Saturday, June 23

Sunday, June 24

Tuesday, June 26

Wednesday, June 27

Thursday, June 28

Friday, June 29

Saturday, June 30

Want to become a better amateur astronomer? Learn your way around the constellations. They're the key to locating everything fainter and deeper to hunt with binoculars or a telescope.

For an easy-to-use constellation guide covering the whole evening sky, use the big monthly map in the center of each issue of Sky & Telescope, the essential magazine of astronomy. Or download our free Getting Started in Astronomy booklet (which only has bimonthly maps).

Sky Atlas 2000.0 (the color Deluxe Edition is shown here) plots 81,312 stars to magnitude 8.5. That includes most of the stars that you can see in a good finderscope, and typically one or two stars that will fall within a 50× telescope's field of view wherever you point. About 2,700 deep-sky objects to hunt are plotted among the stars.

Sky & Telescope

Once you get a telescope, to put it to good use you'll need a detailed, large-scale sky atlas (set of charts). The standards are the little Pocket Sky Atlas, which shows stars to magnitude 7.6; the larger and deeper Sky Atlas 2000.0 (stars to magnitude 8.5); and the even larger Uranometria 2000.0 (stars to magnitude 9.75). And read how to use sky charts effectively.

You'll also want a good deep-sky guidebook, such as Sue French's Deep-Sky Wonders collection (which includes its own charts), Sky Atlas 2000.0 Companion by Strong and Sinnott, the bigger Night Sky Observer's Guide by Kepple and Sanner, or the classic if dated Burnham's Celestial Handbook.

Can a computerized telescope replace charts? I don't think so — not for beginners, anyway, and especially not on mounts and tripods that are less than top-quality mechanically (able to point with better than 0.2° repeatability). As Terence Dickinson and Alan Dyer say in their invaluable Backyard Astronomer's Guide, "A full appreciation of the universe cannot come without developing the skills to find things in the sky and understanding how the sky works. This knowledge comes only by spending time under the stars with star maps in hand."

Jupiter is still low in the dawn for most of us, but from his low latitude in the southern Philippines, Christopher Go is already imaging the giant planet. It was 26° up for him at the time of this image on June 20th.

South here is up. The South Equatorial Belt above center has become relatively narrow and dark red-brown, while the North Equatorial Belt has turned wide and, in its southern two-thirds, turbulent. This is the opposite of how the two belts appeared last year! Ganymede is just off the lower right edge.

Christopher Go

Venus (magnitude –4.5) shines low in the east-northeast during dawn. Don't confuse it with Jupiter to its upper right. The two planets remain 5° or 6° apart this week, crossing the background of Aldebaran and the Hyades.

Mars (magnitude +0.8, in Virgo) shines orange in the southwest at dusk and lower in the west later. It's still about 25° from the Saturn-and-Spica pair to its left, but it's heading their way! Mars will shoot the gap between them in mid-August.

In a telescope Mars is gibbous and tiny (6.8 arcseconds wide), continuing to fade and shrink.

Jupiter (magnitude –2.0) shines low at dawn, to the upper right of Venus. See Venus above.

Saturn on June 18th, imaged by Christopher Go. South is up here. Note the bright, pale greenish North North Temperate Zone (NNTZ) with its slight whitish irregularities. This is the remains of the great white spot outbreak that began a year and a half ago.

Christopher Go

Uranus (magnitude 5.9, at the Pisces-Cetus border) is in the east-southeast before the first light of dawn.

Neptune (magnitude 7.9, in Aquarius) is in the south-southeast before dawn. Finder charts for Uranus and Neptune.

All descriptions that relate to your horizon — including the words up, down, right, and left — are written for the world's mid-northern latitudes. Descriptions that also depend on longitude (mainly Moon positions) are for North America. Eastern Daylight Time (EDT) equals Universal Time (also known as UT, UTC, or GMT) minus 4 hours.

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