
The Moon will occult Antares for eastern Australia and southern South America; details.
SUNDAY, MAY 31
■ Variable action in Lyra: The bottom two stars of the little Lyra parallelogram, faintly seen in in the image at top pointing toward Altair, are Beta and Gamma Lyrae. These are the pattern’s two brightest stars after Vega. Gamma is the one farthest from Vega.
Most of the time Beta and Gamma are almost indistinguishable in brightness: Gamma is visual magnitude 3.25 and Beta is 3.4. But Beta is a famous eclipsing variable star, one of the first discovered. Look up at these two enough times, and sooner or later you will catch Beta very obviously dimmer than Gamma, at its minimum brightness of mag 4.3. More often you’re likely to catch it somewhere in between, when a difference is apparent but not so striking. Like in that photo.
MONDAY, JUNE 1,
■ In the hours after midnight tonight, cover the waning gibbous Moon with your finger to (hopefully) reveal that it is just above the spout of the Sagittarius Teapot. Which is not exactly bright.
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 fingertip. Then open both eyes.
TUESDAY, JUNE 2
■ Bright Arcturus, magnitude 0, shines pale yellow-orange high overhead toward the south these evenings. The kite shape made by the brightest stars of its constellation, Boötes, extends up from Arcturus nearly to the zenith after nightfall. The kite is narrow, slightly bent, and 23° long: about two fists at arm’s length.
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 3
■ Have you ever seen Alpha Centauri? At declination –61° our brilliant, magnitude-zero neighbor is permanently out of sight if you’re north of latitude 29°. But if you’re at the latitude of San Antonio, Orlando, or points south, Alpha Cen skims just above your true southern horizon for a little while late these evenings.
When does this happen? When to look? When Alpha Librae, the lower-right of Libra’s two brightest stars, is due south over your landscape. That’s about 11 p.m. now local daylight-saving time (depending on where you live east-west in your time zone). At that time, drop your gaze 45° straight down from Alpha Librae.
THURSDAY, JUNE 4
■ For much of the spring at mid-northern latitudes, the Milky Way lies right down out of sight all around the horizon in the evening. But look east now. The rich Cepheus-Cygnus-Aquila stretch of the Milky Way is rising up all across the east late these nights, earlier and higher every week. A hint for the light-polluted: It runs horizontally under Vega, along the bottom edge of the Summer Triangle. See the photo at top.
Don’t wait too late. The bright waning gibbous Moon rises around midnight.
FRIDAY, JUNE 5
■ Venus and Jupiter together are attracting attention worldwide as they shine in the western sky during and after twilight. For months these two brightest planets have been approaching each other. Tonight they shine just 4° apart. Venus is the brighter one. And spot Mercury as a bonus 14° to their lower right. That’s a little more than a fist at arm’s length.
Venus and Jupiter will close in to shine just 1.8° apart next Monday June 8th, then 1.6° on their date of conjunction, Tuesday the 9th.
SATURDAY, JUNE 6
■ Capella sets low in the northwest fairly soon after dark (depending on your latitude). That leaves Vega and Arcturus as the two brightest stars in the evening sky. Vega shines fairly high in the east. Arcturus is very high as you face south.
A third of the way from Arcturus down to Vega, look for semicircular Corona Borealis, the Northern Crown, with 2nd-magnitude Alphecca as its one moderately bright star.
Two thirds of the way from Arcturus to Vega is the dim Keystone of Hercules. It’s now lying almost level:
Use binoculars or a telescope to examine the Keystone’s top edge. A third of the way from its left end to the right is M13, one of Hercules’s two great globular star clusters, labeled below. In binoculars it’s a tiny glowing cottonball, 6th magnitude, flanked by two 7th-magnitude stars ¼° to its sides. A 4- or 6-inch scope begins to resolve some of its speckliness. Located 22,000 light-years away far above the plane of the Milky Way, M13 consists of several hundred thousand stars in a swarm about 140 light-years wide.
SUNDAY, JUNE 7
■ The Big Dipper has swung around to hang down by its handle high in the northwest after dark. The middle star of its handle is Mizar, with tiny little Alcor right next to it. On which side of Mizar should you look for Alcor? As always, on the side facing Vega! Which is now the brightest star in the east.
■ Last-quarter Moon tonight (exact at 6:01 a.m. Monday morning EDT). The Moon rises almost due east around 1 a.m., lower right of the Great Square of Pegasus. The Square, just risen, is standing on one corner. Its top right side points diagonally down to the Moon.
This Week’s Planet Roundup
Mercury, about magnitude –0.5, is becoming easy to spot far to the lower right of brilliant Venus and Jupiter in the west. Look for it about an hour after sunset.
Venus and Jupiter, the two brightest planets, shine together in the west during twilight and even for about 40 minutes after full dark. Venus is the lower and the brighter of the two, at magnitude –4.0. Jupiter is a seventh that bright at magnitude –1.9.
Watch Venus and Jupiter close in on each other night by night. On Friday May 29th they’re still 11° apart. Their conjunction will come on June 9th, when they’ll shine 1.6° from each other. That’s about a finger’s width at arm’s length.
Both are in Gemini (and so is Mercury). Spot Pollux and Castor above or upper right of Venus and Jupiter. Pollux is slightly the brighter of the two Gemini heads.
Mars, magnitude 1.3, remains very low in the east as dawn brightens. Look for it 2½ or 3 fists to the lower left of easier Saturn.
Saturn rises about a half hour before the first glimmer of dawn. Catch it low in the east as dawn begins to brighten. Don’t confuse steady Saturn with flickering Fomalhaut, its near-twin in brightness, twinkling in the south-southeast three or four fists to Saturn’s right or lower right.
Uranus is hidden in the bright sunrise.
Neptune, magnitude 7.9, hides about 8° from Saturn in the dawn. Not until well into the summer will Saturn and Neptune enter the evening sky. Mars won’t do so until nearly the end of the year.
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 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 — as it does to charts on paper.
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, low-priced units. 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