Monday 24th to Sunday 30th July 2023
If you venture outside around 2 am any day next week and look towards the east, Jupiter will have risen above the horizon. To the left of Jupiter, you will find the familiar shape of the Pleiades open cluster of stars.
Halfway between the two is Uranus - not a planet you can see with the naked eye as it currently has a magnitude of around +6.0 so you'll need to dig out those binoculars or a small telescope.
For those of you preferring not to stay up quite so late, try looking towards the southwest around 11 pm on Thursday 27th and you will see a slightly gibbous-shaped Moon.
The 27th is the optimum evening to spot the clair-obscur effect that I've mentioned before, known as the Jewelled Handle. It appears as an arc of light near the northern sunlight terminator.
At the same time, look to the left of the Moon and have a go at spotting the red supergiant star Antares.
With a magnitude of around +1.0, it is one of the brightest stars in the night sky and one of the largest stars that can be seen with the naked eye. Its mass is about twelve times that of our Sun. If we stuck Antares in the middle of our Solar System, it would stretch out as far as Jupiter and consume all the rocky planets of our Inner Solar System!
Antares is actually a binary star - you will only see the red supergiant, but there is also a smaller, magnitude +5.5 dwarf star beside it.
Screenshots courtesy of Stellarium
Copyright Adrian Dening and Radio Ninesprings 2023
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