This Week's Sky at a Glance, August 7 – 16

FRIDAY, AUGUST 7 ■ Venus, the "Evening Star," continues to hang in there low in the western twilight. Spica, 1st magnitude but less than 1% as bright even so, is closing in on Venus from the upper left. Tonight they're still 23° apart (about two fists at arm's length). Watch Spica creep toward Venus until their conjunction on September 1st, when they'll pass 1.4° apart even lower after sunset. ■ Seen any Perseid meteors yet? The peak night for this annual shower should be the night of August 12-13: this Wednesday. But the occasional Perseid is already showing up. If you see a shooting star, trace its path far backward across the sky. If you cross the location of the Perseid radiant, between Perseus and Cassiopeia in the northeast, you almost surely saw an early member of the shower. The Perseids build slowly for about two weeks, then drop off more rapidly after the peak. Also active are the weaker, slower, but sometimes brighter Southern Delta Aquariids. This diffuse shower is most active in late July but runs for a couple of weeks before and after. Its radiant is in a very different part of the sky, southern Aquarius. Delta Aquarii is 12° north of Fomalhaut. SATURDAY, AUGUST 8 ■ On Sunday morning the 9th before and during early dawn, the waning crescent Moon shines near Mars. Here's the view as dawn grows bright: The waning crescent Moon rises left of Mars around 2 a.m. Sunday morning the 9th. By dawn the two of them are high. On Monday morning the 10th the slimming Moon hangs to the right of Castor and Pollux. On those two mornings look early while the sky is still almost completely dark. But on the 11th, the remaining wisp of a Moon with won't rise until twilight is well under way. Bring binoculars. ■ Get ready for the solar eclipse coming in four days. The eclipse will be total for parts of Greenland, Iceland and northern Spain, but a slight partial eclipse will occur for much of the upper U.S. and all of Canada. See August 12 below. To get your local timetable of the eclipse's events at any location, zoom in and click on this map. SUNDAY, AUGUST 9 ■ The Big Dipper hangs diagonally in the northwest after dark, as shown below. From its midpoint, look to the right to find Polaris (not very bright) glimmering due north as always. The Dippers as they're positioned after dark at this time of year. If you can see the whole Little Dipper you have a darker sky than most of us. But 2nd-magnitude Polaris and Kochab are in much easier view, and 3rd-magnitude Pherkad is not far behind. Pherkad, Gamma Ursae Minoris, is a wide optical double in binoculars: magnitudes 3.0 and 5.0, separation ¼°. Akira Fujii photo Polaris is the end of the Little Dipper's handle. The only other Little Dipper stars that are even moderately bright are the two forming the outer end of its bowl: 2nd-magnitude Kochab and 3rd-magnitude Pherkad. On August evenings you'll find them to Polaris's upper left (by about a fist and a half). They're called the Guardians of the Pole, since they ceaselessly circle around Polaris through the night and through the year. I sometimes imagine them marching around and around like the Wicked Witch's guards in the Wizard of Oz movie, chanting "O-ee-o, Eeee-o." They do not in fact do this. They are giant, orange-hot and white-hot balls of gas, respectively, spectral types K4 III and A2 III, located 131 and 490 light-years away. They neither march nor speak. Nevertheless, imaginative conceptions and artistic impressions are real things: abstract things that exist in the few cubic inches of your skull, physically encoded in part of the neural network that gives rise to your mind. External realities, and your internal experiences of them, are thus both real things, but they are truly, fundamentally, separate orders of being. Confusing the two with each other is, the more you examine it, the origin of a very large slice of humanity's many failings and delusions. MONDAY, AUGUST 10 ■ As dawn brightens on Tuesday morning, can you catch the super-thin Moon, hardly more than a day from new, just a couple degrees from Mercury? Try about 45 minutes before sunrise. See the scene under August 8 above. TUESDAY, AUGUST 11 ■ East of Deneb in Cygnus, the Milky Way runs between Cepheus and faint little Lacerta, the Lizard, before reaching Cassiopeia. Although the Lizard's stick figure is made of only 4th to 5th-magnttude stars, it's rich with Milky Way background swarms. Including the open star cluster NGC 7209. With a total magnitude of 6.7, this cluster is within reach of largish binoculars on dark moonless nights like we have this week. "The cluster is a pretty, mottled haze in my 10x50s," writes Matt Wedel in his Binocular Highlight column (with chart) in the August Sky & Telescope, page 43. "At 3,800 light-years it's pretty far out there for an open cluster one might study with binoculars. " WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 12 ■ New Moon, and eclipse of the Sun! The eclipse will be total only for parts of Greenland, Iceland, and (near sunset) northern Spain, and for a long strip of the Atlantic Ocean. But a partial eclipse will occur for much of the US and all of Canada. The southern limit of the partial eclipse runs from near Vancouver past the south tip of Lake Michigan and on to the coast of North Carolina. Zoom in and click on this map to get the timetable of the eclipse's events for your exact location. And see Bob King's Rare Total Solar Eclipse – Perseid Meteor Shower Double-Header. ■ Yes, this is also predicted to be the peak Perseid night! Since the Moon is obviously new (solar eclipse, right?) no moonlight will interfere with our view of the meteors. In early evening the meteors will be few, but those that do appear will be Earth-grazers skimming gracefully far across the top of the atmosphere. As the hours pass and the shower's radiant (in northern Perseus just below Cassiopeia) rises higher in the northeast, the meteors will become shorter and more numerous — the most so from midnight to dawn. Layer up warmly even if the day was hot; remember about radiational cooling under an open clear sky! A sleeping bag makes good mosquito armor, and use DEET on the parts of you that remain exposed. Bring a reclining lawn chair to a dark, open spot where no local lights get in your eyes. Lie back, and gaze up into the stars. Be patient. As your eyes adapt to the dark, you may see a meteor every minute or so on average as night grows late. You'll see fewer under light pollution, but the brightest ones will shine through. The best direction to look is wherever your sky is darkest, usually overhead. The shower's radiant (the meteors' perspective point of origin, if you could see them coming from far away in space) is in northern Perseus under Cassiopeia. But the meteors only become visible when they hit the upper atmosphere, and this can occur anywhere in your sky. You can follow the shower's development within a day or two of real time via the International Meteor Organization's graph of the shower's observed zenithal hourly rate. This is the standardized rate (corrected for different peoples' observing conditions) from hourly meteor counts submitted by IMO observers around the world — who could ideally keep the shower under 24-hour-a-day watch. THURSDAY, AUGUST 13 ■ August is prime Milky Way time whenever the Moon is out of the evening sky, as it still is now. Once evening darkness is complete, the Milky Way runs up from between Sagittarius and Scorpius in the south-southwest, then tilts leftward across Aquila, continues left through the big Summer Triangle very high, then tapers on down through Cassiopeia to Perseus low in the north-northeast. FRIDAY, AUGUST 14 ■ The two brightest stars of summer are Vega, overhead now at nightfall, and Arcturus, shining in the west. Draw a line down from Vega to Arcturus. A third of the way down, the line crosses the dim Keystone of Hercules. Two thirds of the way down it crosses the dim semicircle of Corona Borealis with its one modestly bright star, 2nd-magnitude Alphecca or Gemma. Having trouble with the Keystone? Vega and the Keystone's star closest to it form an equilateral triangle with 2nd-magnitude Eltanin to their north, the nose of Draco the Dragon. Eltanin is the brightest star of Draco's quadrilateral head. SATURDAY, AUGUST 15 ■ Having eclipsed the Sun three days ago, the Moon is back in the evening sky as a three-day-old crescent. Spot it low in the west about 40 minutes after sunset. Venus shines 4° or 5° to the Moon's upper left, as shown below. ■ Whenever bright Vega crosses nearest your zenith, as it does right after dark now, you know that the Sagittarius Teapot is at its highest due south. Two hours later, when Deneb passes the zenith, it's the turn of little Delphinus and boat-shaped Capricornus down below it to stand at their highest due south. SUNDAY, AUGUST 16 ■ Now the Moon shines about 10° left of Venus in twilight, as shown above. Look too for Spica. ■ Check the sky low in the northwest or north at the end of these long summer twilights. Would you recognize shiny, ripply noctilucent clouds if you saw them? They're the most astronomical of all cloud types, what with their extreme altitude and, sometimes, their formation on meteoric dust particles. They used to be rare, but they've become more common in recent years as Earth's atmosphere changes. See Bob King's Nights of Noctilucent Clouds. ■ After dark, spot the Big Dipper in the northwest. This is the time of year when it scoops down during evening, as if to pick up the water that it will dump from high overhead in the evenings early next spring. This Week's Planet Roundup Mercury lurks low in the dawn this week, still brightening. It swells from magnitude –0.6 on Saturday morning August 8th to –1.2 on Saturday morning the 15th. But it's getting lower. Look for it above the east-northeast horizon about 40 minutes before sunrise. Don't confuse Mercury with fainter Pollux or Castor well above it. On August 15th Mercury has a close conjunction with Jupiter. For the Americas they'll be ½° apart. See Jupiter below. Venus continues to shine brightly (magnitude –4.4) as the "Evening Star" low in the west in twilight. It continues to set at twilight's end. In a telescope Venus is a brilliant, half-lit disk 23 arcseconds from pole to pole. Catch it as soon in late afternoon or early dusk as you can, before it sinks low into poorer atmospheric seeing. Venus will remain in twilight view until the end of the summer, gradually lower, enlarging while waning in phase. Mars (magnitude +1.3, between Taurus and Gemini) rises around 2 a.m. daylight-saving time. By the beginning of dawn it glows fairly high in the east near the horns of Taurus. Upper right of it by about two fists sparkles Aldebaran, its near-twin for brightness and color. A similar distance upper left of Mars shines brighter Capella. Mars is on the far side of its orbit from us, so in a telescope it's just a tiny, fuzzy blob 5 arcseconds wide. Jupiter begins to emerge from behind the glare of the Sun low in the dawn to start its 2026-27 apparition. It does so with a hard-to-see spectacle: on August 15th it has a close conjunction with Mercury. They'll be just ½° apart (at the time of dawn in the Americas), shining at magnitudes –1.8 and –1.2, respectively. Look for them very low in the east-northeast as the sky is growing bright 30 minutes before sunrise. At that time they'll be only 5° or so above the horizon. Bring binoculars! Saturn (magnitude +0.6, at the Pisces-Cetus border) rises in the east around 10 or 11 pm. Once it's up find it below the Great Square of Pegasus, which is balancing on one corner. Saturn is best placed for telescopic viewing high in the southeast in the hours before the first light of dawn. Late last fall Saturn's rings turned nearly edge-on to Earth and almost disappeared. Now the rings' inclination has widened back up to 9°. On July 25th, planetary imager Christopher Go caught Saturn's rings displaying unusually prominent and obvious ring spokes. They're the gray streaks near the left (celestial east) end of the broad B ring. (North here is up, east is left.) "The sky was hazy today but the seeing was incredible," writes Go.A few telescopic reports of these subtle, transient features date from the 19th century. The first systematic study of them was done by Sky & Telescope's own Stephen J. O'Meara, a famously eagle-eyed visual observer, using Harvard Observatory's 9-inch Clark refractor starting in 1977. Spacecraft flybys later confirmed them in detail.The spokes remain something of a mystery. Says Wikipedia: "The leading hypothesis... is that they consist of microscopic dust particles suspended away from the main ring by electrostatic repulsion, [because] they rotate almost synchronously with the magnetosphere of Saturn." Electrons in the solar wind, redirected by Saturn's magnetic field, may be involved. "The precise mechanism generating the spokes is still unknown." Uranus (magnitude 5.7, in Taurus) hides about 24° west of Mars along the ecliptic, near Aldebaran. Neptune (magnitude 7.8, at the Pisces/Cetus border) hides even farther in the background 10° west of Saturn. You'll need detailed finder charts to tell Uranus and Neptune from stars of similar brightnesses. 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. The Pocket Sky Atlas plots 30,796 stars to magnitude 7.6, and 1,500 telescopic galaxies, star clusters, and nebulae among them. Shown here is the Jumbo Edition, which is in hard covers and enlarged for easier reading in the dark by red flashlight. Sample charts. More about the current editions. 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 yourearbuds in place, listen to Kelly Beatty's monthlypodcast 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