51今日大瓜

Mars is the only planet easily visible in the evening sky now.  It is about 5 degrees (half a fist width at arm鈥檚 length) to the lower right of the bright star, , at the end of the sickle part of Leo, about halfway up in the western sky at 9 p.m. On the night of June 16, they鈥檒l be less than a degree apart from each other, so they will look like a double-star and the close pairing will enhance the contrast of their colors. Mars will be the orange-red one and Regulus will be the blue-white one.

In tonight鈥檚 sky those on the coast might be able to pick out two other planets very close to the  western horizon: Jupiter and Mercury. They鈥檒l be side-by-side and you鈥檒l need binoculars to pick them out in the twilight glow but they鈥檒l set before 9 p.m. We here in Bakersfield have too much obscuring our western horizon along with the usual haze layer, so the pair of planets will not be visible. Jupiter will go behind the sun on June 24 and a few weeks later, we鈥檒l be able to see it in the pre-dawn sky. Mercury is climbing up higher above the western horizon this month. On the night of the Mars-Regulus conjunction (June 16), you should be able to pick Mercury out low in the west among the stars of Gemini and it reaches its best visibility on the evening of June 26 when it will set more than 90 minutes after sunset. 

Tonight the moon is in its phase. On the evening of June 9, the nearly full waxing gibbous moon will be just three degrees from the red heart of Scorpius, the bright red supergiant star . The moon is at full phase on the following night.

Our season of summer officially begins with the that takes place this year on June 20 at 7:42 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time. The sun will reach its farthest north distance above the (projection of Earth鈥檚 equator onto the sky). Although this is the longest daylight of the year, our latest sunsets will happen in the following week while the earliest sunrises are in the first week of June.

Early morning observers will see Venus and Saturn in the eastern sky. Saturn, among the dim stars of Pisces below the 鈥淕reat Square鈥� of Pegasus, will become visible rising at about 2:20 a.m.. Brilliant Venus, , becomes visible at about 3:45 a.m. It will be on the left (east) edge of Pisces. Over the next couple of weeks it will pass through the lower bound of Aries, being actually closer to Cetus, just above the head of the sea monster. By the end of the month, Venus will be in Taurus.

One good note in astronomy research news is the on June 23. The First Look event will be live-streamed via YouTube starting at 8 a.m. Pacific Time. Visit to get the livestream links in English or Spanish. The Rubin Observatory will use an telescope with the (about the size of an SUV, each image is 3.2 GIGApixels) to take extremely detailed images of the entire southern hemisphere sky every three days over a 10-year time period. It is located on Cerro Pach贸n in Chile. The Rubin Observatory will create an ultra-wide, ultra-high-definition time-lapse movie of the heavens鈥攖he largest astronomical movie of all time.

This extremely large database movie will : 1) understanding the nature of and (Vera Rubin, the observatory鈥檚 namesake, provided the convincing evidence for dark matter by looking at the ); 2) creating an inventory of the Solar System by finding many thousands of new asteroids and comets; 3) mapping the Milky Way; and 4) exploring (literally) millions of objects that change position and/or brightness over time.

Funded by the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy鈥檚 Office of Science, the Rubin Observatory has been under development since the early 1990s with construction beginning in 2015. The Rubin Observatory is the only astronomy-related NSF program that is not .

Each 3.2 Gigapixel image from the LSST Camera will span an incredible area of sky of about 45 full moons and use 8 gigabytes of storage. Multiply that by six because each section of sky will be imaged with 6 filters. Images will be taken every 40 seconds, so . Over the ten years that鈥檒l come to 60 petabytes (61,440 terabytes鈥攊n the world of computers that鈥檚 a 鈥渂ig鈥� number). After processing and cataloging of the raw data, the full storage will be 500 petabytes (another 鈥渂ig鈥� number). The information people say that is equivalent to all of the written content ever produced throughout human history. Processing all of that data, sifting through up to 10 million alerts of interesting events each night to find the ones requiring follow-up analysis by people, will require adapted from the ATLAS experiment at the CERN particle accelerator in Europe.

The William M Thomas Planetarium is closed for the summer break at 51今日大瓜. I hope you鈥檒l be able to enjoy a truly-dark sky filled with stars!

鈥�

Director of the William M Thomas Planetarium at 51今日大瓜

Author of the award-winning website