by Geoff Chester | 04 September 2024 Delphinus and the Summer Triangle rising over the lights of Washington, DC imaged 2014 June 1 from Sky Meadows State Park, Paris, Virginia with a Canon EOS Rebel T2i DSLR The Moon returns to the evening sky this week, waxing through her crescent phases as she skims the southwest horizon. First Quarter occurs on the 11th at 2:06 am Eastern Daylight Time. On the evening of the 9th, Luna passes in front of the star Pi Scorpii, the lowest of the three stars that outline the “head” of Scorpius. If you have binoculars or a small telescope, locate the star close to the Moon’s southern limb at around 8:00 pm EDT. At 8:06 pm the star should disappear behind Luna’s dark limb. At 8:44 pm it will emerge from the Moon’s bright limb. Cooler evenings with less haze and humidity are welcome to those of us who have been through another summer in the mid-Atlantic region. It is a great time of the year to enjoy evenings under the summer stars without having to endure the sometimes soggy summer air. The early evening offers the best of summer’s celestial sights, and by the late evening the autumnal constellations are on the rise. Folks who live in more rural areas have a great view of the summer Milky Way arching overhead, and even city dwellers can see several of the season’s brightest constellations. The dominant star pattern of the season is the asterism known as the Sumer Triangle, which lies overhead as evening twilight ends. Its three brightest stars, Vega, Altair, and Deneb, belong to their own constellations, Lyra the Harp, Aquila the Eagle, and Cygnus the Swan, respectively. Vega is the brightest of the three stars, and its constellation is small but distinctive, showing a near-perfect parallelogram in a pair of binoculars with Vega just to the figure’s north. Just east of Vega is a close pair of stars, Epsilon Lyrae, which should easily resolve in your binoculars. If you have a telescope of 4 inches or more aperture, you will find a special treat when you focus on this pair. Each component is also a close double star, making Epsilon a multiple star system. If you sweep the sky with your binoculars just to the east of Altair, the southernmost star in the Triangle, you will run across another near perfect geometrical figure, in this case a small rhombus. Combine that with two other stars that lie just southwest of the rhombus and you will have found the constellation of Delphinus, the Dolphin. It doesn’t take a huge leap of imagination to see how the constellation got its name. Although it is small, it is one of the constellations described by the ancient Greco-Egyptian astronomer Ptolemy and has origins from Greek mythology. If you look at a star atlas, you will notice that its two brightest stars have somewhat unusual names, Sualocin and Rotanev. The names first appeared in a star chart prepared by the Palermo Observatory in Italy, but it was an English amateur astronomer who figured out the mystery. Reverend Thomas Wilson Webb, an assiduous observer of double stars and other celestial objects, was using the Palermo charts when he noticed the star names, which were decidedly not of Greek or Persian origin. He noticed that the chart had been prepared by the Observatory’s director, Niccolo Cacciatore. Translated to English, the name would have been Nicholas Hunter, which, further translated into Latin, would have been Nicolaus Venator. Spell those names backwards, and you solve the enigma. Saturn reaches opposition from the Sun on the morning of the 8th. This is when the ringed planet rises at local sunset and sets at sunrise, and is highest in the sky at 1:00 am local daylight time. If you have a telescope, this is a good time to hunt down some of Saturn’s small icy moons due to the so-called “opposition effect”. For several days before and after opposition the moons appear to brighten by about half a magnitude, enabling several of them to be visible in modest-aperture instruments. The moons orbit the planet in the same plane as the rings, which are currently tipped just under five degrees to our line of sight. Look for the moons on either side of the tips of the rings. Jupiter now rises at local midnight, and is best seen in the pre-dawn sky, where he rides high among the stars of Taurus. He won’t reach opposition until early December, but if you’re up early he will certainly grab your attention. Old Jove is perched between two red-tinged objects, the bright star Aldebaran to the west and the planet Mars to the east. Mars will continue to move eastward from Jupiter, and by the time he reaches opposition in mid-January of next year Mars will be some 45 degrees away.