These will be easier to spot through a small telescope, which may also show the bands in Jupiter’s atmosphere, and the Great Red Spot, a storm around twice the size of earth that appears to have been raging on Jupiter for hundreds of years.ĭid you know? Jupiter has 79 official moons, but four are significantly larger than the others.
Powerful binoculars might enable you to spot the Galilean moons of Jupiter as tiny points of light around the gas giant. The brighter object below Pleiades is Mars. The Pleiades star cluster (bottom left) rises soon after Jupiter. Darker skies away from town and city lights will be needed to spot the Andromeda Galaxy (top left).
Jupiter is the brightest object in the south-eastern sky soon after dark. As darkness falls it sits just above the eastern horizon, rises higher through the night and is still visible in the south-west at dawn. On a cloudless night, it is unmistakably bright, and it is visible throughout the night. This sees Jupiter at its largest and brightest this month, so it’s the perfect time to try and spot it. Our solar system’s largest planet reaches opposition with Earth on 26 September, meaning the two planets are at their closest point to each other as they travel around the Sun. Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, Jupiter ERS Team image processing by Ricardo Hueso (UPV/EHU) and Judy Schmidt. The James Webb Space Telescope recently photographed Jupiter with its near infrared camera, capturing auroras at the poles, the Great Red Spot, small moons and even the super-faint rings that surround the planet. Travelling at the same speed it would take two and a half million years to reach the trillion stars that make up the Andromeda Galaxy! Autumn equinoxĪutumn begins on 23 September, with the equinox marking the point in our planet’s orbit where the north and south poles are equally distant from the Sun and where the days and nights are equal in length. 300,000 kilometres or 186,000 miles per second) to reach our nearest star. In last month’s blog we described how it would take four years travelling at the speed of light (approx. Looking to the left of Cygnus and Delphinius and moving through the large constellation of Pegasus (which looks like a large upside-down winged horse!) you’ll reach Andromeda.Īndromeda is another must-see from darker skies, hosting the most distant object visible to the naked eye – the Andromeda Galaxy.
While many of the constellations require a fairly vivid imagination to see the object, figure or animal they’re named after, Delphinius is a fun constellation to look out for, as it actually resembles a dolphin leaping out of water!Īs Autumn approaches some familiar sights will return to the night sky. See if you can spot the fainter constellation of Delphinius (the dolphin), a small group of stars just to the left of bright star Altair. It sweeps through Aquila the eagle (home to bright star Altair), down to the southern horizon and the constellation of Sagittarius, which marks the direction of the very centre of our galaxy. Look high in the south to see Cygnus the Swan, whose tail (the bright star Deneb) forms the ‘summer triangle’ of stars with Altair and Vega.įrom darker skies Cygnus sit in amongst a brighter stretch of the glowing band of stars that make up our Milky Way galaxy, which arcs down through the southern sky. The summer constellations are still overhead as darkness falls. The stars and constellations of the southern sky soon after dark (credit ).
Some of the most beautiful sights in our night skies are visible through September, and if you can get away from the bright lights of towns and cities there are some real treats in store.
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