Caoimhín's Content

Today, we are going to be taking a look at the night sky for August yet again, but we’re going to concentrate on the constellations and a couple of the other features of the August sky.

We’ll start just a little after sunset, at 11:30. The sky is almost as dark as it’s going to get and we’re still just on the 1st of August. We can see that Saturn is already up in the east, the summer triangle is also nice and high in the sky making it easy to spot at the beginning of the night. That means of course we’ve got Cygnus with Deneb, we’ve got Vega in Lyra and we’ve got Altair down in Aquila, all of those are going to be nice and easy to spot pretty much immediately at sunset. We’ve also got Scorpius and Sagittarius low in the south, so we’ve got the constellations that let us know where the Milky Way is going to be, whether or not we can see it.

Besides Sagittarius and Scorpius, the zodiacal constellations that are up at the moment are some of the less famous ones. We’ve got the Plough or the Big Dipper in the northwest, just over the sunset. The Plough arcs to Arcturus and then you spike on to Spica, so we know that Virgo is down in the west as well, just under the horizon mostly and so not easily visible at this time of the year. We’ve got Arcturus in Böötes, so that’s another constellation that’s easy to find. Using some of our knowledge of the constellations we can fill in a little bit more. Libra must be down in the south west, if Virgo is down towards the west then that must be where Libra is, because we can see Scorpius in the south. Above Scorpius, we’ve also got the curve of the Snake Serpens, so Ophiuchus must be in that region. The other zodiacal constellations, Capricornus and Aquarius, they’re difficult to see from here in the city, but they are just east of Sagittarius low to the horizon, before we come to Saturn in Pisces.

We are getting some famous constellations along the back of the Milky Way to the east as well. We have Cassiopeia and the Square of Pegasus up before midnight and we’ve got the constellation of Andromeda reaching out from Pegasus under Cassiopeia. The Andromeda Galaxy must be up around there as well, with Perseus just a little bit lower on that curve of the Milky Way, almost at the horizon early in the night. We’ve got the same constellations as always back in the north. The Plough is coming under the North Star as we move through the evening and towards morning time. Moving ahead to just a little bit after midnight, and we can see the Plough is down in the northwest with Cassiopeia up in the northeast, almost level with the North Star, maybe a little bit higher. From the city of course, we’re not going to get the best view, so we will move into the countryside very soon, but before that, we’ll move forward to morning time. I’ve spoken about the morning time in August a little bit already because we’ve got some nice conjunctions and occultations coming up, but I will discuss those a little bit more once we’re a little further into August, when they’re actually happening, for example the conjunction of Venus and Jupiter there on the 12th. I’ll talk about those a little bit more when we get closer to those dates.

Up above the sunrise we can see the pentagonal shape of Auriga with the bright star Capella. Capella has some alternative names listed, including the Goat Star.I mention in the video that Auriga is the goat-herd, the goat herder, so that is one of Auriga’s goats. However, despite being shown holding a goat, in mythology it is likely that Auriga was a charioteer who lost his chariot. The star Capella was originally in its own constellation of the goat, but the constellations were combined, leading to Aurigas depiction carrying a goat. We know that the planets must be along the zodiacal constellations, and Jupiter and Venus are both clearly visible. This puts us in the right place to see Aldebaran and the Pleiades, but we’re not seeing much of the Hyades because we’re coming close to more morning time. Gemini is then just a little bit lower on the other side of the planets. We can see Pollux and Castor just above the sunrise even early in the month. Looking to the south of Taurus, the little pair of stars is Aries. It is tough to spot, but it must be Aries coming after Taurus. Continuing along the line brings us to Pisces. Again, from the city, we’re not seeing quite as much.

The square of Pegasus ends up nice and high to the south by sunrise, and the fin-shape of Perseus is much more distinct and also higher in the sky. As always, we’re going to get a better view from the countryside so that is where we will go. With the light pollution removed, many more stars are visible, which does make some of the constellations a little bit easier to find, though we don’t really need much help for now. Just above the horizon, under the planets in the east is Orion. It was tough to recognize Orion with only Betelgeuse and Bellatrix above the horizon, Betelgeuse really being the only one visible from the city and even then extincted by the atmosphere. Now that the sky is dark, we’ve got the curve of stars that make the lion skin that Orion is holding, that’s going to be visible there early in the morning in the countryside. We’ll move back to evening time, as I say from the countryside we’re going to have a lot more stars visible and more of them are going to be named by Stellarium, so that’s going to make finding certain constellations that little bit easier as well.

We’ve still got Saturn above the horizon just a little after 11 even clearer from a dark sky, and early in the month we’ll still have some glow from the Moon as well. We’re seeing very much the same constellations, but more are visible now that the sky is dark. Delphinus is a little bit more recognizable there just along the edge of the summer triangle. It is still hard to recognize the shapes of Capricornus and Aquarius in the south east, but that is what those constellations are. Even if it’s tough to see them, we can see Sagittarius, so we know what constellations are going to come next in the sky. It’s similar for many others. You may be able to spot Sagitta in the middle of the summer triangle and just above it would be Vulpecula. Even if it’s hard to spot the individual stars that are parts of those constellations, we know where they should be and that’s going to help us to find them in the sky.

Turning around to the north, we’ve got the legs of Ursa Major nice and clearly visible now, extending out from underneath the Plough. We’re still at just a little after 11 o’clock and we’re still in August, so we’re still getting a little bit of sunlight over on the northern horizon. If we start moving forward into the month, the Moon will come into the sky, but that light we’re seeing in the north will die away. Still looking at the sky at the same time, but by the 18th of August, the northern horizon is definitely dark at midnight. We’ve definitely come the whole way through summer, we’ve gotten past that portion of the year where we still have light from the Sun during the middle of the night here in Ireland, so it is getting that little bit easier to observe things. We’ve got Corona Borealis up over the northeast as well, it’s got that recognizable arc shape, a curve in the sky. You can find it by going away from the Plough, by moving through the tail of the Plough and out the other side. Not following the arc to Arcturus, but rather going kind of straight across. With less light pollution we’ve got the Little Dipper, Ursa Minor, visible in the sky. All of the same constellations are visible, but with more stars to help form their shapes.

Just to finish it off, we’ll go through some of the constellations that are tough to see. Looking back to the south, we have Scutum between Sagittarius and Aquila. We don’t really see that many recognizable stars for it and the shape isn’t very distinct. Next to Sagittarius we can see a kind of triangle shape in Capricornus, but Aquarius still looks like a bit of a mess, it’s tough to see exactly what shape Aquarius is supposed to be in the sky. Triangulum is just underneath the Andromeda constellation, and the Triangulum Galaxy is there as well, just a little lower in the sky than the Andromeda galaxy, so they’re all in the same part of the sky as well. At sunset, the end of Virgo is above the horizon, but none of the bright stars like Spica are visible, so that does encourage me to think that spiking onto Spica would bring you down under the horizon. Hercules is up as well, just next to Corona Borealis, a reasonably recognizable sort of a trapezoid kind of shape but not quite as clear as some of the other constellations in the sky.

We’ll keep moving forward and we’ll see some of the other constellations coming up. We’ve moved later in the month so we’re getting a reasonable amount of Orion into the sky at sunrise, and a reasonable amount of Gemini. Looking at the morning sky, we can see that many of the constellations have stayed with us. Saturn is up more or less all night, so certainly everything west of Saturn has been with us since the sunset as well. They’re not going to change, it’s just the eastern portion of the sky where new things have come into the sky, and only outside of the circumpolar region. It’s really just Gemini, Auriga, more of Perseus, Taurus, Aries, Orion, Eridanus and a few smaller constellations. These are the ones that have come into the sky and you may remember from the last video, you may recognize some of the names like Perseus and Eridanus from their meteor showers.

If we bring up the meteor showers and come back a little bit closer to the beginning of August, we can see the Perseids are indeed radiating from Perseus. We can also see that the Eta Eridanids are pretty much in Eridanus. though it looks like they’ve drifted into Cetus. If we bring up the borders of the constellations, we’ll see that the borders and the pictures don’t necessarily line up. The radiant of the Eta Eridanids is after crossing the line into Cetus, but we’ll say they’re the Eridanids anyway. Similarly with the Piscis Austrinids, they’re down in the Southern Fish, distinct from the Pisces that we have here in north. Also in a similar situation to the Eta Eridanids after crossing from Eridanus into Cetus, we can see that the Alpha Capricornids have crossed from Capricornus into Aquarius, so they’re another one that’s after changing position.

The Kappa Cygnids have changed position quite a lot, their radiant is comfortably in Draco, well outside of Cygnus. Coming back a little bit in the month, the July Gamma Draconids are also in Draco, so Draco is getting two meteor showers in succession, one of them must have moved or the borders of the constellation must have moved since its naming. Both the Southern Delta Aquariids and the Northern Iota Aquariids are comfortably contained within Aquarius. The antihelion point is an interesting one because it’s going to drift through the zodiac as we move through the year, but of course that’s something that we’ll cover when we look at it over slightly longer time scales. We can see that the antihelion point is pretty comfortably in Aquarius for the month of August. That brings us through just a few of the other things that we’re going to see in the sky, particularly the constellations and there how the constellations relate to the meteor showers as seen from the city and from the countryside. If you’d like to know about the planets and how the planets are going to move over the course of August, you can take a look back to my preview of August. There’s simply so many things in the sky we can’t cover even one month in just one piece, there’s always a few different things to talk about.

I hope you did enjoy this piece, if you did then please do like it. I also hope that you get to see some of these constellations in the sky. If you enjoy this kind of content, then you can subscribe to this website and to my YouTube channel to see more. Most importantly, thank you for reading and hopefully I’ll see you back here next time.