Bob Moler's Ephemeris Blog

This is Ephemeris for Memorial Day, Monday, May 26th. Today the Sun will be up for 15 hours and 12 minutes, setting at 9:16, and it will rise tomorrow at 6:03. The Moon is new today, and won’t be visible.

The constellation Hercules, out in the evening sky now, contains the brightest globular star cluster in the northern sky. A globular star cluster, about 25 thousand light years away. It’s an ancient assemblage of hundreds of thousands to millions of stars in a big ball. About 150 of these star clusters, that we know of, exist in the Milky Way. They form a spherical distribution around the Milky Way concentrated towards the center. The ages of these clusters runs to over 10 billion years. It is thought that they formed first out of the gas of the Milky Way and so did not participate in the collapse of the gas into the disk of the Milky Way we know today from which later stars were formed. We see them in other galaxies.

The astronomical event times given in this blog are for the Traverse City/Interlochen area of Michigan (Lat 44.7° N, Long 85.7° W; EDT, UT – 4 hours) unless stated otherwise. Times will be different for other locations.

Addendum