Prepare your telescopes, we have two amazing planets to observe. If you don’t have telescopes, join us at Space Place at Carter Observatory where we have telescope viewings every Tuesday, Friday and Saturday nights clear skies. The Centre of the Galaxy has fantastic objects such as open and globular clusters, about which we go into detail in our podcast, Sagittarius and Scorpius are excellent constellations but now they are adorned by the two jewels on each side of the Milky Way that are Jupiter and Saturn – amazing objects. There is also a comet that we can see with a telescope, P/2008, comet in Scorpius at magnitude +9.7.
Oldies but Goldies, the circumpolar zone of the South Celestial Pole has some spectacular objects too, open clusters, globular clusters and the Magellanic clouds of course but this time of the year are in the lower part of the sky near the horizon so not the best to observe as we are looking through a thick layer of atmosphere, whereas we look straight up to see the galactic centre. The very famous meteor shower, the Perseids will not be visible from Wellington so unfortunately no hot chocolate on your star lounger admiring falling stars but, definitely the entire Milky Way makes up for that in beauty.
That and more about the night sky in our August podcast.
Clear skies,
the Milky Way Kiwis
