Bob Moler's Ephemeris Blog

Ephemeris for Tuesday, August 30th.  The Sun will rise at 7:03.  It’ll be up for 13 hours and 18 minutes, setting at 8:22.  The Moon, 2 days before new, will rise at 6:14 tomorrow morning.

Yesterday I talked about the Teapot pattern of stars low in the south these evenings that’s better represented in the stars for us moderns than a centaur with a bow and arrow called Sagittarius.  The teapot, spout to the right is appearing to begin to pour its contents on the southern horizon, with steam appearing above the spout.  That steam is the Milky Way.  In that steam, above the spout is a small horizontal line of light.  Binoculars or a telescope will reveal a star cluster there and more haze.  That haze is the Lagoon Nebula, also known to astronomers as M8, that spawned that star cluster.  This is the brightest nebula of the summer sky, and is 5 to 6 thousand light years away, in the next spiral arm inward in our Milky Way galaxy.

Times are for the Traverse City/Interlochen area of Michigan. They may be different for your location.

Addendum

The Sagittarius Teapot showing the location of the Lagoon Nebula that is visible to the naked eye. Photo Credit Bob Moler.

Objects designated by the letter M are known as Messier objects, from a list made by Charles Messier who was an astronomer at the Paris Observatory at about the time of the American Revolution.  Messier was interested in discovering comets, which when the first become visible are fuzzy blobs without tails.  A comet makes itself known by moving against the stars.  The objects on the list don’t move against the stars, being with the stars or beyond, which we call deep sky objects.  So it’s a list of objects not to bother with, because they aren’t comets.  Today we use his list or catalog of objects as some of the finest objects in the heavens.