Hello ...
For deep-sky observers, May means galaxy season as our night sky looks out of the plane of the Milky Way into the intergalactic void. It’s the best time of year to grab some aperture and go deep. Also, the Eta Aquarid meteor shower peaks in the first week of the month, bright planets congregate in the eastern sky before
sunrise, Jupiter and Mars make a close conjunction at the end of the month. Best of all, for much of the world, a total lunar eclipse occurs in mid-May during the ‘Full Flower Moon’...
Here's your Night Sky Newsletter for May 2022.
1. What to see in the
Night Sky This Month.
2. This month's observing article takes you on a short tour of the "Hunting Dogs", a dim constellation under the handle of the Big Dipper which has more than its share of interesting and photogenic deep-sky objects.
3. Not to alarm you, but it seems that Saturn's rings are disappearing (but very, very slowly).
4. We've long known that meteorites hold complex organic molecules. But now we know that, despite billions of years floating through space, they contain all the base pairs that make up
DNA.
5. At first, I thought this was a late April Fool's joke. But NASA's Perseverance rover observed a total solar eclipse... from Mars! The same rover also recorded sounds of itself working on Mars and a (very) faint
sound of Martian wind.
And finally, in case you were wondering about the purpose of life, according to one ancient wise man, it is this:
"The purpose of life is the investigation of the Sun, the Moon, and the heavens." - Anaxagoras
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Wishing you clear skies!
Brian Ventrudo
Publisher
CosmicPursuits.com
