Howdy Star Gazers and welcome to this episode
of Star Trails. Drew here, and I'll be your guide
to the night sky for the week starting July the
20th through the 26th. This week we welcome one
of the best windows all month for deep sky observing,
thanks to a moonless sky midweek. I'll offer
up an insane challenge to spot Pluto, and that's
no joke. And later in the show, we examine mysterious
signals from space that defy explanation. Whether
you're tuning in from the backyard, the balcony,
or just your imagination, I'm glad you're here.
So find a cozy spot, let your eyes adjust, and
let's see what the sky holds for us this week.
We start the week with a waning crescent moon,
just about 23 % illuminated tonight. And it's
not just hanging around, it's making moves. Over
the next couple of mornings, the crescent moon
continues eastward and pulls up alongside Venus
and Jupiter in the pre -dawn sky. Mark your calendar
for the mornings of Monday and Tuesday. The moon
will appear near Venus first, then Jupiter, low
on the eastern horizon about an hour before sunrise.
It's an easy pairing to spot, and makes for an
amazing photo -op if you can get some trees or
skyline in the frame. On Wednesday, we hit the
new moon, which means dark skies all night long
for the second half of the week, and a perfect
window for deep sky observation. By Saturday,
a thin waxing crescent will reappear in the evening
sky near Regulus, the brightest star in Leo.
Our planetary lineup this week is for the early
risers and night owls. Venus is blazing away
in the east just before dawn. It's your easiest
target, bright, unmistakable, and a great way
to get others interested in sky watching. Jupiter
is right there with it, rising a bit higher and
earlier each day. The two will be fairly close
in the sky this week, with the moon sliding past
them on the 21st and 22nd. Saturn rises later,
around midnight, and is best viewed in the pre
-dawn hours low in the south. Mars is visible
in the west after sunset. It's not as bright
as the morning show, but still worth a look as
it moves from Leo into Virgo. And if you're really
feeling adventurous, here's a challenge. Pluto
reaches opposition on July 25th. That means it's
as close and bright as it gets, and naturally
you're going to need a substantial telescope,
a good star chart, and maybe a camera to even
catch the dimmest glimpse of it. Here's how you
can spot it. First, know that even though Pluto
is at opposition, it's at magnitude 14 .3, which
means it's 10 ,000 times dimmer than the faintest
thing your eye can see. Obviously, you'll need
the darkest skies you can find, preferably Bortle
3 or less, and a telescope of 10 inches or larger
to even detect Pluto as a dim dot. Use a 12 to
16 inch scope if you can. Remember, Pluto doesn't
stand out visually. It just looks like any other
faint star. Tracking its motion over several
nights is often how observers confirm they found
it, as it shifts slightly against the background
stars. This is exactly how it was discovered
back in 1930 by Clyde Tombaugh and his team.
Even in the highest powered scopes on the planet,
Pluto appears as a faint star -like point. It
has no visible disk and shows no details. You're
seeing an icy dwarf planet as a speck of light
about 3 billion miles away. Getting eyes on Pluto
is beyond the means of most backyard astronomers
and casual observers, but if you know an advanced
astronomer or are a member of a club with great
equipment, it would be an amazing feat to see
it with your own eyes. Going deeper into the
night sky, the middle to end of the week is a
prime time to scan the summer Milky Way, especially
the rich fields around Scorpius and Sagittarius.
rising in the southeast after dark. Try your
hand at the Lagoon Nebula M8 or the Trithid Nebula
M20 in Sagittarius. Both are binocular visible
under dark skies. In Cygnus near Deneb, the North
America Nebula NGC 7000 is a great target for
wide field scopes or long exposure astrophotography.
And speaking of Deneb, that star forms one corner
of the summer triangle, along with Vega and Altair.
By 10pm, it's high in the eastern sky and a great
landmark for stargazing. Now, closer to home,
the Delta Aquarid meteor shower is active right
now, ramping up toward its late July peak. You
might catch a few stray meteors overnight, especially
in the early morning hours under dark skies.
Everyone's favorite shower, the Perseids, are
coming soon, and they'll kick off in early August.
We spend a lot of time looking up, watching for
meteor showers, planets or constellations drifting
through the night, but sometimes we listen. And
sometimes what we hear is stranger than anything
we could have imagined. Let me take you back
to an August night in 1977. Disco is still everywhere.
Star Wars had just come out a few months before,
and a team of astronomers at Ohio State University
were scanning the skies with a radio telescope
the size of a football field. It's called the
Big Ear, and on August 15th, it picked up something
odd. A signal, not just static, not a satellite,
but a strong, narrow band radio burst that lasted
72 seconds. That's exactly the duration the telescope
could observe a fixed point in the sky as Earth
rotated. The printout, a long string of computer
data, recorded the burst as 6EQUJ5, and that's
just a code to describe signal strength. But
it stood out from all the surrounding background
noise. One of the astronomers, Jerry Eamon, was
so stunned he grabbed a red pen and circled it,
and in the margin he wrote one word, wow. And
just like that, the most famous anomaly in radio
astronomy was born. The signal seemed to come
from the direction of the constellation Sagittarius.
It lined up suspiciously close to the hydrogen
line, a frequency some researchers believe alien
civilizations might choose to broadcast on, since
hydrogen is the most common element in the universe.
Naturally, scientists scrambled to observe that
region again, but the signal never came back.
It was never confirmed or explained. For nearly
50 years the wow signal has stood as this eerie
one -time whisper from the stars a Cosmic cold
call that never called back But here's the thing
lately the universe has gotten a whole lot louder
in just the last year astronomers have been picking
up brand new signals many just as baffling and
Some even stranger than the wow signal itself
One of the weirdest is called ASCAP J1832 -0911,
and yet that name doesn't exactly roll off the
tongue, but the behavior is wild. Discovered
earlier this year by the Australian Square Kilometer
Array Pathfinder, ASCAP for short, this object
lies somewhere in the Milky Way. It pulses every
22 minutes. It blasts out powerful radio waves
and X -rays. Then it vanishes again, hiding for
nearly three -quarters of an hour. It's like
clockwork, but we've never seen anything like
it. Astronomers think it might be a kind of magnetar.
That's a hypermagnetic neutron star, or maybe
a white dwarf with a companion. But even those
theories don't quite line up. It's as if this
object is doing something it physically shouldn't
be able to do, leading the team studying it to
call it unlike anything we've ever seen before.
A decade ago, another discovery came out of the
cosmos like waves from a Lovecraftian ham radio
station. This time, the culprit was a white dwarf
star in a tight orbit with a red dwarf. just
1600 light years away, which is basically next
door in cosmic terms. Every 125 minutes, it sends
out a little burst of radio waves like a slow
tap -tap -tap, almost like Morse code from space.
Turns out these two stars are locked in a chaotic
magnetic handshake, and their flares produce
this oddly timed signal. It's the first time
we've ever seen a white dwarf binary system behave
this way, and it expands the kinds of places
we now know can generate cosmic radio noise.
And of course, no modern conversation about space
signals is complete without talking about fast
radio bursts, or FRBs. These are ultra -short,
ultra -energetic bursts of radio waves from distant
galaxies. Some last just a millisecond, but in
that flash they can release more energy than
our sun does in several days. We've been detecting
FRBs since 2007, and while many seem to be one
-off events, some repeat. A few do so at regular
intervals, and one discovered earlier just this
year, FRB 2024 -0114A, has been firing off bursts
so frequently, it's become one of the most active
repeaters ever recorded. Even stranger, another
FRB this year was traced to an ancient dead elliptical
galaxy. These galaxies don't have young stars
or much magnetic activity, so where's the burst
coming from? The answer is we really don't know.
Which brings us back to that lonely radio burst
in 1977. After all these years, and after all
the weirdness we've found since, there's still
never been another signal quite like it. No second
call, no follow -up ping, just 72 seconds of
remarkable noise. It may have been a cosmic prank
by nature, a one -time flare from a strange stellar
object, or something else. We just don't know,
and really, that's what makes astronomy so thrilling.
What keeps all of us staring up is that every
discovery deepens the mystery. And maybe the
next WOW is just waiting to be heard. If the
stars spoke to you this week, or if a question's
been on your mind, I'd love to hear it. Visit
our website, StarTrails .Show, where you can
contact me and explore past episodes. Be sure
to follow us on Blue Sky and YouTube. Links are
in the show notes. Until we meet again beneath
the stars, clear skies everyone.