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Ephemeris: 08/26/2024 – Scanning the Milky Way with binoculars

August 26, 2024

This is Ephemeris for Monday, August 26th. Today the Sun will be up for 13 hours and 30 minutes, setting at 8:29, and it will rise tomorrow at 6:59. The Moon, at last quarter today, will rise at 12:06 tomorrow morning.

Now that the Moon has left the evening sky the Milky Way dominates the sky from northeast to south-southwest. The best way to appreciate the Milky Way is with binoculars and just scan through the Milky Way as Galileo did with this primitive telescope. What he found was that the glow of the Milky Way resolved itself into individual stars, thousands upon thousands of stars, each too faint to be perceived with the naked eye. At many places in the Milky Way there are fuzzy spots. These could be nebulae, clouds of gas lit up by the stars within them, or clusters of stars not quite resolvable by binoculars, that can be studied in more detail with a larger telescope. Wandering through the Milky Way with binoculars can give hours of enjoyment.

The astronomical event times given are for the Traverse City/Interlochen area of Michigan (EDT, UT–4 hours). Times will be different for other locations.

Addendum

The Milky Way from Cygnus to Scutum
The Milky Way from Cygnus to Scutum. I this image, actually a stack of 5 images, on August 12, 2018. I was hoping to record Perseid meteors. It was a poor showing, as none appeared in these images. We were hampered that year by smoke from the western US wildfires which really affected the lower part of this image, which was still pretty high up in the sky. Featured here is the Great Rift, a series of dust clouds that split the Milky Way into two sections. Credit Bob Moler (me).

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