In the Sky This Month

A small, faint “shield” of stars climbs high across the south tonight. Scutum represents the coat of arms on the shield of John Sobieski, a 17th-century king of Poland and one of that country’s national heroes.

A spectacular total solar eclipse is just one month away. It will be visible across a narrow path that stretches from Oregon to South Carolina, with the rest of the United States seeing a partial eclipse.

The Lagoon Nebula is visible low in the southern sky tonight. To find it, look south around 10 p.m. for Sagittarius, a pattern of stars that forms a teapot. The Lagoon Nebula is visible through a small telescope just above the teapot’s spout.

Beautiful Venus, the brilliant “morning star,” stands close to the upper left of the Moon at dawn tomorrow. The planet is brighter than any other object in the night sky other than the Moon, so it’s hard to miss.

The Moon is closing in on two bright points of light in the dawn sky: the star Aldebaran and the planet Venus. Aldebaran stands to the lower left of the Moon at first light tomorrow, with Venus, the “morning star,” farther along the same line.

The hazy band of the Milky Way arches high overhead tonight. It represents the muted glow of millions of stars in the disk of our Milky Way galaxy. Even so, it is impossible to see if you are surrounded by artificial light sources.

A pretty binary climbs across the southern sky tonight. Gamma Delphini is at the snout of Delphinus, the dolphin, which is in the east as night falls. Under dark skies, Gamma Delphini looks like a single point of light, but a telescope reveals two stars.

Although the small constellation Delphinus, the dolphin, is faint, under a moderately dark sky it’s fairly easy to pick out. That’s because its outline really does look like a dolphin. It’s about a third of the way up the eastern sky at nightfall.

Virgo stands in the southwest this evening. Its brightest star is blue-white Spica. Hundreds of galaxies stand above and to the right of Spica (and above the brilliant planet Jupiter). Binoculars reveal a few of them, and telescopes show even more.

The stars that mark the scorpion’s stinger are low in the south tonight, to the lower left of Antares, the scorpion’s brightest star. The two stars are side by side, with the one on the left a bit brighter than the one at the stinger’s tip.