Innehållsförteckning för June 2023 från BBC Sky at Night

Visit www.skyatnightmagazine.com/bonus-content/GOKTED4 to access this month’s selection of exclusive Bonus Content JUNE HIGHLIGHTS Interview: Astronaut Kathy Sullivan The former NASA astronaut discusses her role in the launch of Hubble and what it’s like to walk in space. The Sky at Night Search for Alien Life Maggie and Chris return for a new series. Catch up as they explore how science is looking for life beyond our home planet. Build your own EQ camera mount Download PDF plans and extra images to help you make this month’s DIY Astronomy project (find the details on page 74). The Virtual Planetarium Pete Lawrence and Paul Abel guide us through the best sights to see in the night sky this month.…

Dark-sky campaigner Bob Mizon, who spent many years fighting to protect the night from light pollution, passed away on 19 April. Born in 1946. Mizon helped to establish the British Astronomical Association’s Commission for Dark Skies (CfDS) in 1989 and became its national coordinator soon after its inception. In this role, he promoted responsible lighting throughout the UK and Europe. He was instrumental in helping Cranborne Chase AONB achieve its status as an International Dark Sky Reserve, and was one of the instigators of the UK government’s All-Party Parliamentary Group for Dark Skies. He spent 26 years working as a French teacher, during which time he helped run school astronomy clubs and translated French astronomy books into English, before becoming a full-time planetarium operator in 1996. Nearly 150,000 children and…

When my husband and I set up our first meteor camera back in 2018, we did it not only to learn more about the orbits of the meteor events we observed and captured with our DSLR cameras, but also to see what we were missing while we slept. We loved our first meteor camera so much that we soon set up three more and we now have almost full sky coverage. We had no idea back then just what an important and valuable contribution they would make to so many aspects of meteor and asteroid science. A meteor is the streak of light we see when a piece of space debris burns up in our atmosphere; a fireball is a meteor that has a magnitude greater than –4.0. Most fireball…

Even small, mindful contributions - such as closing your blinds at night and ensuring outside lights are on a timer and are aiming their light downwards - can help improve light pollution, as can campaigning on projects with harmful impacts. Becoming citizen scientists with the ongoing Globe at Night project helps create the evidence to inform decision-making. “Your participation makes a big difference to us,” says Christopher Ivyba. “When you add up 10,000s of subjective feelings, it produces really reliable data.” This is particularly important as many current lighting standards are not scientifically-based. A study on road lighting for drivers and pedestrians published in Lighting Research & Technology in 2018, found that “recommendations for the amount of light do not appear to be well-founded in robust empirical evidence, or at…

After her flight on STS-7, Ride stayed with NASA and flew a second Shuttle mission, STS-41-G, in October 1984. She was joined on board by Kathy Sullivan, making it the first space mission with two women. It also made Ride the first US woman to fly in space twice and Sullivan the first US woman to perform a spacewalk, though cosmonaut Svetlana Savitskaya had claimed both of these world firsts a few months earlier. Ride was scheduled for a third flight, but this was cancelled following the Challenger disaster. Instead, she was appointed to the commission investigating the accident, leading to a more managerial role at NASA, planning the agency’s future. She left NASA in 1987, taking various university professorial posts, although she continued to work with NASA on outreach…

Edasich (lota (Ι) Draconis) is a mag. +3.3 star in the curving tail of Draco, the Dragon. Located 31.8° from Polaris (Alpha (α) Ursae Minoris), Edasich is circumpolar from the UK and never sets. The name is a corruption of the Arabic term for the male hyena’. The Chinese name for Edasich is Zĭ Wēi Zuŏ Yuán yī, which means ’First Star of Left Wall of Purple Forbidden Enclosure’, the enclosure asterism being formed by lota, Theta (θ), Eta (η), Zeta (ς). Upsilon (ν), 73, Gamma (γ) and Beta (β) Draconis. Edasich is 1.8 times more massive, 12 times larger and 55 times more luminous than our own Sun. It has a spectral classification of K2 III, indicating that it’s an orange giant star. It’s estimated to be about 1.2…

Thanks to NASA’s Curiosity rover, we can now say we’ve spotted noctilucent clouds on another planet. While exploring the Martian surface in the first few months of 2021, the rover began imaging wispy clouds that scattered light from the setting Sun and shimmered with colour. Analysis of the images determined that these clouds were unlike typical Martian clouds, which are composed of water ice and float no higher than 60km up in the atmosphere. These new clouds were sitting at higher altitudes, as their shiny appearance against a dark sky indicated that they were catching light from the setting Sun. Such a height would put the clouds in a very cold part of Mars’s atmosphere where it would be cold enough to freeze carbon dioxide into crystals of dry ice…

For thousands of years, our ancient ancestors tracked the path of the Sun across the sky, watching it rise and set at different positions throughout the year and constructing monuments such as the prehistoric stone circle Stonehenge in Wiltshire to keep track of its movement. June is a key month in the Sun’s path and also at Stonehenge, where thousands visit to mark the summer solstice - the longest day and shortest night of the year in the Northern Hemisphere. The word ‘solstice’ comes to us from Latin, ‘sol’ meaning Sun and ‘sistere’ to stand still. But why does the Sun appear to stand still? And what does it signify in the astronomical calendar? Join me on a short journey as we follow Earth’s orbit of our nearest star and…

The lack of truly dark skies is an issue for the UK at this time of year. Some compensation is the chance to see noctilucent cloud (NLC) displays, and this month we’ll look at how to photograph them to capture their structural movement. NLCs are high-altitude ice-sheet clouds able to reflect sunlight despite the Sun being below the horizon from ground level. They are typically seen 90-120 minutes after sunset, low above the northwest horizon or a similar time before sunrise, low above the northeast horizon. Extensive displays may last all night, tracking from the northwest, through the north and ending in the northeast. There are many interesting things about NLC displays, including their brightness, colour and different types of structure. This can all be seen visually, but recording displays…

Captured by the Nicholas U Mayall 4-metre Telescope at the Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona using its new Mosaic-3 detector, this is LBN 867, the Raspberry Nebula, which lies in the constellation of Orion. Look more closely, though, and you can see that LBN 867 is actually three objects in one: two nebulae and a powerful main sequence star. This blue-white star, HD 34989, lies at its heart. Surrounding it is the red emission nebula Sh2-263 - a diffuse region of hydrogen ionised by the heat and light energy coming from the star, and so giving off a reddish glow. Meanwhile, towards the bottom left of the photo, an adjacent cloud of cosmic dust is reflecting that same light, forming the blue reflection nebula vdB 38. Somewhat confusingly, another…

For the first time, astronomers have captured both the shadow of a black hole and its powerful jet in the same image. The picture of the heart of galaxy M87 was taken in 2018 using radio observatories around the world working as one to create a single, Earth-sized telescope, but it has taken several years to process the data. “We know that jets are ejected from the region surrounding black holes,” says Ru-Sen Lu from the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory, China, “but we still don’t fully understand how this happens. To study this directly we need to observe the origin of thejet as close as possible to the black hole.” M87’s black hole made history as the first to be imaged by the Event Horizon Telescope in 2019, but the new…

Our experts examine the hottest new research CUTTING EDGE The more we’ve learned about the planetary systems orbiting other stars in the galaxy, the more we’ve realised just how unusual our own Solar System is. Most exoplanetary systems have very different architectures to our own. The Kepler-11 system, for example, is exceedingly compact, with six planets crammed within the equivalent orbit of Venus. Other systems contain worlds with extremely elliptical orbits - such as HD 20782 b - which indicate significant past effects of gravitational interactions between planets. And one of the most common kinds of exoplanets to turn up in our astronomical searches is not present at all in the Solar System: super-Earths. Super-Earth planets have a mass several times larger than Earth’s but substantially less than ice giants…

In September 2020, I was pleased to move into my new home, but shortly after settling in I noticed the floodlight on a block of housing association flats next door. An earlier tenant there used to turn it off using the circuit breaker as a light switch. To my dismay, the circuit was switched back on and the whole of my back garden has been floodlit ever since, all night, every night, activated by a dusk-to-dawn light sensor. Night-sky observing is near impossible. I contacted both the housing association and the local council, at first requesting that the light was switched off. Then I suggested that a new light, shaded, shielded and directed where it needs to be, with a motion sensor, could be installed. The council’s response was that…

Sixty years ago this June, a Soviet factory worker with a passion for parachuting became the first woman to fly in space. Twenty years and two days later, half a world away a tennis-playing astrophysicist followed suit to become the first American woman in space. This month, we take a look back at the flights of Valentina Tereshkova and Sally Ride - two individuals who forged the way for women in space. Yet while one’s flight remained something of a one-off with little lasting effect on her nation’s space programme, the other’s was the start of a step-change in outlook that continues to this day. Born on 6 March 1937, Valentina Tereshkova was the daughter of a tractor driver who died during World War II. Upon reaching adulthood, Tereshkova worked…

It’s the question that always comes up when thinking about the origin of the Universe: what came before? And if there was no ‘before’, what was the cause of the Big Bang in the first place? Until a few centuries ago, the answer was easy: some eternal deity set everything in motion. Even Isaac Newton believed that God created the Universe, some 6,000 years ago. Later, many scientists, including young Albert Einstein, assumed the Universe itself to be eternal and everlasting. But when cosmic expansion was discovered, Belgian cosmologist (and Jesuit priest) Georges Lemaitre realised there must have been a beginning - a scientific version of Genesis, so to speak. Not that everyone immediately agreed. Well into the 1960s, Fred Hoyle’s steady-state theory was quite popular among iconoclastic scientists as…

1. M5 Let’s start with a fine globular cluster, M5, immediately northnortheast of mag. +5.0 5 Serpentis. It contains mostly Population II stars, which are among the oldest stars that we can see. They are thought to be more than 12 billion years old, which suggests that they formed very soon after our Galaxy did. In 10x50 binoculars, you should notice that M5 brightens towards the centre, exactly like a comet does. □ SEEN IT 2. Zubenelgenubi In antiquity, the stars of Libra, the only non-living zodiac constellation, represented the claws of Scorpius, and the common name of mag. +2.7 Alpha (α) Librae, Zubenelgenubi, means ‘southern claw’ (the northern claw is mag. +2.6 Zubenelschamali (Beta (β) Librae). Zubenelgenubi is a nice easy binocular double star. Binoculars easily reveal the mag.…

The Krakatoa eruption of 1883 was one of the deadliest in recorded history. The volcano, which lies on an island in Indonesia’s Sunda Strait, had been threatening to blow for months. It had been sending plumes of ash and steam into the sky since May of that year, but at 1pm on 26 August the pressure beneath its rocky cones finally became too much. Four increasingly violent explosions over the next 24 hours all but destroyed the island. They killed over 36,000 people and could be heard 3,500 kilometres away in Australia. Twenty-one cubic kilometres of rock and ash was blasted across 800,000 square kilometres and over 80 kilometres up into the air. So much ash was released into the atmosphere, the region was plunged into darkness for two and…

On seeing a chart of the Southern Hemisphere constellations, the Lick Observatory astronomer Heber Doust Curtis is reputed to have declared: “It looks like somebody’s attic!”. While it’s true that the southern constellations include such technological relics as an air pump, a chemical furnace and a pendulum clock, there are also exotic animals such as a peacock, a bird of paradise and a dorado chasing a flying fish— not to mention the oak tree that was planted by Edmond Halley to commemorate King Charles ll, only to be later felled by a Frenchman. Before the first European seafarers ventured around the tip of Africa to open trade routes to India and the Far East, the sky around the south celestial pole was a blank slate for Western astronomers. The 48…

When you look to the night sky over the course of a year, you’ll notice that it changes. Constellations not only shift their position from night to night, but come and go as the seasons change. Each season has its own sky, with its own prominent constellations - which is why Orion, for example, dominates the winter sky but is absent in summer. These changes are entirely due to the motion of Earth and are nothing to do with the stars far out in space. Earth is moving around the Sun by approximately one degree a day and at the same time is completing one rotation every 23 hours and 56 minutes. This is why we see the constellations shift westwards by one degree each night and rise in the…

BEFORE AFTER Astrophotography can be an expensive hobby and one where we constantly seek perfection from our data. While processing is a crucial step to achieving image excellence, many processing software packages come with the cost of monthly subscriptions. But that’s not the case with astrophotography freeware Siril (siril.org/download). Siril performs many functions including image stacking and autostretching, and it interfaces with external programs such as StarNet++ to remove stars too. This lessens the need to jump between various programs and simplifies the workflow for beginners. We won’t focus on these functions, however, and will instead run though a few key features of Siril’s ‘Image processing’ suite. The latest version of Siril, 1.2.0, was released in March 2023 and is available across Linux, Windows and macOS platforms. For this article,…

VITAL STATS Smart telescopes like the Unistellar eVscope eQuinox 2 have a lot in common with the smartphones used to control them. This new second-generation version of Unistellar’s most affordable smart telescope comes with upgraded electronics, a new sensor and lots of new features -just as the latest smartphones tend to offer every year. But there are some genuine reasons to invest in this latest and greatest smart telescope. As with its predecessor, eQuinox 2 has no eyepiece so no way of getting the original photons from stars, galaxies and nebulae into your eyes. This is about astrophotography. At its core, the eQuinox 2…

What do scientists think the early Universe was like? In the beginning there was nothing: no time, no space. Then the Big Bang happened and everything popped into existence - all the light and matter that exists in our Universe. The early Universe was a hot, dense, turbulent place and the kinds of objects that could form then were very different from those that could form today. What was your research team looking for? We were trying to see the first luminous objects in the Universe. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) was constructed to look back at the earliest cosmic epochs to search for these luminous objects. We don’t yet know how far back in time they exist. We didn’t think JWST would have the sensitivity to see individual…

The latest astronomy and space news, written by Ezzy Pearson BULLETIN A flash of radiation called a gamma-ray burst (GRB) which swept across Earth last year was the brightest on record, astronomers have recently been able to confirm. Seen on 9 October 2022, it’s believed such blasts only occur once every 10,000 years. The event is called GRB 221009A, though it has been nicknamed the BOAT - the brightest of all time. GRBs are thought to be created when a large star’s core collapses to form a black hole, which then quickly ingests the gas surrounding it before blasting the material out at near to light speed. These jets emit powerful gamma and X-rays that can cross the Universe. Observatories around the world look out for these signals as they…

The Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE) from the European Space Agency is on its way, following a successful launch at 12:14 UTC on 14 April from French Guiana. The launch was scheduled for the previous day, but was put on hold due to bad weather. The spacecraft unfurled its solar wings around 90 minutes later, but it will spend the next few months deploying and testing its instruments as its continues its journey to Jupiter. It will have plenty of time, as JUICE will not arrive at the planet until July 2031. It will conduct several fly-bys of the icy moons Europa, Callisto and Ganymede, taking detailed measurements of their surface geology, composition and magnetic fields. It will then eventually enter orbit around Ganymede in December 2034. The mission is…

A duet of extremely active black holes discovered in the heart of a distant galaxy are believed to bejust 10,000 lightyears apart, according to the latest observations. The pair, known as J0749+2255, are thought to be quasars. These are supermassive black holes gorging on the gas surrounding them, with the turbulence from this feeding frenzy superheating the gas, causing it to glow exceptionally brightly. The two were most likely to have been brought together during a merger of two galaxies that will eventually form a giant elliptical galaxy. The pair are so far a way we are seeing them as they were when the Universe was just three billion years old. “We don’t see a lot of double quasars at this early time in the Universe. And that’s why this…

The stars have always been part of human culture. From motifs on Greek pottery to van Gogh’s Starry Night painting, the connection is evident across the globe. But today, there are few people who get to experience what our forebears saw every night in the sky, researcher Christopher Kyba tells me. “If you went outside at night you would have had the whole cosmos staring down at you - this really difficult to understand thing,” says Kyba. “From my experience with stars, it makes you quite reflective. It changes how you think - this confrontation with awe.” The light pollution from humanity’s use of lights at night is reducing the number of stars we can see. Year on year it worsens, threatening our connection with the night sky, not to…

Over the past decades, scientists have unravelled a lot of cosmological mysteries. In particular, detailed observations of the cosmic microwave background by the European Space Agency’s Planck mission, as well as large-scale surveys of the three-dimensional distribution of galaxies, provided so much information about the early stages and the later evolution of the Universe as to warrant the use of the phrase ‘precision cosmology’. Nevertheless, astronomers are left with an annoying number of unsolved cosmological riddles. Apart from the fact that no one knows what (if anything) happened before the Big Bang, there’s no consensus on the hypothesis of cosmological inflation - an extremely early and brief phase of exponential expansion without which a number of properties of the Universe, like its homogeneity and lack of large-scale curvature, would remain…

PICK OF THE MONTH Venus 1Junefrom1 hour after sunset 19 Gemini West-northwest Phasesubtlesurfacemarkings 75mmorlarger Venus is literally at a turning point in the evening sky this month, reaching a position known as greatest eastern elongation - when it appears furthest from the Sun on the sky’s dome - on 4 June, when it will be separated from the Sun by 45.4°. Despite such an excellent separation, Venus’s position is starting to deteriorate as seen from the UK, with the planet appearing lower in the sky after sunset. As a consequence, on 1 June Venus sets 3.5 hours after the Sun, but by the end of the month this figure will have dropped to just two hours. At mag. -4.3, Venus appears to pass across the northern extremes of the Beehive…

Minor planet 20 Massalia reaches opposition on 16 June, when it will be in the southeast corner of Ophiuchus, northwest of the distinctive Teapot asterism in Sagittarius. At the start of June, it’s positioned 2.5° west of the beautiful Trifid Nebula, M20. The Trifid shines with an integrated magnitude of +6.3, although at 28 arcminutes across its surface brightness is significantly lower. The Trifid lies 1.5° north and slightly west of the much brighter Lagoon Nebula, M8. If you fancy recording the passage of 20 Massalia this month, including this pair of iconic nebulae will make for an impressive record of its journey. Incidentally, if you’re reading this in time, at 01:00 BST (00:00 UT) on 20 May, shining at mag. +10.7, Massalia is located 0.4° north of M20. Massalia…

CAUTION Never observe or image the Sun with the naked eye or any unfiltered optical instrument Venus reaches dichotomy, when it will be 50%-illuminated, on 4 June - in theory at least. In practice, when Venus is in the evening sky this occurs a few days earlier than prediction, due to atmospheric ‘adjustment’, a phenomenon known as the Schroter effect. The evening 50% phase represents the transition from a gibbous Venus into a crescent Venus, and where this planet is concerned, its crescent is very beautiful indeed. This month’s challenge is to follow the development of the phase as the crescent gets thinner. You might think that Venus isn’t hard to find and the crescent is easy to see through a telescope. While both statements are true, the position of…

Various satellites have observed noctilucent clouds (NLCs) over the years, but the first one dedicated to studying them was NASA’s Aeronomy of Ice in the Mesosphere (AIM). With Prof James Russell of Hampton University in Virginia as its principal investigator, and costing $l40m, it launched on 25 April 2007 to begin its two-year mission. Almost 16 years later, in March 2023, NASA finally ceased AIM’s operations after power loss in its battery left the satellite unable to receive commands. The data AIM gathered was crucial for our understanding of the causes and formation of NLCs, and featured in 379 peer-reviewed scientific papers. AIM’s successor, the Atmospheric Waves Experiment (AWE), is scheduled to launch in December 2023. It will perch on the International Space Station and study gravity (or buoyancy) waves,…

Near the Large Magellanic Cloud is a little tableau of Dorado the goldfish chasing Volans the flying fish. And you might wonder, why is there a goldfish in the sky? But it’s not the sort of goldfish that you keep in a bowl. It’s actually a dolphinfish, also known by its Hawaiian name of mahi-mahi, which is much bigger and more aggressive. They are caught for sport and for eating. They really do appear gold, and they chase flying fish. Indeed, one reason flying fish learned to fly was to escape predators such as dorado. The early explorers must have seen dolphinfish chasing flying fish on their voyages, and they put their images in the sky.…