Scorpius and Sagittarius highlight July nights, scooting low across the south. Antares highlights the scorpion’s hook-shaped body, with teapot-shaped Sagittarius to its left. Under dark skies, the Milky Way rises from the teapot’s spout like steam. Meanwhile, the Big Dipper stands high in the north and northwest during the evening, with its handle to the upper left and bowl to the lower right.
The full Moon of July is known as the Hay Moon, Thunder Moon, or Apollo Moon.
Perigee July 13
Apogee July 25
Moon phases are Central Time.
The new Moon will accompany the Sun as it climbs across the sky today. We can’t see the Moon because it is immersed in the Sun’s glare. The exact moment of new Moon is 2:12 p.m. CDT. The Moon will return to view after sunset tomorrow or Saturday.
The planet Uranus is putting in its best appearance of the year this week. It rises at sunset and remains in the sky all night. It’s also closest to us for the year. It’s still so faint, though, that you need binoculars to find it.
The beautiful “morning star” shines above the crescent Moon at dawn tomorrow. It’s not a star at all, though. Instead, it’s Venus, our nearest planetary neighbor. It shines so brightly in part because its surface is completely covered by clouds.
The planet Mars is in good view at dawn tomorrow. It stands to the right of the crescent Moon, and looks like a moderately bright star. The much brighter planet Venus stands below them.
The Andromeda galaxy is in good view right now. Tonight, it’s in the east-northeast as darkness falls, and overhead later on. It looks like a faint, fuzzy star. Small telescopes reveal its true nature: a family of hundreds of billions of stars.
Regulus will wink out of sight early tomorrow across most of the U.S. The star will be covered by the crescent Moon, an event known as an occultation. It’s one of a series of occultations that began last December and will continue through April.
Capricornus, the sea-goat, is low in the southern sky as darkness falls at this time of year. Its brightest stars form a wide triangle. None of the sea-goat’s stars is especially bright, though, so you need a fairly dark sky to make them out.
The Moon is at its last-quarter phase at 7:25 a.m. CDT, so sunlight illuminates half of the lunar hemisphere that faces Earth. The illuminated portion of that hemisphere will grow smaller each day until the Moon is new on October 19.
Asteroid 2012 TC4 will pass about 30,000 miles from Earth tonight. Astronomers are tracking it to learn about the asteroid and its orbit. 2012 TC4 is about the size of a house, which is smaller than the asteroid that exploded over Russia in 2013.
Rho Cassiopeia, one of the largest stars in the galaxy, stands to the right of the “W” outlined by Cassiopeia, which is in the northeast at nightfall. The star, which is visible to the unaided eye, eventually will blast itself apart as a supernova.
