In the Sky This Month

The crescent Moon is low in the west early this evening, with Venus, the brilliant “evening star,” close to the lower right. The bright planet Jupiter is in the south, with the slightly fainter planet Saturn rising in the southeast.

There’s a beautiful conjunction between the Moon and the planet Venus, the “evening star,” over the next couple of nights. Venus stands above the Moon tonight, and about the same distance to the lower right of the Moon tomorrow night.

One sure sign of summer is a triangle of bright stars in the evening sky. Called the Summer Triangle, it will make a big mark in the northern half of the sky well into autumn. Look for the triangle low in the east and northeast beginning around 10 p.m.

The Moon is new at 2:43 p.m. CDT today as it crosses the line between Earth and the Sun. It will return to view in a day or two as a thin crescent quite low in the west shortly after sunset.

A small, faint “shield” of stars climbs high across the southern sky on June nights. The constellation Scutum represents the coat of arms on the shield of John Sobieski, a 17th-century king of Poland and one of that country’s greatest heroes.

Venus, the “evening star,” is climbing a little higher into the sky each night. Tonight, the brilliant planet lines up with the twins of Gemini. The brighter star, Pollux, is closer to Venus, with Castor farther along the same line.

In western culture, the stars of the Big Dipper and those around it form the great bear, Ursa Major. The dipper is his body and tail, and three faint pairs of stars represent his feet. In ancient Arabia, those stars represented the leaps of a gazelle.

The sky is divided into 88 constellations. One of them is split into two disconnected parts. Serpens, the serpent, consists of a head and a tail. Serpens is in full view in the east and southeast by a couple of hours after sunset.

The star cluster IC 4665 is a quarter of the way up the sky as it gets dark. It stands to the lower right of the brightest star of Ophiuchus the serpent-bearer. Under really dark skies, the cluster is barely visible to the unaided eye.

From the southern latitudes of the United States, the upper half of Centaurus, the centaur, stands due south at nightfall. The brightest star in that part of the constellation is Menkent, the centaur’s shoulder.