What's in the Northam Sky
Around mid August about an hour after sunset in Northam if you look due east and just above the horizon you'll seea V shaped collection of stars know as the constellation of Capricornus the sea goat.
According to ancient lore,Capricornus had the head and body of a goat but the tail of a fish. The fish part is thought to be because of the winter rains that came in ancient Babylon when the constellation was prominent in the evening sky. The way it seemed to climbacross the sky related to the climbing ability of wild goats.Capricornus’ brightest star is Deneb Algedi down at the bottom of the V. With a brightness magnitude of 2.9, this whitish star is easy to find this month as the even brighter planet Jupiter is just a few moon diameters to the left and above it.
Jupiter shines at magnitude -2.9 and it was sporting a black eye the size of one of it’s moons earlier in the month after a comet is thought to have crashed in to it. The black eye was discovered by an Australian amateur astronomer. Might be worth having a look to try and see if it’s still there if you own a pair of binoculars or a small telescope. Binos will also reveal Jupiters four largest moons, Ganymede, Io, Callisto and Europa. The moons, should line up on either side of Jupiter and extend out from it at about 45 degrees relative to the horizon. If you look again in a few hours time you should notice the moons have changed position as they orbit around Jupiter very quickly.
A similar distance to the left and below Deneb Algedi is the smallest of the gas giant planets, Neptune. Shining at mag 7.8, you will need a good pair of binos or a small telescope to make out it’s blue/green color and possibly see it’s largest moon, Titan.
Above and right of Jupiter there is the small globular cluster, Messier 30. Shining at mag 6.9, this compact cluster of stars should be visible in binoculars but might look like just a fuzzy smudge. In August Mercury and Saturn are close together in the constellation of Leo and can be seen low in the western sky just after sunset.
Mars joins Venus in the morning sky and is in the constellation of Taurus the bull with Venus in nearby Gemini the twins. A hoax about Mars appearing about the size of the full moon appears as regular as clock work every July or August and was even reported on some TV stations. Every two years, the earth catches up to Mars in it’s orbit getting as close as 40 million miles or less than half the distance from Earth to the Sun. But even at it’s closest approach Mars never gets any bigger than half the apparent diameter of Jupiter or a hundredth the diameter of the full Moon.
Uranus is in the constellation Pisces the fish and is just visible to the unaided eye. The minor planets Pluto and Ceres are in Sagittarius and Virgo respectively.