1. A meteor shower arrives this week. Mercury and Venus make a close encounter in the evening sky. Jupiter and Saturn get bigger and brighter. And the first total lunar eclipse since 2019 happens later in May.

 

2. A favorite of astrophotographers and visual observers alike, the Flaming Star Nebula is set alight by a dazzling blue-white runaway star that was ejected from the Orion Nebula long ago. This month, a look at runaway stars and, even more rare, hypervelocity stars that have enough speed to leave their home galaxy and roam the darkness of intergalactic space.

 

3. Maria Popova reviews Seeking an Aurora, a beautiful and inventive picture book about the aurorae borealis.

 

4. It's hard to get enough of watching a little helicopter fly around on Mars. Here's a video and mission update from the third flight of the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter.

 

5. A fascinating look at the idea of primordial black holes formed in the Big Bang itself. Can these yet-to-be-detected phenomena account, at least in part, for the dark matter in the universe?

 

6. For hands-on stargazers: here's how to hunt down a variable star in the globular cluster Messier 3. These sorts of variables were used, a century ago, to first map out the shape and size of the Milky Way.

 

7. Little Proxima Centauri may be the nearest star to Earth, and far smaller than our Sun, but it might be an unpleasant place to visit because of its frequent and violent flares that would tear the hide off of most living beings.

 

8. Podcast suggestion: physicist Carlo Rovelli on why time might not exist. (Tell that to my editors...)

 

9. An update on the current crop of comets visible in small-to-medium sized backyard telescopes.

 

10. A Song for Stargazers: Ella Fitzgerald's version of the wonderful 'It's Only a Paper Moon' with music by Harold Arlen and lyrics by Yip Harburg and Billy Rose.

 

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Clear Skies!

 

Brian Ventrudo

Publisher