Stars to Look For

The moon is always beautiful, especially when it’s setting! Even with just your naked eye, you should be able to see darker spots on the lunar surface – those are the maria, ancient volcanic floodplains the size of entire countries here on Earth. Moving beyond the moon’s orbit, there are four other planets in our Solar System easily visible to the naked eye: Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. They’re often some of the brightest objects in the sky, and are usually easily findable with a phone app! Here’s a list of some other objects worth finding in the sky!

● Cassiopeia, Cygnus, the Big and Little Dippers, Draco, Orion: a set of prominent, generally easy to find constellations at our latitude! The Dippers, Cassiopeia, and Draco are almost always visible, while Cygnus and Orion dip below the horizon at different times of the year. Cygnus and Cassiopeia are also useful as waypoints to find the Milky Way, which runs straight through Cygnus and near Cassiopeia. Again, use any of apps recommended below to check what might be visible when you’re going

● The Pleiades (also known as the Seven Sisters, or the Subaru logo!): a cluster of hot, young stars that looks like a mini Little Dipper. How many of the stars in the Pleiades are visible is actually a good test of how dark the sky is!

● The Milky Way: it will only be visible in truly dark skies (Bortle 4 at the very least) but is absolutely spectacular in the right conditions! The summer Milky Way is stronger and more visible than the winter Milky Way but both are worth seeing.

● Andromeda Galaxy and Orion Nebula: two non-star phenomena that can be visible to the naked eye in dark enough skies. The Orion Nebula is a vague blur in the constellation Orion, while the Andromeda Galaxy is near Cassiopeia. Shooting stars are one of the highlights of any dark sky trip, and you’ll usually see one or two if you keep your eyes on the sky! If you want to see more, you can head to darker skies or run your dark sky trip during a meteor shower. Shower intensity is highly variable between showers and from year to year, but is generally quantified by the zenithal hourly rate (ZHR) — a rough guess of how many meteors you might see in ideal conditions. Generally, showers with a high ZHR and which peak on or near a new moon will be the most impressive. Here’s a list of our favorites:

● Quadrantids: start off the year, peaking shortly after New Year’s. The peak is very short – you may see some of them on other dates, but they’ll be most impressive on the night that they peak. Good news: this shower occurs during our winter break!

● Eta Aquarids: thrown off by Halley’s comet, these peak just before dawn in early May, but they aren’t much to write home about.

● Perseids: a classic. They peak in mid-August and are best seen a few hours before dawn. John Denver was inspired to write “Rocky Mountain High” after seeing the Perseids on a dark night in the Rockies!

● Southern/Northern Taurids: these two showers peak around midnight in early to mid November. While they aren’t very active, they do produce more than their fair share of fireballs, particularly bright meteors blazing their way across the heavens.

● Leonids: every 33 years, this becomes the most spectacular meteor shower of the year, with potentially hundreds of meteors visible an hour during the midnight peak in mid-November. Unfortunately, the big outburst isn’t expected until the ’30s.

● Geminids: one of the most active meteor showers of the year, peaking in mid December and becoming clearly visible after about 10pm. Definitely worth watching! Since the 1950s, our species has put a bunch of satellites in orbit and some of these are visible to the naked eye! If you see an unblinking bright dot moving steadily through the sky, you may have spotted one.