The middle of the year

The Pleiades above Venus

The Pleiades through a scope, claerly a star cluster

Not that its got much to do with the night sky, but today is the halfway point in the year, day 183, so we’re 182 days away from new years day, and next new years eve, and we’re closer to next Christmas than the last one, and bizarrely there’s still no Christmas crackers on sale in the co-op.

10 days ago we had midsummer’s day, last Saturday was the latest sunset and on Friday we have another turning point, though after this one things start getting hotter rather than colder, not that we’ll notice. On Friday Earth is at aphelion, it’s at its farthest from the Sun for the year about 3 million miles further from the sun than it is in January, but to be brutally frank, its quite hot enough isn’t it, and we should all take this opportunity to be smug that its even colder in Melbourne at the moment, because of it.

Mercury is having a poor apparition deep in the glow of dawn. Look for it early in the week about 28° lower left of Venus and Mars. Binoculars will help, but don’t get up especially for it.
A very bright Venus and Mars remain together due east during dawn. Venus is a dazzler; Mars is 130 times fainter. Mars was only 2.6° above Venus on the morning of June 26th; it widens to 5° above Venus by July 4th. Early in dawn, look for the Pleiades to their left. And the position of the Pleiades, or the seven sisters, and look on the blog if you’re unsure what it looks like, gives a fair indication of how different the summer sky is from the winter sky. From October to March the Pleiades are high in the southern sky way up to the left of Orion, which completely dominates the southern winter sky. Orion’s still there, in fact it’s with us all day long, which is why we can’t see it. The stars we are seeing at the moment are the ones that are up during the day in the winter. The constellations we see all year round such as the plough and Cassiopeia are the northern ones, effectively above us and the sun, so they never drop below the horizon.

Jupiter is in Capricorn at the moment and rises around 11 p.m. and shines brightly in the south at dawn. Any binoculars, even the ones I found in a skip 20 years ago will show it as a disc.

Saturn is still fairly high in the west at dusk, but it sinks lower as evening advances.

Uranus is still very dim in Pisces, is high in the southeast before dawn, but to be honest I wouldn’t know it if I was looking at it.