Hello ! It's been hot and smokey in my part of the world, but I've still cooked up a great newsletter for you this month with lots of tips, videos, and cloudy-night reading. Here's your monthly night-sky newsletter from CosmicPursuits.com.

 

1. Both Jupiter and Saturn reach opposition in August and make their best apparitions of the year. The grand Perseid meteor shower peaks under nearly moonless conditions, ideal for some northern summer stargazing under the Milky Way (southerners can see many of these meteors as well). Venus hangs low and bright over the northwestern horizon after sunset, and tiny Mercury and makes a very close approach to Mars in the same part of the sky. Here's what's going on in the Night Sky This Month.

 

2. It's a big month for planetary observers as Jupiter and Saturn make their closest approach to Earth this year. Want to know more? Here's a guide to observing Jupiter in 2021, and here's one for observing Saturn. Don't miss seeing these two spectacular worlds!

 

3. Take a brief tour of the famous 'Coathanger' asterism, one of the best sights for binocular observers anywhere in the sky.

 

4. Bob King offers a tour of some lovely double stars, all ideal sights for those of us suffering compromised skies.

 

5. In this video, Alyn Wallace explains how to do astrophotography with a smartphone.

 

6. We're not the only Earth-bound species who can see the stars. This article explains what animals can see in the night sky, and what they lose as light pollution encroaches.

 

7. Soon after it was commissioned, the magnificent ALMA telescope in Chile's Atacama desert directly imaged new planets forming around other stars. Now, it captured an image of a moon forming around an exoplanet. Just amazing.

 

8. A short documentary video about Jocelyn Bell, who as a young graduate student who discovered pulsars in 1967 only to have her graduate advisor win the Nobel Prize in 1974.

 

9. Enjoy this absolutely dazzling video of the space probe Juno's flyby of Jupiter's moon Ganymede, the largest moon in the solar system.

 

10. A Song for Stargazers: Because of thick smoke in my part of the world, I can only see one star right now, an angry red sun. Which brings to mind this obscure but utterly beautiful piece by Canada's Gordon Peterson (with haunting background vocals by Joni Mitchell) who laments the state of Earth's natural world.

 

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Clear Skies!

 

Brian Ventrudo

Publisher