Here's this month's 'Night Sky' newsletter from Cosmic Pursuits for August 2020!

 

1. Three bright planets - Jupiter, Saturn, and Mars - are prominent in the night sky and make for excellent viewing in a small telescope. Brilliant Venus rises well before dawn. And while Comet NEOWISE slowly fades, the Perseid meteor shower, the best of the year, peaks on August 12-13. Here's what's going on in the Night Sky This Month.

 

2. What a great and unexpected pleasure to see a bright comet after a 23-year drought in the northern hemisphere. A few thoughts and images of my own after such a long wait at this link (along with a spectacular image of the comet by a Dutch photographer), while Rod Mollise sums up his experiences in seeing this pleasant little visitor from the outer solar system.

 

3. Photos of NEOWISE aren't exactly hard to find, but here's a summary of some good ones from around the world.

 

4. Looking to cruise the night sky this month with a small telescope? Here's a bunch of ideas for sky tours in an article I wrote for Sky & Telescope magazine last year. It will help you appreciate just what you can see with a modest scope and a keen eye.

 

5. What, what? Maybe dark matter isn't a thing after all?

 

6. There's just over a year left until a spectacular solar eclipse in Antarctica. Book your ticket now (?).

 

7. Planetary scientists took advantage of a launch window to send three separate missions to Mars. The most exciting, NASA's Perseverance rover (and it's attendant Martian helicopter) will look for evidence of life at the bottom of the small crater Jezero. Ivan Semeniuk explains what the mission hopes to accomplish...

 

8. It's summer in Earth's northern hemisphere. As it happens, it's also summer in Saturn's northern hemisphere. Astronomers captured a spectacular image of the planet last month using the Hubble Space Telescope.

 

9. My current project: learning to use Sequator to stack and smooth the noise of nightscape images. It's a simple and impressive little software tool (and the price is right). Here's a tutorial video from photographer Alyn Wallace that shows how to use it.

 

10. And finally a little astronomy music: he was a strange young man and more than a bit sad, but Nick Drake could surely play the guitar and write a pretty song. As I stood for many hours under a dark northern sky last month, this song came to mind more than once. Enjoy!

 

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Clear Skies!

 

Brian Ventrudo

Publisher