It’s time to enjoy the beauty of the autumn night sky. We’re entering the prime time of stargazing season. The nights are longer and with less humidity and the skies are generally more transparent.
Dress warmly and discover how awesome it is to lie back on a lawn chair and take in the show. The dark skies of the countryside are best, but it’s even a great show if you have to put up with light pollution, unless it’s way out of hand.
Even though summer is long gone there’s still a many stars of summer hanging on in the western sky after evening twilight. You can still easily see the Summer Triangle high above the western horizon with the three bright stars from three separate constellations. The brightest shiner is Vega in the constellation Lyra the Harp. In second place for brilliance is Altair in Aquila the Eagle. The third brightest nuclear fusion furnace is Deneb in another bird constellation, Cygnus the Swan. Cygnus is also known by a lot of stargazers as the “Northern Cross”, because at first glance that’s what it really looks like. Deneb is at the top of the cross and below you can see three dimmer stars that make up the crosspiece of the cross. Roll your eyes a little ways below the crosspiece and look for an equally bright star at the foot of the cross. That’s Albireo.
You definitely want to check out Albireo with binoculars or a small telescope. You’ll like what you see here. Albireo is actually a double star. One star is gold and the other is blue and you can really see these colors. The two stars look like they are right next to each other but they’re by many astronomers to be about light-year apart. Astronomers don’t know for sure but Albireo may be a binary system. The two stars could be orbiting each other in a period of around 100,000 years. I don’t think you want to stay to see that.
The Big Dipper is upright and riding low in the northwestern sky. In fact, it’s getting so low that it’s hard to see if you have a high tree line. The Big Dipper is the most famous star pattern there is, but it’s technically not a constellation. The Big Dipper is actually the rear end and the tail of the constellation Ursa Major, the Big Bear. It’s also the brightest part of the Big Bear.
Over in the eastern skies is the grand constellation Pegasus, the winged horse. Look for a giant diamond of stars on the rise in the east. Just to the upper left of Pegasus is the Andromeda Galaxy, the next door neighbor to our Milky Way, nearly 2.5 million light years away, with just one light year spanning nearly six trillion miles.
Mike Lynch is an amateur astronomer and professional broadcast meteorologist.
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