Mon May 4, 2026 SPRING CROSS QUARTER DAY, VIRGO AS SKY MARKER
Divide the year up into four parts or quarters. Each quarter is marked by the beginning of a new season. The quarter days of Summer and Winter are known as solstices, while during the equinoxes of Spring and Autumn, nights and days are of fairly equal length. Now divide those seasons in half and you get cross-quarter days, the midpoints of each season. The beginning of May marks the cross-quarter day for Spring, called Beltane in the old Celtic calendar. In traditional maypole dances, everyone moved clockwise around the maypole, mimicking the sun’s motion across the sky through the day. At the beginning of spring, the stars of the constellation Virgo, the springtime maiden, appeared in the east after sunset. Now Virgo is well up in the southeastern sky, and at summer’s beginning it will be high in the south.
Tue May 5, 2026 ALAN SHEPARD, FIRST ASTRONAUT
On May 5, 1961 – that’s sixty-five years ago today, Alan Shepard became the first American to be called a real astronaut, riding on board the Mercury space capsule Freedom 7 to an altitude of about a hundred miles. It was a suborbital flight, and the rocket’s trajectory brought him down again to splashdown in the Atlantic Ocean near the Bahamas. The first minute of flight was fairly smooth, until the rocket made the transition to supersonic speed - as Shepard put it, "the ride did get a little rough." When things settled down, and the capsule separated from the Redstone rocket, Alan Shepard had a beautiful view of Florida - south to the Keys, north toward the Carolinas, west to Lake Okeechobee, Tampa Bay and Pensacola, and east to Bimini.
Wed May 6, 2026 HOWLING COYOTE
An old Navajo story tells how the stars came to be. Altse’ Hastiin, the first man, asked all the animals to gather up the bright shining stones along the river. They carried those stones up into the sky where they became stars. They put them in patterns which would show the people which creatures had set those stars in place. Now the small animals could not carry many stars and Great Spirit asked Coyote to take a bag of stones to help them complete their pictures. But Coyote soon grew tired, and he flung the stones across the sky, scattering them, and making a jumble of the pictures. Then Coyote was sorry, because he had forgotten to put his own picture up in the heavens. And that, say the Navajo, is why the Coyote howls at night.
Thu May 7, 2026 CECILIA PAYNE GAPOSCHKIN
Cecilia Payne Gaposchkin was born on May 10, 1900. At the age of 25, she decoded the light from stars, revealing their chemical compositions. When a spectroscope, a device that like a prism, splits starlight into a rainbow of colors, we find dark gaps in those colors, places where the outer atmosphere of a star has absorbed those wavelengths of light. These absorption lines are like cosmic fingerprints, telling us what elements are present in a star. Cecelia Payne was able to prove that hydrogen and helium are the most abundant elements, the rest of the periodic table making up only 2 percent of a star’s mass. Cecilia also said, “Your reward will be the widening of the horizon as you climb. And if you achieve that reward you will ask no other.”
Fri May 8, 2026 ANNIE JUMP CANNON
On May 9th, 1922, astronomers adopted Annie Jump Cannon’s stellar classification system. Annie Cannon worked at the Harvard Observatory, where she sorted and catalogued stars by their spectra. When you look at the light of a star through a specialized prism, a spectroscope, you can see that there are thin gaps where the colors are missing. The spacing of these gaps can be matched up with those of heated gases in the lab, telling us what elements are present in those stars – kind of a cosmic bar code. Cannon sorted the stars, and after some adjustments, it resulted in a ranking of stars from hot to cool: O, B, A, F, G, K and M, which countless astronomy students have memorized by using this simple phrase – “Oh, Be A Fine Girl (or Guy,) Kiss Me!