The Evening Sky in August 2024
Venus is the brilliant ‘evening star’. It sets before 7 pm at the beginning of the month. Mercury is then straight above Venus, looking like a medium-bright star. Between it and Venus is Regulus, the brightest star in Leo. Venus and Mercury hold their elevation in the evening twilight, at first, while Regulus slips lower night-to-night. On the 5th and 6th Regulus will be just to the left of Venus. On the 6th the thin crescent Moon will be to the right of Venus. Mercury fades and slips lower in the sky. By the 10th it will be level with Venus but faint in the twilight. Venus sets later as it swings out from the far side of the Sun. At the end of August it will be setting around 8 pm, two hours after the Sun.
Saturn is the only other planet in the evening sky. It rises due east around 7:40 mid-month. It looks like a medium bright star with a cream tint. It is likely to be fuzzy in a telescope when low in the sky. The ring is nearly edge-on to us so looks like a line on each side of the planet. Saturn’s biggest moon, Titan, is within four ring-diameters from the planet. Big telescopes show other moons looking like faint stars closer in than Titan. At dawn Saturn is low in the western sky. The Moon will be near Saturn on the night of August 21st-22nd.
Bright stars are widely scattered over the sky. Vega on the north skyline is balanced by Canopus low in the south. Canopus twinkles with all colours as its white light is broken up by the air. So does Vega but, being fainter, it's not so obvious. Orange Arcturus is in the northwest, twinkling red and green as it sets. Canopus is the second brightest true star. (Sirius, the brightest star, is in the morning sky.) Arcturus is the fourth-brightest star in the sky and the brightest north of the equator. Vega is the fifth brightest of all the stars and the second brightest north of the equator.
North of the zenith is orange Antares, marking the body of Scorpius. The Scorpion's tail hooks around the zenith like a back-to-front question mark. Antares and the tail make the 'fish-hook of Maui' in Māori star lore. Antares is a red giant star: 600 light years* away and 19 000 times brighter than the sun. Below or right of the Scorpion's tail is 'the teapot' made by the brightest stars of Sagittarius. It is upside down in our southern hemisphere view.
Midway down the southwest sky 'The Pointers ', Beta and Alpha Centauri, point down and rightward to Crux the Southern Cross. Alpha Centauri is the third brightest star in the sky (planets not counted) and the closest of the naked eye stars, 4.3 light years away. Beta Centauri, like most of the stars in Crux, is a blue-giant star hundreds of light years away and thousands of times brighter than the sun.
The Milky Way is brightest and broadest overhead in Scorpius and Sagittarius. In a dark sky it can be traced down past the Pointers and Crux into the southwest. To the northeast it passes Altair, meeting the skyline right of Vega. The Milky Way is our edgewise view of the galaxy, the pancake of billions of stars of which the sun is just one. The thick hub of the galaxy, 27,000 light years away, is in Sagittarius. The actual centre is hidden by dust clouds in space. The nearer dust clouds appear as gaps and slots in the Milky Way. Binoculars show many clusters of stars and some glowing gas clouds in the Milky Way.
The Large and Small Clouds of Magellan LMC and SMC look like two misty patches of light low in the south, easily seen by eye on a dark moonless night. They are galaxies like our Milky Way but much smaller. The LMC is about 160 000 light years away; the SMC about 200 000 light years away.
Jupiter is the brightest ‘star’ in the morning sky (so not on the chart.) It rises in the northeast around 4 a.m. at the beginning of the month, and a bit after 2 a.m. at the end. At the beginning of August two orange stars will be above Jupiter. The one straight above Jupiter is Aldebaran, one eye of Taurus the bull. The orange ‘star’ to the left is Mars. Matariki is left of it. Jupiter and the stars move higher morning-to-morning while Mars stays put. On the 14th Mars will be just a full-moon’s width left of Jupiter. After that it drifts down and right of Jupiter. The Moon will be below the two planets on the 28th.
*A light year (l.y.) is the distance that light travels in one year: nearly 10 million million km or 10^13 km. Sunlight takes eight minutes to get here; moonlight about one second. Sunlight reaches Neptune, the outermost major planet, in four hours. It takes four years for sunlight to reach the nearest star, Alpha Centauri.
Admin Login