Mon June 16, 2025 HERCULES OVERHEAD
Late this evening, look toward the top of the sky. Up there is an undistinguished star pattern which looks something like a simple letter H. The H stands for Hercules, and while the constellation is not very prominent, the ancient Greek hero it represents was. Nearby constellations represent some of his 12 labors. There’s his first labor, the conquest of the Nemean lion – the constellation Leo, to the west of Hercules; or the second task, the destruction of the Hydra, below Leo. Hyppolyte, the queen of the amazons, whose golden belt was task number 9, is represented by Virgo to the southwest. To the north is Draco the dragon who guarded the golden apples of the Hesperides, the three stars in the handle of the Big Dipper. And the great, carnivorous Stymphalian birds are present as the three bright stars of the summer triangle, Vega, Deneb and Altair, over in the eastern sky.
Tue June 17, 2025 WILLIAM PARSONS, LEVIATHAN BUILDER
William Parsons was born on June 17th, 1800. Forty years later, he built the Irish Leviathan. At sixteen tons, and with a primary mirror six feet across, the Leviathan would remain the world’s largest telescope for the next seventy years. It was so big that it couldn’t be rotated, so by leaning the instrument east to west, Parsons could observe objects for over a half hour. The Irish Leviathan was so powerful that he could actually see individual stars in distant galaxies like M51, the Whirlpool, roughly 40 million light years away! A lot of the colorful descriptive names of nebulas and galaxies were made up by Parsons – the whirlpool galaxy, the crab nebula, the Saturn nebula. Parson’s son continued his work, but his grandson had no interest in astronomy, and Leviathan was dismantled. But it was rebuilt in 1999.
Wed June 18, 2025 PLANET SYMBOLS
Planet positions are often marked on star charts with a symbol. Each symbol is based on some aspect of that planet. Mercury, the messenger of the gods, has a walking stick symbol with two snakes wrapped around it (Yeah, that’d make me walk faster too.) A circle on a letter T makes a hand mirror - that’s for beautiful Venus. Mars, god of war, is symbolized by a shield and a spear. A stylized lightning bolt is the symbol for Jupiter, ruler of the sky. Saturn, a harvest god, has a scythe. For Uranus, it looks like somebody jammed a Mars symbol onto a sun symbol; it’s probably got something to do with sex, but this isn’t that kind of a program so let’s move on. The moon’s symbol looks like a crescent moon, while the sun is a dot inside a circle. Neptune is the king of the sea, so he bears a trident; and Pluto's is "P" and "L" combined. Can we talk about Pluto as a planet? Well, it’s got a symbol, so, yes!
Thu June 19, 2025 ANCIENT SUN TEMPLES
Stonehenge, built over forty centuries ago, is one of over a thousand circles of standing stones that can be found throughout the British Isles and Europe. On the first day of summer, the sun rises over an outlying heelstone, as viewed through a central arch of stones. In ancient Egypt, temples were built so that at the summer solstice, the sun’s rays shone through tall columns to sanctuaries within. At the Bighorn medicine wheel in Wyoming, piles of carefully placed stones point toward the summer sunrise. For hundreds of years in New Mexico, a slender ray of sunlight – the sun dagger of the Anasazi – sliced through a petroglyph spiral on the first day of summer. And there is the Sun Temple, built by the Incas at Machu Pichu – but of course Peru is south of the equator, and now it is their winter solstice sun that is framed in this ancient observatory’s window.
Fri June 20, 2025 SUMMER SOLSTICE
Summer begins today, June 20th, at 10:42 pm Eastern Daylight Time. It’s at this precise moment that the sun will shine directly overhead at local noon, not here in Florida obviously, but as seen from a point on the Tropic of Cancer at twenty-three and a half degrees North latitude. When it’s local noon here, the sun will be as high in the sky as possible for our latitude. Along this part of the Treasure Coast, we’re at 27½ degrees North latitude, so at midday today the sun will be about 4 degrees south of our zenith. This is the summer solstice, as the sun stops its northerly progression, due to the inclined tilt of the earth’s axis as it revolves about the sun; sol/stice – sun stop. It also marks the longest period of daylight and the shortest period of night in the year, at least in Earth’s northern hemisphere.
