Sun, Moon and Stars in July: Jupiter Shines, Aquarius Falls

Wednesday 30 June 2021

sun, moon and stars in july
Jupiter shines, and Aquarius falls

The summer solstice has turned behind us, in July the days are noticeably shorter again. Saturn is high in the night sky, but another planet steals the show from it. From the middle of the month a stream of meteors is approaching.

At dusk, Venus appears as the first star in the deep northwest. Due to its position near the horizon, it is not particularly noticeable. It is often referred to as the evening star, although it is not a star at all, but a planet. Around 11 p.m., Venus sets at the beginning of the month, but at the end of July, it sets 40 minutes earlier. The narrow crescent of the wax moon passes from Venus on the evening of the 12th, a beautiful sight of the sky. She meets Leo’s main star Regulus on the 21st at 9 p.m. Regulus can only be seen with binoculars in bright twilight.

Agile Mercury does not manifest itself in our latitudes. In southern regions such as the countries of the Mediterranean, in the tropics and in the Southern Hemisphere, the planet closest to the Sun can be seen in the depths of the eastern sky around the middle of the month. Mars withdrew from the evening sky and remained invisible. On October 8th, the Sun will overtake it in Virgo. Jupiter in the constellation Aquarius dominates the night sky with its brilliance. After Venus, it is the brightest planet in Earth’s sky. At the beginning of July, the giant planet rises ten minutes before midnight, and at the end of the month around ten in the evening. On the night of the 25th to the 26th, the moon, which is still almost full, passes Jupiter to the south.

Aquaried every five to ten minutes

Saturn, in the constellation Capricorn, can be seen most of the night. On July 1, the ring planet rises five minutes after 11 pm, and at the end of July it is 9 pm. Pluto should be mentioned because it faces the Sun in the constellation Sagittarius in mid-July. The prominent dwarf planet reached its exact opposite position on the 17th day, as reflected sunlight travels four hours and 37 minutes to Earth to travel a distance of nearly five billion kilometers.

Aquariidenstrom meteors appear from mid-July to mid-August. It appears to flow from the constellation Aquarius. The maximum is expected on July 28 in the hours after midnight. Expect 20 to 25 shooting stars per hour. Since a single person could only see a small part of the sky at a time, they only saw a basin of water every five to ten minutes. The falling stars of this stream are parts of Comet 96P/Machholz.

On the afternoon of the fifth day, the moon is 405,370 kilometers from the Earth. The new moon appears on the tenth at 3.17 am. The moon passes near its closest point on 21 noon, 364,520 kilometers away from us. The full moon on the 24th is reached at 4.37 am in the constellation Capricorn.

The Big Dipper began its descent in the northwest. The drawbar is pointing up, and the car body is hanging down. Mizar, the middle star in the drawbar, is an eye test. Right next to him was a faint little star, called Alcor, called Little Knight. He rides, so to speak, on the drawbar or on the tail of the Great Bear. In a telescope, Mizar appears as a double star.

The celestial star W, Cassiopeia, begins to rise in the northeast. The Summer Triangle, made up of Vega in the harp, Deneb in the swan and Atair in the eagle, stands high in the east in the sky. Besides Arktur, Wega is the brightest fixed star in the northern sky. The orange tree is already in the western sky. It is easy to determine if you follow the curve of the car handle with your eyes.

shining like 50 suns

Unlike the Arktur, the hotter Vega emits a bluish-white light. We are 25 light years away from Wega. This means that it is still one of the stars next to the Sun. It shines brilliantly like 50 our suns. Its equatorial diameter is three times the diameter of our Sun. Because of its rapid rotation, Wega is severely flattened. Its pole diameter is a fifth shorter than its equatorial diameter. While our Sun needs just over 25 days for one revolution near the equator, the much larger Vega rotates once on its axis in just twelve hours. Because of the strong flatness of Vega, the poles are closer to the central fire core than to the equatorial region. This results in a large difference in surface temperatures. While the temperature at the poles is 9,880 degrees Celsius, the tropics are only 7,380 degrees. With nearly three times the mass of the Sun, Vega is still a young Sun 400 million years old. In just under five billion years, our Sun is about twelve times as old.

In the West, the spring constellations say goodbye. The lion is falling, its main star Regulus has already disappeared. Thus the spring triangle also disintegrates, and the other two corner points can be seen: in the depths of the southwest, the bluish-white Spica in Virgo and the bright Sagittarius in the constellation Bootes, the Shepherd, can be seen. On July 5th, the Earth reached its maximum solar distance of 152 million km. Then sunlight travels to us for eight minutes and 27 seconds. At the beginning of January, when the Earth is close to the sun, sunlight reaches us seventeen seconds earlier.

The sun began to descend until the point of autumn at the celestial equator. On the evening of the 20th, Gemini departed and changed into the constellation Cancer. Two days later, in the afternoon, I entered the zodiac sign of Leo. The length of the day decreases by one hour at 50 degrees N, and the height of the sun decreases at midday by five degrees.