Mon Aug 11, 2025 PERSEIDS AT THEIR PEAK
The Perseid meteor shower is now at peak activity. These “shooting stars” are bits of comet dust that fall to earth at high speeds, burning up in our atmosphere and lighting up the night sky. Now the old gibbous moon will rise around midnight and its light will make it hard to see the meteors, so best viewing will be during the evening hours. Dress warmly, protect yourself against mosquitoes, find a safe spot that’s away from bright streetlights. Bring a lounge chair that lets you lean all the way back, and of course refreshments such as iced tea and chocolate chip cookies, are always a good idea. Look to the east and up toward the top of the sky. Meteor showers are fun, but you can sometimes go for several minutes before seeing one. And if it’s cloudy you won’t be able to see any at all.
Tue Aug 12, 2025 SCORPIUS – MAUI’S FISHOOK
All through this month the constellation Scorpius appears well-placed in the southern sky during the evening. It is one of the few constellations that looks like it should, outlining a scorpion from Greek myth. But to folks in the South Pacific, Scorpius was known as Maui’s fishhook. Maui and his brothers were far out at sea, when Maui’s fishing line suddenly went taut. He urged his brothers to row as hard as they could, and with all his strength, attempted to lift the mighty fish out of the ocean. But it wasn’t a fish; Maui had snagged the sea bottom. He pulled so hard that he brought the ocean floor up to the surface where it became the island of Hawaii. The great fishhook itself flew up into the sky, where everyone can see it tonight, a cosmic reminder of the big one that got away.
Wed Aug 13, 2025 EGYPTIAN CONSTELLATIONS
Many of our modern constellations were also recognized by ancient Egyptians; there were also distinct star patterns which were theirs alone. The Big Dipper, part of the larger constellation of Ursa Major, the Great Bear, was seen by the Egyptians as the leg of a great bull, a dismembered piece of the god Set. The star Polaris in the Little Dipper represented the coffin of Osiris, while the rest of the Little Dipper was sometimes a scorpion, or sometimes a jackal, the “dark and loathsome creature of Set.” Between the dippers is the long, straggling constellation of Draco the Dragon, which hearkens back to Babylonia, where he was the frightful Tiamat of Chaldea, whose body was divided to make heaven and earth. But to the pharaohs of Egypt these stars also represented Taweret the Hippopotamus and Sobek the Alligator.
Thu Aug 14, 2025 THE AGE OF AN UNBOUNDED UNIVERSE
Some astronomers have recently suggested, based on their interpretation of data from the Webb space telescope, that the Universe is roughly twice as old as we thought: instead of slightly less than fourteen billion years old, it’s now closer to 28 billion. There have been many attempts to determine the age of the Universe by the means of refining the Hubble constant, the rate at which galaxies recede from the initial theorized Big Bang. Not everyone agrees with this new estimate, but we are still talking about the likelihood of a very old, although not infinitely old, Universe. While cosmologists continue to search for that theoretical time when things began, a common thought is that the Universe is still unbounded, like a great unending forest of stars and galaxies that curves back upon itself – a cosmic singularity.
Fri Aug 15, 2025 HOW TO SEE A BLACK HOLE
In the summer evening sky, there are three bright stars high overhead which are known as the Summer Triangle. Inside this triangle, in the neck of the constellation Cygnus the Swan, there is a great mystery. It is a black hole called Cygnus X-1. We can't see it directly because its gravity field is so intense that light can't escape it. But we know that it is there, because we've discovered an incredible amount of x-rays pouring out of this part of the sky. Cygnus X-1 is part of a binary star system. Gas from its companion, a massive blue giant, is being pulled from it to feed the accretion disc surrounding the hole; it’s here that the x-rays are being made, just outside the black hole's event horizon - its point of no return, about 2500 parsecs, or a little less than 48 quadrillion miles from Earth.
