Ohio is not only welcoming the official start of summer with many clear and partially clear nights in the near future. This is the perfect way to kick off the warm season – with some good ol’ stargazing.

The daytime temperatures are going to be in the toasty upper 80s and low 90s. The nighttime temperatures will also be on the warmer side hovering around the mid-sixties for most of the week. Sunset will occur around 9:05 PM, so be ready with all your stargazing gear by 10:30 PM when the skies are “astronomically” dark.

Be on the lookout this week for the moon passing by several planets, the North America Nebula, and the Wild Duck Cluster.

If you are an early-riser and wake up between 5 AM and 6 AM, you have a good chance at seeing the moon be neighbors with a new solar system body almost every day this week. On Monday, June 21st, the moon was just next to Jupiter. The morning of June 21st, the moon was neighbors with the red planet, Mars. On Sunday, June 26th, the moon will be passing within a few degrees of our sister planet, Venus. And lastly, on Monday June 27th, the moon will pass next to the inner-most planet of the solar system, Mercury. Binoculars or a telescope with a wide field of view will be perfect for observing these celestial meetups.

The moon was next to Mars this week (in the morning sky….)

… and finally, in heavy morning twilight, Mercury.

If you have plans to visit a dark sky park (like the John Glenn Astronomy Park, hint hint) or are just getting into astrophotography, there is a bright emission nebula that is perfect for you. The North America Nebula, more formally known as NGC 7000, is a region of ionized hydrogen that shines red from the absorbed energy of a nearby hot star. A telescope or binoculars will reveal a fuzzy patch in the sky, but a DSLR using long-exposure settings will reveal the nebula’s red color. This emission region sits 2,500 light-years away and occupies an area roughly ten times larger than the full moon so try using a wider field-of-view telescope or camera.

The North America gets its name from its shape. Can you see the “America” shape?

Globular clusters are collections of upwards of 100,000 stars that live outside of the plane of their host galaxy. Our own galaxy, the Milky Way, is known to have around 150 globular clusters circling in the galactic halo. Try searching for the Wild Duck Cluster (Messier Object 11). This particular globular cluster sits just south of the bright start Altair and can be spotted as a faint patch of fuzz using binoculars. M11 sits 6,200 light-years away and is home to only 2,900 stars with an average age of around 220 million years.

M11, the wild Duck Cluster is either a very sparse globular cluster, or a very dense “Galactic” cluster. Either way, it is a great target in small scopes.

Did you know that the night sky would look extremely different if our eyes could see in other wavelengths outside of the visible part of the spectrum? My personal favorite is microwave astronomy. If our eyes could see in microwaves (about 5,000x lower frequency), we would see a faint but mostly uniform light across the entire sky – weird. Why don’t we see this in the optical spectrum? Well, around 200,000 years after the Big Bang (when the universe came into being) the universe cooled enough to let light travel through it (this light was in the visible part of the spectrum). Over the last 13.75 billion years the universe has been expanding very quickly, causing a doppler shift in that original light light. This results in the short-wavelength optical light from the early universe “stretching” into much longer microwave light – which appears as a weird signal all over the sky.

So that’s right, if we could see microwaves, we would be able to see a signal in the sky from the earliest moments in the universe – pretty cool! (Imaged: This is a microwave map of that light from the early universe, more technically called the cosmic microwave background (CMB) from the Planck space telescope. The different colors are deviations in this all-sky signal by roughly 0.13% - IMAGE: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/planck/multimedia/pia17449.html#.YrKprOzMJTM)

A map of the Cosmic Background Radiation, the “stretched out” light that was released when the universe first became transparent.

Get outside this week and kick off summer with some warm-night stargazing under multiple clear and partially clear skies. Grab a blanket or lawn chairs and invite some friends out to the John Glenn Astronomy Park (JGAP) to enjoy a nighttime tour of the sky surrounded by the many friendly and familiar faces willing to share their astronomy expertise and guidance. In addition to gazing up at the Milky Way at JGAP, try looking for the lunar conjunction with multiple planets, the North America Nebula, the Wild Duck Cluster, and imagine seeing the CMB from the early universe.

Clear Skies!

Jared May: What's Up, June 22-29, 2022