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Ephemeris: 06/26/2026 – How do we know so much about those points of lights in the sky?

June 26, 2026 Leave a comment

This is Ephemeris for Friday, June 26th. Today the Sun will be up for 15 hours and 33 minutes, setting at 9:32, and it will rise tomorrow at 5:59. The Moon, 3 days before full, will set at 3:37 tomorrow morning.

All but a handful of stars are mere points in even our largest telescopes. How do we know so much about them then? The reason is the science of spectroscopy, breaking down light into its constituent colors where color equals frequency or the energy of the light. Isaac Newton was the first to discover that by passing white light through a prism it turned into a rainbow of colors that the colors were actually combined within the white light. Passing sunlight through a vertical slit and smearing the light horizontally with the prism into its constituent colors, many dark vertical lines within that spectrum of colors appear. They turned out to be the fingerprints of the elements within the atmospheres of the stars, and that is just the beginning.

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

The visible solar spectrum. In 1814 Joseph von Fraunhofer observed the spectrum and labeled the dark lines on it.
This is the visible solar spectrum. In 1814 Joseph von Fraunhofer observed the spectrum and labeled these lines with the letters that you see on top . These lines are the most prominent lines of the solar spectrum. There are many more for all the elements in the sun’s atmosphere. These elements absorb light of specific wavelengths coming to us and remit it in all directions, so we have a net loss. The lines are actually the images of the slit that the light went through, or in this case didn’t go through so they imprint on the spectrum as a line. The bottom scale is the wavelength in nanometers (billionths of a meter).

Categories: Concepts, Ephemeris Program, Stars Tags: ,