Caoimhín's Content

Today we are going to be looking ahead to the month of May and for a change we’re going to start with sunrise at the start of the month, on May Day.

Watching the first sunrise of the month immediately gives us Venus, visible early in the morning already on the 1st of May, you can see it from the city and Venus is the last thing we’re going to see anywhere. Even here as early as 5:30, there’s very little in the sky besides Venus. You may sort of see the summer triangle there, but those three stars seem quite faint compared to Venus. Arcturus should be visible as well, a little further west. Venus at 5:30 isn’t even as high in the sky as it will get. Pushing closer to 6 o’clock and Venus is still barely visible, all alone by 5:50 at least.

I am starting with the 1st of May because it is May Day or Bealtaine. Bealtaine is really the month of May in Irish, Lá Bealtaine is the day of May, the first day of May, in Irish. It is sometimes spelt “Beltane” in English and it is a cross-quarter day. You may remember from previous articles where I discussed the cross-quarter days, but I will recap. They relate to the way you break up the year. You can break up the year according to the solstices and the equinoxes, splitting the year into four quarters that way, or you can use dates exactly in between the quarter days. These are the cross-quarter days and it is how the year was quartered in Ireland, with Bealtaine, Samhain, Imbolc and Lughnasadh. Each of these is halfway between an equinox and a solstice.

Moving ahead to sunset on May 1st, we can see the Moon just in between Jupiter and Mars. You may have noticed from the sunrise and now the sunset that we are missing Saturn and Mercury. If we look at daytime with the atmosphere taken away, then we would see Saturn just next to Venus and Mercury a little closer to the Sun. Saturn is as far from the Sun as Venus, if anything it is a little further, but we’re not quite seeing it in the morning. The reason is just because Saturn is so much fainter. If we come back to the first morning of May, Saturn is just under and a little ahead of Venus, but with the orange yellow glow of the Sun, by the time Saturn is a reasonable height above the horizon, it’s too faint and obscured to see. Saturn will get more visible as we get later in the month because it will continue to appear further from the Sun. As we continue moving around the Sun, Saturn will appear to move further and further west. We’ll see that as we move a little bit later into the month.

We are hopping straight through to the end of the first week, the seventh day, to look for a meteor shower. In early May we have the the Eta Aquariids. This means we need to look for the constellation of Aquarius, which is up close to sunrise. Moving through the night we pass the antihelion, and the Eta Lyrids. Eta or η, it looks like an n with a long tail, is a letter in the Greek Alphabet, as is usually the case with labelling meteor showers. Just as the Sun rises, so does the constellation of Aquarius. It is hard to see, but we can see Sagittarius. After Sagittarius is Capricornus and then Aquarius, even if we can’t really see those constellations.

The Eta Aquariids peak on the 6th of May, with Stellarium predicting a maximum zenith hourly rate of 40 to 85. In the morning of the sixth it also shows a current rate of 40 to 85, but only about 4 to 8 visible. This is partly because the radiant is so low in the sky, partly due to the Sun coming up. We’re also viewing this from the city, all of those things are going to affect our view. If we bring things a little bit darker, and earlier in the morning, the local hourly rate still doesn’t get very high, but of course, these are just predictions. We can certainly keep our fingers crossed for a rate of 40 to 85. The parent body of these meteors is comet 1P/Halley. You can take a look at one of my previous pieces where I looked into the future to see the return of Halley’s comet. It won’t be until 2061 that comet 1P/Halley will come back around, but it is P for Periodical and 1 for the first periodic comet that was sort of confirmed to be periodical, so it will definitely come back around,

Looking at sunrise now later into the month, Saturn’s a little further ahead of Venus but we’re still not quite catching it from the city. We’ll head into the countryside where of course everything looks a little bit better. Just by jumping into the countryside, it’s saying that’s Saturn is visible there in the morning. Furthermore, our local hourly rate has gone up to 10 to 20 an hour. Getting rid of some of that light pollution makes a difference. It changes the limiting magnitude, the faintest object you can see. You can see more when the light pollution isn’t limiting. Of course, the glow of the sunrise coming up certainly will, but from the countryside Saturn is visible in the morning with Venus, just about. This will get easier as we get later into the month, but it looks like you will need to be in the countryside to see Saturn in the early part of May.

As we get later and later in the month, Saturn continues to push away from the Sun at sunrise. This also reveals the Daytime Arietids. Aries of course is pretty much behind the Sun at the moment, so as it comes up so does the radiant of the Arietids in Aries. This is happening during the day, which means we won’t get to see very many of them. Of course meteors during the day are very hard to see due to how bright the sky is. We’re after moving significantly later in the month now, so we’ll push all the way through to sunset again just to see how slightly different, it is. Mars is still easy to see and Jupiter is still just about visible, if we turn towards the west. We’re still just about getting Jupiter low to the horizon in the evening. If we if we pull back a little bit earlier it does get higher in the sky, but is also much fainter. It’s so low in the sky it will be blocked out by a lot of trees and buildings, but we still at least have Mars.

Also close to the end of the month we see the radiant of the Tau Herculids. They are variable, but they’re generally quite low, so we’re probably not going to get a lot from them, and they’re not peaking until June anyway. It really is just the Eta Aquariids that we really have to look forward to, even though there are other meteor showers running, that’s the one that’s peaking. More importantly, the one that’s peaking where we get to see it, at nighttime, even though we only get to see it really in the morning.

We are getting closer and closer to summertime, so waiting for all of that sunset glow to leave the sky brings us pretty close to midnight already, and that will only get worse, or better, depending on your view, once we get into June. In late June it will essentially be twilight all night long. In May however, around quarter to midnight basically all of the Milky Way will be up. The Summer Triangle is completely above the horizon and we’ll have Scorpius. By the time we’re through to a little after midnight, around 2:40 in the morning, so a lot after midnight, the whole core will be up. Importantly, it’s completely dark, we’re not getting that little glow of sunrise coming up over the north just yet. It will be another month or so before that happens, but we’re definitely getting all of the Milky Way, and the core of the Milky Way is clearly visible. It is still sort of an early morning phenomenon, but we are getting the glow of the Milky Way nice and clearly for longer and longer.

Coming up to sunrise we get Saturn just next to the Moon. Mercury at this point would be after curving back around, getting closer to the Sun, whereas Venus is still pushing out. It will continue pushing out until we get to the very end of the month, to Venus’s greatest elongation. Venus’s greatest elongation on May 31st is its greatest western elongation, which means we see it in the east. At the end of the month at sunrise, in the countryside at least, you can still see the Square of Pegasus. The whole Square of Pegasus is there and we can see a lot more of Andromeda. This is a good comparison to our view overnight in April, we didn’t quite get to see these stars even in the countryside, the Square of Pegasus was getting pretty wiped out by the light of the Sun. Saturn is now nice and clear, it’s a lot further ahead, so it’s there in almost complete darkness at about 3:30 in the morning. Venus will be staying with us at its greatest elongation, the last thing to leave the sky, fading at around 5:25.

So, there is a big difference there between the beginning of the month and the end of the month. Even though Venus is further from the Sun at the end of the month, it’s disappearing almost half an hour earlier, even in the countryside. That’s because we are still getting closer to summer, we’re now really getting closer to the summer solstice, we will have passed the quarter day between the spring equinox and the summer solstice. That is going to really change our view of the sky. At the very end of the month it’s only 1:45 when we have the glow of the Milky Way stretching across the sky, and at sunset, the Sun is just going down there and we can see the entire summer triangle. On the last day of May we’re pretty much going to have the summer triangle in the sky as the Sun is going down, which is our sign that we’re getting back into summer, and of course that’s really going to start out once we’re into June, but we have all this to look at in May. We’ve still got Jupiter and Mars in the evening, though Jupiter will really be gone by the end of the month. You can kind of see it just above the sunset, that’s going to be incredibly tricky. Mars is with us for the entire month, though not in the sky for very long once we’re through to the end of the month. Saturn will be coming back in the morning and Venus stays there all month. All of that plus the Eta Aquariids to look forward to.

I hope you get to see some of these things in the coming month. If you enjoyed this look ahead, I do a look ahead like this almost every month, so as well as liking this article, you can subscribe to this website and my YouTube channel to see more. Thank you very much for reading and hopefully I’ll see you back here next time.