For June 2022, the waxing crescent moon passes just south of the Gemini on June 2nd. The moon is first quarter on June 7th, and the Full Moon, the Honey Moon, is June 14th. The waning gibbous moon is below Saturn on the morning of June 18. The last quarter moon passes below Jupiter on June 21st. On June 22nd, the waning crescent moon passes below Mars in the dawn, and the slender crescent sits just to the left of Venus in the dawn on June 26th, a great photo op 45 minutes before sunrise. Then it passes Mercury (best to use binoculars in dawn) on June 27th. The new moon is June 28th. The slender crescent again sits south of the Gemini on the NW horizon after sunset on June 30th. This return of the moon to the same place among the stars is the defined as the "sidereal" month, and as we see here, it takes 27.3 days.
While the naked eye, dark adapted by several minutes away from any bright lights, is a wonderful instrument to stare up into deep space, far bed our own Milky Way, binoculars are better for spotting specific deep sky objects. For a detailed map of northern hemisphere skies, about June 30th visit the www.skymaps.com website and download the map for June; it will have a more extensive calendar, and list of best objects for the naked eyes, binoculars, and scopes on the back of the map. There is also a video exploring the June sky from the Hubble Space Telescope website at: www.hubblesite.org/explore_astronomy/tonights_sky/. Sky & Telescope has highlights at www.skyandtelescope.com for observing the sky each week of the month.
This June Mercury lies between us and the sun until midmonth, when it moves into the dawn sky just to the lower left of brilliant Venus in the dawn. The best grouping comes when the waning crescent moon joins the pair on June 26-27th. Venus is heading behind the Sun soon, and rises lower in the dawn sky each morning. By years end, it will pass behind the Sun and back into the evening skies.
Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn are working their way back into the evening skies this fall. Saturn in Capricornus will come to opposition in July, Jupiter in Aquarius in September, and Mars by years old.
The Big Dipper is almost overhead as twilight falls, and its pointers take you north to the Pole Star. If you drop south from the bowl of the Big Dipper, Leo the Lion is in the SW. Note the Egyptian Sphinx is based on the shape of this Lion in the sky. Taking the arc in the Dipper’s handle, we "arc" SE to bright orange Arcturus, the brightest star of Spring. Cooler than our yellow Sun, and much poorer in heavy elements, some believe its strange motion reveals it to be an invading star from another smaller galaxy, now colliding with the Milky Way in Sagittarius in the summer sky. Moving almost perpendicular to the plane of our Milky Way, Arcturus was the first star in the sky where its proper motion across the historic sky was noted, by Edmund Halley.
Spike south to Spica, the hot blue star in Virgo, then curve to Corvus the Crow, a four sided grouping. Jupiter lies just east of Spica this July. North of Corvus, in the arms of Virgo, is where our large scopes will show members of the Virgo Supercluster, a swarm of over a thousand galaxies about 50 million light years distant. Even farther south, on June evenings we can spot the top three stars of Crux, the Southern Cross, just above the horizon. Above it is Omega Centauri, the closest and brightest of the globular clusters, visible as a round blur with the naked eye.
To the east, Hercules is well up, with the nice globular cluster M-13 marked on your sky map and visible in binocs. Few objects in the sky can compare with this glorious ball of stars in any telescope 6" or larger. This ball of almost a million older stars lies about 25,000 light years away, in the halo of our Milky Way Galaxy, almost directly above the Galactic Center in Sagittarius.
The brightest star of the northern hemisphere, Vega (from Carl Sagan’s novel and movie, "Contact"), rises in the NE as twilight deepens. Twice as hot as our Sun, it appears blue-white, like most bright stars. At the opposite end of the parallelogram of Lyra is M-57, the Ring Nebula. It is visible with large binoculars, but does not show its fine colors and faint central white dwarf until you get to some big deep sky scopes.
Northeast of Lyra is Cygnus, the Swan, flying down the Milky Way. Its bright star Deneb, at the top of the "northern cross" is one of the luminaries of the Galaxy, about 50,000 times more luminous than our Sun and around 3,000 light years distant. Under dark skies, note the "Great Rift", a dark nebula in front of our solar system as we revolve around the core of the Milky Way in the Galactic Year of 250 million of our own years.
To the east, Altair is the third bright star of the summer triangle. It lies in Aquila the Eagle, and is much closer than Deneb; it lies within about 13 light years of our Sun. Use your binocs to pick up many clusters in this rich region of our own Cygnus spiral arm rising now in the east. The nearest spiral arms of our Milky Way are now on the eastern horizon, and may be mistaken for a cloud rising if you are not used to the transparency of rural skies! They arc overhead in the morning hours for restless campers.
To the south, Antares is well up at sunset in Scorpius. It appears reddish (its Greek name means rival of Ares or Mars to the Latins) because it is half as hot as our yellow Sun; it is bright because it is a bloated red supergiant, big enough to swallow up our solar system all the way out to Saturn’s orbit! Scorpius is the brightest constellation in the sky, with 13 stars brighter than the pole star Polaris! Note the fine naked eye clusters M-6 and M-7, just to the left of the Scorpion’s tail.
Just a little east of the Scorpion’s tail is the teapot shape of Sagittarius, which lies toward the center of the Milky Way. From a dark sky site, you can pick out the fine stellar nursery, M-8, the Lagoon Nebula, like a cloud of steam coming out of the teapot’s spout.
