FRIDAY, MAY 8
■ Spot Venus, the Evening Star, shining bright white in the west-northwest. It’s almost as high now as it’s going to get during this rather low apparition.
As twilight fades, look for Beta Tauri coming into view above Venus, and Aldebaran coming into view almost twice as far below Venus. Binoculars will help. This evening Venus sits right on the line between those two stars. Tomorrow it will be visibly left of the line.
And this week, Venus forms a shrinking triangle with Beta Tauri and fainter Zeta Tauri. Spot Zeta to Beta’s left or lower left. The three will line up on Wednesday the 13th.
■ High to Venus’s upper left ,the second brightest planet, Jupiter, shines in Gemini as shown below. The sky will need to become good and dark before all the fainter stars of the Twins’ pattern will come into view.
■ Last-quarter Moon tonight (exactly last quarter at 5:10 p.m. EDT on this date. The Moon rises around 2 a.m. local daylight-saving time Saturday morning. Can you see that it’s no longer perfectly half lit by then?
Later, once the Moon is well up but before the beginning of dawn (look at least 1¾ hours before sunrise), you can see that the Moon is in the center of the dim, boat-shaped pattern of Capricornus — if you have a dark enough sky. (Cover the Moon with your fingertip.) The boat is about two fists from end to end and will be steeply tilted lower left to upper right. Its brightest stars, at the two ends, are only 3rd magnitude.
SATURDAY, MAY 9
■ Three zero-magnitude stars shine after dark in May: Arcturus high in the southeast, Vega much lower in the northeast, and Capella in the northwest. They appear so bright because each is at least 60 times as luminous as the Sun, and because they’re all relatively nearby: 37, 25, and 42 light-years from us, respectively.
SUNDAY, MAY 10
■ The Arch of Spring spans the western sky in late twilight, highlighted by Jupiter near its top. Pollux and Castor, lined up roughly horizontally, form the top of the Arch. Watch for them to come out in the fading twilight less than a fist above or upper right of Jupiter. Look far to their lower left for Procyon, and farther to their lower right for Menkalinan and then bright Capella to complete the Arch.
MONDAY, MAY 11
■ The Big Dipper floats upside down high in the north after dark, as if dumping spring showers onto the world.
The farther north you are, the higher it’ll be. But not too far north. The Dipper passes straight overhead every night for people around latitude 55° to 60°: southern Alaska, Hudson Bay, northern Scotland, lower Scandinavia.
TUESDAY, MAY 12
■ Low in the eastern dawn Wednesday and Thursday mornings, the waning crescent Moon guides your way to difficult Saturn and even more difficult Mars, as shown below.
WEDNESDAY, MAY 13
■ Spot Venus in the western twilight. As the sky darkens this evening, you’ll see that Venus is sitting halfway between Beta Tauri (to its right or upper right) and dimmer Zeta Tauri (to its left or lower left). These are the horntips of Taurus. The rest of him is setting.
By tomorrow Venus will bend the line.
THURSDAY, MAY 14
■ What’s the oldest thing you have ever seen? It might be the Sun and other objects of the solar system, age 4.6 billion years. Everything on or near the Earth’s surface is much younger.
Next is Arcturus, which most people have surely seen whether they know it or not, since it’s one of the brightest stars in the sky. It’s a Population II orange giant, age about 7 billion years, just passing through our region of the Milky Way.
Amateur astronomers have globular clusters; most are older still. White dwarfs in the familiar M4 in Scorpius have dated the cluster, at least in part, at 12.7 ±0.7 billion years.
And did you manage to get a look the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS in your telescope when it dove through the inner solar system last fall? Its solid nucleus apparently dates from around 10 or 12 billion years ago when the universe and the Milky Way were young.
But individual stars that you can observe right now? Even with just binoculars? For that you want Bob King’s article In Search of Ancient Suns including finder charts. Assigning dates to individual stars from the first eras after the Big Bang is iffy; astronomers have to work from the near-absence of heavy elements in their spectra. But a 6th-magnitude star in Boötes and a 7th-magnitude star in Libra, both in binocular range, await you these May and June nights. They probably date from about 12½ billion and at least 13 billion years ago, respectively. These will probably be the oldest things you have ever seen, or will. The Big Bang itself is well dated at 13.8 billion years.
One could pick nits. Pick a proton, any proton right in front of you, and it has very likely remained intact, with its two up quarks and one down quark, since the Big Bang’s first millionth of a second. And what it has been through since then!
FRIDAY, MAY 15
■ This is the time of year when Leo the Lion starts walking downward toward the west, on his way to departing into the sunset in early summer. Right after dark, spot the brightest star fairly high in the southwest. That’s Regulus, his forefoot.
Regulus is also the bottom of the Sickle of Leo: a backward question mark about a fist and a half tall that outlines the lion’s leading foot, chest, and mane. To the Sickle’s upper left by more than a fist is the long triangle marking Leo’s rear end and tail.
SATURDAY, MAY 16
■ Vega is the brightest star in the east-northeast after dark. Look 14° (about a fist and a half at arm’s length) to Vega’s upper left for Eltanin, the 2nd-magnitude nose of Draco the Dragon. Closer above and upper left of Eltanin are the three fainter stars forming the rest of Draco’s stick-figure head, also called the Lozenge. Draco always points his nose toward Vega, no matter how he’s oriented. He seems curious about it, but he has made no move on it yet.
The faintest star of Draco’s head, opposite Eltanin, is Nu Draconis. It’s a fine, equal-brightness double star for binoculars (separation 61 arcseconds, both magnitude 4.9). The pair is 99 light-years away. Both are hot, chemically peculiar type-Am stars somewhat larger, hotter, and more massive than the Sun
■ New Moon (exact at 4:01 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time).
SUNDAY, MAY 17
■ Can you see the big Coma Berenices star cluster? Does your light pollution really hide it, even on these moonless evenings? Or do you just not know exactly where to look?
It’s 2/5 of the way from Denebola, Leo’s tail tip, to the end of the Big Dipper’s handle, Ursa Major’s tail tip. Its brightest members form an inverted Y. The entire cluster is about 4° wide — a big, dim glow in a very dark sky, roughly the size of a ping-pong ball held at arm’s length. It nearly fills a binocular view. It totally overspills a telescope’s view; you don’t see anything unusual because you’re looking right through it!
This Week’s Planet Roundup
Mercury is out of sight in conjunction with the Sun.
Venus (magnitude –3.9) shines bright white in the west-northwest during evening twilight. It’s just about as high now as we’re going to see it during this rather low apparition. It doesn’t set until about 45 minutes after complete dark.
High to Venus’s upper left shines Jupiter, and less far to Venus’s upper right sparkles Capella.
As the stars come out closer to Venus, you’ll find it forming an isosceles triangle (two equal sides) with the horntips of Taurus: Beta Tauri above it, and lesser Zeta Tauri to Venus’s upper left. Every day the bright planet moves closer to them; the triangle flattens. Venus passes between them on May 13th.
Mars and Saturn are low in bright sunrise, as shown below. Bring binoculars. Saturn is the higher and brighter one, magnitude +0.9. Mars is much lower and somewhat fainter, magnitude +1.2. Look for Mars about two fists to Saturn’s lower left, a little farther every morning.
Jupiter, magnitude –2.0 in Gemini, is the second-brightest planet after Venus. It shines high in the west in twilight about 30° upper left of Venus.
Look upper right of Jupiter for Pollux and Castor, and a little farther lower left of it for brighter Procyon. Jupiter sinks all evening and sets around midnight or 1 a.m. on the west-northwest horizon.
Watch Jupiter and Venus close in toward each other in the coming weeks! At their conjunction on June 9th, they’ll pass just 1.6° apart.
In a telescope Jupiter is down to 35 or 34 arcseconds wide, nearly as small as we ever see it; Earth is carrying us around toward the far side of the Sun from it.
I’ve certainly been fooled! Once when I was using my 12.5-inch reflector and knew the situation beforehand, dark Callisto did seem to look a little grayer than a shadow might. But in astronomy, contrast can sure play tricks. The opposite effect happens when you see our own dark-surfaced Moon sunlit against a darker sky. It looks brilliant white.
For a timetable of all the doings of Jupiter’s moons this month, good worldwide, see the May Sky & Telescope, page 51.
Uranus is lost in the sunset.
Neptune hides low in the sunrise.
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 and graphics that also depend on longitude (mainly Moon positions) are for North America. Eastern Daylight Time (EDT) is Universal Time minus 4 hours. UT is also known as UTC, GMT, or Z time.
Want to become a better astronomer? Learn your way around the constellations. They’re the key to locating everything fainter and deeper to hunt with binoculars or a telescope.
This is an outdoor nature hobby. For a more detailed 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.
For the attitude every amateur astronomer needs, read Jennifer Willis’s Modest Expectations Give Rise to Delight.
Once you get a telescope, to put it to good use you’ll want a much more detailed, large-scale sky atlas (set of charts). The basic standard is the Pocket Sky Atlas, in either the original or Jumbo Edition. Both show all 30,000 stars to magnitude 7.6, and 1,500 deep-sky targets — star clusters, nebulae, and galaxies — to search out among them.
Next up is the larger and deeper Sky Atlas 2000.0, plotting stars to magnitude 8.5; nearly three times as many, as well as many more deep-sky objects. It’s currently out of print, but maybe you can find one used.
The next up, once you know your way around well, are the even larger Interstellarum Deep-Sky Atlas (with 201,000+ stars to magnitude 9.5 and 14,000 deep-sky objects selected to be detectable by eye in very large amateur telescopes), and Uranometria 2000.0 (332,000 stars to mag 9.75, and 10,300 deep-sky objects).
For the necessary tricks, read How to Use a Star Chart with a Telescope. It applies just as much to electronic charts on your phone or tablet — which many observers find handier and more versatile, if sometimes less well designed and contextualized For the necessary tricks, read How to Use a Star Chart with a Telescope. It applies just as much to electronic charts on your phone or tablet — which many observers find handier and more versatile, if sometimes less well designed and contextualized — as it does to charts on paper.
You’ll also want a good deep-sky guidebook. A beloved old classic is the three-volume Burnham’s Celestial Handbook. It was my bedside reading for years. An impressive more modern one is the big Night Sky Observer’s Guide set (2+ volumes) by Kepple and Sanner. The pinnacle for total astro-geeks is the new Annals of the Deep Sky series, currently at 11 volumes as it works its way forward through the constellations alphabetically. So far it’s up to H.
Can computerized telescopes replace charts? Well, I used to say this:
“Not for beginners, I don’t think, unless you prefer spending your time getting finicky technology to work rather than learning how to explore through the sky yourself. As Terence Dickinson and Alan Dyer say in their 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 and a curious mind.’ Without these, ‘the sky never becomes a friendly place.’ “
But things change. The technology has continued to improve and become more user-friendly — particularly with “plate solving” software that can now recognize any star field to determine exactly where the telescope is pointed — finally bypassing all aiming imperfections in the mount, tripod, gears, bearings and other mechanics, or in the user’s skill in setting up.
The latest revolution is the rise of small, photography-only “smartscopes.” These take advantage of not only today’s pointing technology, but also the vastly better capabilities of imaging chips and image processing compared to the human retina and visual cortex. The most sophisticated image stacking and processing can come built right in. The result is decent deep-sky imaging from shockingly small, low-priced units. The image may be viewable on your phone or computer as it builds up in real time. Some can directly enable contributions to citizen-science projects.
Smartscopes are changing the hobby at the entry level. For more on this see Richard Wright’s “The Rise of the Smart Telescopes” in the November 2025 Sky & Telescope. And read the magazine’s review of this especially small one.
If you get a larger, more conventional computerized scope that you can look through, make sure that its drives can be disengaged so you can swing it around and point it readily by hand when you want to, rather than only slowly by the electric motors (which eat batteries).
Audio sky tour. Out under the evening sky with your
earbuds in place, listen to Kelly Beatty’s monthly
podcast tour of the naked-eye heavens above. It’s free.
“The dangers of not thinking clearly are much greater now than ever before. It’s not that there’s something new in our way of thinking, it’s that credulous and confused thinking can be much more lethal in ways it was never before.”
— Carl Sagan, 1996 , The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
“Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”
— John Adams, 1770, in the summation of his unpopular, but successful, defense of British soldiers in the Boston Massacre trial
“Truly, whoever can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”
— Voltaire, 1765, Questions sur les miracles
