In the Sky This Month

There’s a beautiful conjunction between the Moon and the planet Venus early this evening. Venus is the Evening Star. The Moon is a thin crescent, which means the Sun illuminates only a sliver of the lunar hemisphere that faces Earth.

Under dark skies, Messier 13, the Great Hercules Cluster, is just visible to the unaided eye. In early evening, look in the east-northeast for the Keystone, which is like a lopsided “square” of stars. M13 is between the two stars at the top of that pattern.

Cepheus is low in the north at nightfall. It represents a mythological kind of Ethiopia. The king’s brightest stars form an outline that resembles a child’s drawing of a house.

The galaxy M82 is in Ursa Major, the great bear. As night falls, the galaxy dangles below the upside-down bowl of the Big Dipper. It’s an easy target for small telescopes. It’s a spiral galaxy, like the Milky Way, but only about half as big.

The little-known constellations Canes Venatici and Coma Berenices stand high overhead in early evening. They reside between two easy-to-find stars: Alkaid, which is the end of the Big Dipper’s handle, and Denebola, the tail of Leo, the lion.

The constellation Boštes, the herdsman, is high in the east as darkness falls. Find it by picking out its brightest star, yellow-orange Arcturus, which is the second-brightest star in northern skies.

Saturn, the second-largest planet in the solar system, stands below the Moon at dawn tomorrow. The planet looks like a bright star with perhaps a slight golden tint, low above the horizon.

Venus, the brilliant Evening Star, is sneaking up on the star Elnath, which marks the tip of one of the horns of the bull. Tonight, the star is a little to the upper right of Venus. The planet will slip past Elnath during the week.

Hercules the strongman poses low in the east-northeast at nightfall and soars high across the sky later on. It’s marked by a lopsided square of stars known as the Keystone. None of the stars of Hercules is all that bright.

The eyes of Draco, the dragon, stare down from the northeast as night falls. They are above brilliant Vega, one of the night sky’s most prominent stars. The brighter eye is the star Eltanin. The other eye, Rastaban, is just above Eltanin.