Mon June 8, 2026 VENUS AND JUPITER TOGETHER
Today’s Skywatch was written by Hallstrom Planetarium theater assistant Vela De la Mare. There is a dazzling sight in the night sky this evening, with two of the brightest lights of our night coming together to form a beautiful “double star.” This illusion isn’t actually a star at all, but two radiant planets appearing to travel together. If you gaze towards the Northwest just after sunset, you should see a brilliant pair of steady lights gazing back at you. These are the planets Venus and Jupiter. Venus is the brighter, paler light on the right, and Jupiter is the warm glow on the left. If two planets weren’t enough, there’s a third one hanging out nearby as well! Look a little further down toward the horizon, and a fainter star-like object will be peeking out through the sky. This is the planet Mercury, staying around just long enough to say hello before setting for the night.
Tue June 9, 2026 GIOVANNI CASSINI
Giovanni Cassini was born on June 8th, 1625. In 1665, he made the first detailed observations of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, an immense 400 mile-an-hour storm a couple of times larger than earth. He later discovered a gap about two-thirds of the way out in Saturn’s ring system, something we now call the Cassini Division. Saturn’s rings are made up of billions of tiny moonlets of water ice, ranging in size from icebergs down to fist-sized and smaller particles. The gap that Cassini discovered is something of an illusion - there are ice chunks there, just not quite as plentiful as elsewhere. A spacecraft named for the astronomer went into orbit around Saturn in 2004. If you want to see Saturn tonight, it will be rising in the east an hour or so before dawn, nearby the old crescent moon. But you won’t be able to find the Cassini spacecraft – it plunged into the ringed planet back in 2017.
Wed Jun 10, 2026 J.G. GALLE
Today’s Skywatch was written by my student assistant, Isabella Gargiulo. J. G. Galle was born on June 9th, 1812. When Galle was 23, he obtained a position at the newly completed Berlin Observatory, where he happened to be the first person to see Neptune telescopically. Upon receiving a letter from Urban Le Verrier, a fellow astronomer and mathematician who believed there to be a planet further out than Uranus, Galle and his student assistant began their search. Using a 9-inch refracting telescope and an updated star chart, Galle discovered a small dot that didn’t belong, which turned out to be the blue planet Neptune. In our current night sky, Neptune rises around 2:30am with the constellation Pisces. Sadly, this far-out world cannot be seen with the unaided eye. But you can find Neptune with a powerful telescope, such as Galle did almost 180 years ago.
Thu Jun 11, 2026 PLANET SYMBOLS
Planet positions are often marked on star charts with a symbol. Each symbol is based on some mythical 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!
Fri Jun 12, 2026 FLAG DAY
Sunday is Flag Day. The first United States flag, adopted by the Continental Congress on June 14, 1777, held thirteen stars, one for each of the original colonies. The current U.S. flag has 50 stars, one for each state. The arrangement of stars on flags does not as a rule correspond to any actual constellation in the sky, and the U.S. flag has gone from a circle pattern to a series of rows and columns, and of course there was even an arrangement where the stars were made into a great star pattern, such as the one that flew over the fort in Fort Pierce when it was built back in 1838. Sometimes the stars on flags do reflect actual star patterns, such as the use of the Big Dipper and the North Star in the state flag of Alaska, or the use of the Southern Cross in the flags of Australia and New Zealand; and Brazil’s flag features the Southern Cross, Canis Major and Scorpius.
