Start With Saturn
 | Author:
Jeff Ross
Contributor |
Three weeks into July and a month after the Summer Solstice, we can see that the setting Sun is work¬ing its way back South. That also means that the daylight hours are getting progressively shorter by roughly a minute per day this close to the solstice. We now have almost a half hour less of daylight than we did on the Solstice.
Increasing darkness means more opportunities to use a telescope under dark skies. I'd be the first to admit that it is a challenge to stay up late enough to get to dark skies during June and July. It's a good thing there is still plenty to see during the early evening!
Saturn is the first of the planets we see in the early evening, visible to the unaided eye. It rises a little after 10:00 p.m. Jupiter rises around midnight so Jupiter and Saturn can be seen during all of the truly dark hours. Mars makes its appearance a little after 1:00 a.m. Venus rises about 4:00 a.m., about half an hour before the end of twilight.
Our Moon is at Last Quarter, rising around midnight. With Saturn up by then and Jupiter and the Moon rising at about the same time an hour later, there will be a trio of objects visible to the observer with binoculars or a small telescope.
The Broadwater School and Community Library has such a telescope available for checkout to anyone with library privileges. It is more than capable of show¬ing off the rings of Saturn and Jupiter's four Galilean moons. Panning down the Moon's terminator, you will see sunlit mountain tops above inky dark plains below. Later around 3:00 a.m. you could take that StarBlast telescope and simply drift through the Milky Way to see countless galaxies and nebulas. Its wide field of view makes it an excellent tool to simply get lost in the ribbon of stars stretching from the Northeast to the Southwest.
With clear skies, of course.
